Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus wrote the last great history of Rome in Latin and is the principal source for the fourth century, including the disaster at Adrianople. He was a Greek from Antioch who served as a protector domesticus, a staff officer of the imperial guard, which is the reason his history reads as it does: he was present at the siege of Amida in 359, escaped it, and went on Julian's Persian expedition in 363 where the emperor was killed. He retired to Rome and wrote thirty-one books continuing Tacitus from AD 96 to 378. The first thirteen are lost; what survives covers 353 to 378 in great detail. His account of Adrianople, where the emperor Valens and two thirds of an eastern army were destroyed by the Goths, ends the work and is written as a catastrophe he expects the reader to understand the weight of. He was a pagan and notably fair to Christians, critical of Julian's more extravagant restorations, and savage about the Roman aristocracy's frivolity and about informers and torture. He also wrote what may be the first sustained ethnographic description of the Huns. Gibbon called him an accurate and faithful guide, which is the judgement most later historians have kept, while noting that his Latin is difficult and his digressions are long. He wrote in Rome in Latin though Greek was his first language, and apologised for it. His description of the Huns as a people who lived on horseback and ate raw meat warmed under the saddle is the origin of an image that lasted fifteen hundred years and is not reliable. What makes him valuable is the opposite habit: he names his own uncertainty, distinguishes what he saw from what he was told, and says when a rumour is only that.

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