In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past

Abstract

The reception of Orosius is a fascinating subject. Few authors can claim to have had such a significant impact on their literary successors in the pre-modern world, and yet be so maligned by modern scholars over the past two hundred years. Although judges no less in stature than Gelasius I, Bede and even the padre dell’Umanesimo Petrarch deemed the Spanish clergyman’s Historiae aduersos paganos (hereafter Histories) worthy of praise, emulation and use, historians and philologists have for too long dismissed Orosius’smagnum opus as vulgar, derivative and unreliable. The writer’s reputation has suffered from unfavourable and unjust comparisons with his near-contemporaries, the theological behemoth Augustine and the classicising miles quondam et Graecus Ammianus, both of whom are still frequently judged to have crafted works far superior to that of the lowly priest. Thankfully, this tide of condemnation is now being surmounted by a new wave of reinterpretation; some scholars have recently emphasised and analysed the literary qualities of the Histories in their own right, often without the daunting shadow of Augustine, whose looming presence is rarely absent for long in Orosian scholarship. The monograph under review feeds directly into these attempts to reappraise the Late Antique author’s historiographical and ideological objectives. Offering a persuasive rebuttal to modern criticisms of the Histories, Victoria Leonard situates the churchman’s narrative within his specific temporal, cultural and religious contexts. By approaching Orosius’s account along predominantly historiographical lines of inquiry, she seeks to move the discussion away from the thorny problem of reliability and avoid comparisons between Orosius’s account and those of his contemporaries. Although the core argument – that the Histories responded to allegations that widespread support for Christianity had led to the Gothic capture of Rome in 410 CE – has been made before, Leonard focuses on four themes that have yet to receive extensive exploration. Following a brief foreword by Mark Humphries and a contextualising introduction by Leonard herself, these four themes constitute the monograph’s major chapters: Chapter 1 explores Orosius’s identification as a historical writer; Chapter 2 examines the use of time in the