The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta
David Rohrbacher
Wisconsin Studies in Classics
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, Laura McClure,
Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, and
Matthew Roller, Series Editors
“This lively and original analysis of the Historia Augusta successfully
argues that it was a fictional work to entertain a fifth-century audience,
and the pleasure resides in the deliberate anachronisms, allusions, and
parodies of both ancient and more contemporary authors and genres.”
—Ellen O’Gorman, University of Bristol
By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the Historia Augusta is an
eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of
the second and third centuries. Historians of late antiquity have struggled to
explain the fictional date and authorship of the work and its bizarre content (did
the Emperor Carinus really swim in pools of floating apples and melons? did the
usurper Proculus really deflower a hundred virgins in fifteen days?). David Rohrbacher
offers, instead, a literary analysis of the work, focusing on its many playful
allusions. Marshaling an array of interdisciplinary research and original analysis,
he contends that the Historia Augusta originated in a circle of scholarly readers
with an interest in biography, and that its allusions and parodies were meant as
puzzles and jokes for a knowing and appreciative audience.
David Rohrbacher is an associate professor of classics at
New College of Florida. He is the author of The Historians of
Late Antiquity.
Praise
“A valuable literary study that
synthesizes a large, diffuse body
of scholarship, integrating it in an
intelligent argument about the
literary milieu in which the Historia
Augusta emerged. The Historia
Augusta has long needed a study
like this one.”
—Adam Kemezis,
University of Alberta
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Shaping Ceremony
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Mary B. Hollinshead |
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Larger images
January 2016
LC: 2015008393 DG
268 pp. 6 x 9
|
