Herodian on Greek and Roman Failings

chapter 10 Herodian on Greek and Roman Failings Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen Ancient historians resemble limited companies in that their market values fluctuate for reasons that are not always obvious. Long before the present financial crisis, that of Herodian was on a downward trend. Once his rating had been excellent: Photios, writing in the ninth century, thought that Herodian was ‘inferior to few in the good qualities of an historian’.1 In the sixteenth century, Herodian was being read and translated2 and as late as the eighteenth, Edward Gibbon paid him the equivocal compliment of being ‘an elegant historian’.3 By the second half of the twentieth century, however, Herodian’s History from the time of Marcus Aurelius had come to be reckoned a junk asset, ‘a farrago of clichés’ . ‘stock formulae learned at school’ . ‘quite unlike the brief, factual account of Dio’4 . ‘mehr eine Art historischen Romans als ein Geschichtswerk’.5 The author himself was judged to be an indiffer- ent stylist, a careless historian, an uninspired compiler of banalities, a Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Within the last two decades, Herodian’s reputation has improved somewhat, but he is still largely considered a ‘historian of last resort’ to be consulted only where all other sources fall silent. While Herodian is not entirely without merits as a historiographer, he was obviously no Thucydides, nor a Tacitus, not even a Dio Cassius. The purpose of this paper, then, is not to rehabilitate Herodian as an historian but to exam- ine him from the perspective of this volume, that is, as a Greek intellectual living and writing within the Roman Empire. For Herodian was Greek, at least in the Roman sense of the word: a person hailing from one of the Greek- speaking eastern provinces of the Empire. He wrote in Greek; he was well versed in Greek literature; he took Greek historians as his models. But he was also Roman in the sense of being a citizen of the Roman Empire, pursuing a career in what he calls the ‘imperial and public service’6 and in his History, 1 Photios, Bibl. 99. 2 Zimmermann 1999b: 120–1. 3 Gibbon 1776/1894, vol. 1: 100. 4 Bird 1976. 5 Alföldy 1971a: 431. 6 Her. 1.2.5. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�78�88_�� Herodian on Greek and Roman Failings 225 he sometimes underscores his own Romanitas with a pedantic-didactic excur- sus on some aspect of Italian geography customs or religion.7 The Eastern Roman Empire was a large area. We should like to know from which province or city he hailed, but all the information we have about Herodian’s origins is what can be gleaned from his History, and that is not much.8 There is nothing to suggest that he was a native of Greece proper, i.e., the Roman province of Achaea. Alexandria and Antioch have been proposed as his native city, but Herodian does not take much of an interest in Alexandrian events save for Caracalla’s massacre of the citizens in the winter of 215/169 and while he seems to know his way around Antioch, he is not too well informed about the geography of Mesopotamia.10 His recurrent references to the ‘quick-witted’ Levantines,11 too, seem to reflect the view of an outsider. Western Anatolia has been proposed as his homeland, given Herodian’s mention of Byzantium, Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Nicaea, Cyzicus and Ilium, ancient Troy,12 but the first four of these cities are located on the overland route used by the emperor and his entourage when going to or coming from the East, while Troy would be known to even the least educated Greek. Cyzicus is mentioned only once, as the site of a decisive battle between Niger’s forces and the Severans, and his account of the conflict reveals Herodian’s knowl- edge of Bithynian geography to be rather limited.13 As in the case of Antioch, Herodian’s familiarity with the Bithynian cities and their history may be derived from his travels in the imperial entourage. Whatever the precise nature of his Greek roots, Herodian was also Roman. That, too, has a wide range of meanings—socially as well as geographically. Dio Cassius in the course of his History drops many hints to remind us that he was a member of the Senate: Herodian does not, and probably was not. He may have been an equestrian: he shows some sympathy for Macrinus, the first equestrian to attain the purple.14 He may even have been an imperial freedman: while he condemns the activities of some freedmen, he criticizes them as individuals, 7 E.g., Her. 1.10.5–11.5 (the cult of Cybele at Rome), 2.11.8 (the Alps), 4.2 (deification of emperors). 8 Whittaker 1969: xxv–xxvi; Alföldy 1971b: 219–25. 9 Her. 4.9.3–6. 10 Below, n. 31. 11 2.7.9, 2.10.7, 3.11.8. 12 Whittaker 1969: xxvii; Alföldy 1971b: 223–4; Zimmermann 1999a: 302–4. 13 Below, p. 231. 14 Her. 4.12–15; compare Cassius Dio who stresses Macrinus’ humble origins while downplaying his legal training (Cass. Dio, 79.11) and the even more negative thumbnail portrait by Aurelius Victor (22.1), echoed by the Historia Augusta (Macrinus, 2.1)..

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