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The ''Augustan History'' (Latin: ''Historia Augusta'') is a late Roman collection of biographies, in Latin, of the Roman Emperors, their junior colleagues and usurpers of the period 117 to 284. It presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors (collectively known as the ''Scriptores Historiae Augustae''), written in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I, but the true authorship of the work, its actual date, and its purpose, have long been matters for controversy. Major problems include the nature of the sources it used, and how much of the content is pure fiction. Despite these conundrums, it is the only continuous account for much of its period and is thus continually being re-evaluated, since modern historians are unwilling to abandon it as a unique source of possible information, despite its obvious untrustworthiness on many levels.〔 Ernst Breisach, ''Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern'', 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 75.〕 ==Title and scope== The name originated with Isaac Casaubon, who produced a critical edition in 1603, working from a complex manuscript tradition with a number of variant versions.〔David Magie, Introduction to the Loeb translation, p. xi.〕 How widely the work was circulated in late antiquity is unknown, but lengthy citations from it are found in authors of the 6th and 9th centuries, and the chief manuscripts also date from the 9th or 10th centuries.〔Magie, pp. xxiv-xxv.〕 (The ''editio princeps'' was published at Milan in 1475.) The six ''Scriptores'' – "Aelius Spartianus", "Iulius Capitolinus", "Vulcacius Gallicanus", "Aelius Lampridius", "Trebellius Pollio", and "Flavius Vopiscus (of Syracuse)" – dedicate their biographies to Diocletian, Constantine and various private persons, and so ostensibly were all writing c. the late 3rd and early 4th century. The biographies cover the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian. A section covering the reigns of Philip the Arab, Decius, Trebonianus Gallus, Aemilian and all but the end of the reign of Valerian is missing in all the manuscripts, and it has been argued that biographies of Nerva and Trajan have also been lost at the beginning of the work, which may suggest the compilation might have been a direct continuation of Suetonius. (It has also been theorized that the mid-3rd-century lacuna might actually be a deliberate literary device of the author or authors, saving the labour of covering Emperors for whom little source material may have been available.) Despite devoting whole books to ephemeral or in some cases non-existent usurpers, there are no independent biographies of the Emperors Quintillus and Florian, whose reigns are merely briefly noted towards the end of the biographies of their respective predecessors, Claudius Gothicus and Tacitus. For nearly 300 years after Casaubon's edition, though much of the ''Augustan History'' was treated with some scepticism, it was used by historians as an authentic source – in the first volume of Edward Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', for example. "In modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of deliberate mystification written much later than its purported date, however the fundamentalist view still has distinguished support. (...) The ''Historia Augusta'' is also, unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and caution."〔''The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2, Latin Literature, Part 5, The Later Principate'', E. J. Kenney, Wendell Vernon Clausen, pp43, 45, Cambridge University Press, 1983,ISBN 0521273714〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Augustan History」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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