Res Gestae
Res Gestae
Rome's fourth-century decline into military disaster and internal division, most vividly the catastrophic defeat at Adrianople, can still be understood through the same rigorous, eyewitness-grounded historical method the Greeks used centuries earlier, even by a Greek-speaking soldier writing in his adopted Latin.
- last major work of classical Roman historiography, explicitly continuing Tacitus
- eyewitness account of the catastrophic defeat at Adrianople
- unusually balanced treatment of both pagan and Christian excess
- written in dense Latin by a native Greek speaker from Antioch
A history originally in thirty-one books, of which the surviving eighteen cover AD 353 to 378, composed by a former army officer of Greek background from Antioch writing self-consciously as a continuator of Tacitus, covering the reigns from Constantius II through the death of Valens at the catastrophic Battle of Adrianople in 378, an event Ammianus, who had personally witnessed major campaigns as a staff officer, narrates with unusual authority and grim detail. Ammianus is notably even-handed for an ancient historian, criticizing both pagan and Christian excess and offering one of antiquity's more balanced portraits of the pagan emperor Julian, whose campaigns he served on directly. Written in dense Latin by an author whose native language was almost certainly Greek, the Res Gestae is the last great work of classical Roman historiography and the single most important narrative source for the empire's fourth-century crisis.
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