Les documents d’archives dans la Vita Commodi : degré zéro de l’histoire ou fiction ?
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Archival documents in the Vita Commodi: zero degree of history or fiction? The senatorial acclamations which end Commodus’ Life in the Historia Augusta are the only archival document of the Historia Augusta whose unauthenticity could not be proved in a decisive way. The examination of what seems to be two fragments of the Acta Senatus does not indeed prohibit accepting the author's assertion when he claims to quote them from Marius Maximus, contemporary biographer of Commodus and source of the first Vitae of the collection. Whithout excluding the possibility of some reelaboration by the latter instead of the biographer of Historia Augusta, we are tempted to consider them as authentic. Suetonius in his Twelve Caesars often relies on the testimony of documents drawn from the senatorial and imperial archives, but without producing entire extracts of them. His successors, like Marius Maximus, and much later, the author of the Historia Augusta, seem on the contrary to have inserted a great number of them (true or false ones), and sometimes of imposing size, in their imperial biographies.
Author: Agnès Molinier Arbo
Institution: Université de Strasbourg
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1965946155