sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 4

Mario Baumann / Adam M. Kemezis / Maria-Eirini Zacharioudaki (eds.): Herodian

Herodian's History of the Empire after Marcus is a rarity. No other imperial Greek historian survives in its entirety between Josephus' Jewish Antiquities and Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. Yet Herodian tends to suffer in comparisons with the Roman History of Cassius Dio, whose final (yet highly fragmentary) eight books cover much the same material, yet with greater historical and prosopographical detail. Indeed, Sir Ronald Syme dismissed Herodian as ''fluent and superficial''. The problem often confronting scholars working with Herodian is knowing how to read the History of the Empire on his own terms.

The so-called literary turn in ancient historiography has been kind to Herodian. Those vices identified by Syme and others in Herodian's work have been recast in recent decades, if not as virtues, then at least as points of interest. We are now more likely to see Herodian's work as being highly readable and possessing considerable literary merit - or at least sophistication - rather than being inadequate as an historical source. This volume is indicative of this new approach.

The editors have assembled 14 wide-ranging chapters which deal primarily with the literary-historiographical aspects of Herodian's History, with contributions in English, German, Italian, and French. The result is a thoroughly successful and stimulating volume, which does much to advance our understanding of that elusive historian of events between the death of Marcus Aurelius and the accession of the juvenile Gordian III.

Following the introduction which provides a succinct overview of the state of the question, the following chapters of the volume fall into four parts: 1) Herodian's Narrative: Sources, Genre, and Readers; 2) Communities and Communication in Herodian; 3) Time and Space in Herodian; and 4) Greek Tradition in Herodian. Happily, the chapters in each of these sections speak to each other, and common themes emerge both within and across sections. Although the contributors take different methodological approaches to the text, what emerges is a rounded picture of the author and his work.

Some chapters offer new approaches to old questions. The question of Herodian's (putatively) provincial origins and attitude towards Rome has long been a scholarly crux. As demonstrated by Makhlaiuk (Ch. 12), Herodian's origins remain obscure and any attempt to tie this historian to any particular geographical region is bound to fail. In its place, Makhlaiuk advances a model of Herodian's general ''imperial'' (rather than specifically ''provincial'') identity. Such a conclusion makes sense if we take into account the fact that Herodian was writing in the first or second generation after the Constitutio Antoniniana had transformed what it meant to be Roman.

The paradox at the heart of Herodian's literary persona runs deeper than the question of his origins. As noted by Sulochana Asirvatham (Ch. 11), for all his classicising tendencies, Herodian as an author seems curiously disengaged from the Greek and Roman past, and when he does evoke pre-Antonine history, Herodian's knowledge is decidedly ropey. Indeed, as noted in passing by Baron (Ch. 13), Herodian's comments on the Battle of Issus (Hdn. 3.4.3) do not indicate a historian with great familiarity with the Alexander-historians.

Those chapters which venture into the more traditional realm of Quellenforschung raise some tantalizing results. Alessandro Galimberti (Ch. 2), after providing a clear historical account of Pertinax's largely successful career under Commodus, makes a sound case for Herodian's use of Severus' Autobiography to account for the differences between Herodian's and Dio's portrayal of Pertinax, suggesting that the overall more positive account found in Herodian derived from a whitewashed account of Pertinax in that work.

Conversely, turning to the question of how later writers used Herodian's history, Kemezis (Ch. 4) offers an insightful reading of the Historia Augusta's use of Herodian, especially in the Lives of the emperors of AD 238. Here Kemezis manages to illuminate both texts, while characterising the pseudonymous scriptor's approach to Herodian as not dissimilar to his handling of the bogus authorities he cites elsewhere in his work.

Three of this volume's most rewarding studies deal with Herodian's handling of three concepts, which are deeply rooted in Greek historiography, namely pothos (Baron, Ch. 13), stasis (Pitcher, Ch. 14) and kairos (Androulakis, Ch. 9). Among these fine contributions, Luke Pitcher's discussion of Herodian's treatment of stasis is particularly worthy of note. Here Pitcher places Herodian's understanding of civil discord as being essentially an inter-poleis rather than an intra-polis phenomenon (as it is in Herodian's model, Thucydides), which was ultimately informed by ''his [sc. Herodian's] own vision of how power works in the Rome of his lifetime''.

All contributions are up-to-date with respect to their engagement with contemporary scholarship on Herodian, though the (otherwise compelling) contributions by Mecella (Ch. 8) and Markov (Ch. 10) might have engaged with the provocative thesis of Stover and Woudhuysen regarding whether or not we should see the Latin tradition for the third century as deriving from Marius Maximus and Enmann's Kaisergeschichte; but this is admittedly tangential to their larger arguments. [1] Moreover, the volume is handsomely produced and the presence of both a comprehensive Index locorum and a General Index is particularly welcome.

Overall, what emerges from this volume is an image of Herodian as a historian whose work demonstrates a high level of intellectual cohesion and unity. The volume demonstrates what results are produced through the judicious use of various methodological approaches: from narratology to a close reading of Herodian's Greek. Thanks to this volume and other studies which have appeared in recent years, the ground is well-set for further contributions on this beguiling third-century historian.

Note:

[1] J. Stover / G. Woudhuysen: The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor, Edinburgh 2023.