This is the fifth instalment in a series of articles by Classics Ambassador Ffion Shute introducing lesser-known Roman authors. The series covers forgotten gems ranging from history to architecture to military tactics, whose authors deserve to be more widely known. Strictly no Tacitus here (though Livy does get a passing mention this time): these articles will help you to know your Frontinus from your Fronto! This time, Ffion encounters the obscure historian Florus.

Florus

When I perused my books on Roman history in search of inspiration for this latest instalment, I was somewhat taken aback to read that the historian and archaeologist, Colin Wells, in his 1984 book The Roman Empire, describes Florus as “a man of egregious stupidity”. I thought that this strong statement might be somewhat unjustified: regular readers will know that I normally find a way to defend the reputations of lesser-known authors in this series, reading their own words to find some points of interest and hopefully some arguments in favour of their modern utility. However, when I turned to the work of Ronald Syme, one of the most esteemed experts on Roman history, what did I find? Syme also condemns Florus as “that elementary and miserable compiler”. Having ordered a copy of Florus, I was already committed, but my fears were quickly confirmed. A difficult question presented itself. Is there such thing as an ancient writer so bad that their work is not worth reading at all?

The man (men?)

Very little is known about the life of Florus. In fact, there is so much confusion as to his identity that it is not even known whether he was one, two or even three people. A Publius Annius Florus, a Julius Florus and a Lucius Annaeus Florus have all been identified as writers, all born in northern Africa and all working in Rome during the late 1^st and early 2^nd centuries CE. Whether two or more of these people were members of the same family, actually the same person and were separated due to later confusion, or even unrelated people with similar names is anybody’s guess. Works of poetry, oratory and history are all attributed to various Florii, but I deal here only with the author of the Epitome of Roman History, whoever that person may have been.

The Epitome

The Epitome of Roman History, or, to give it its full title, Epitome of All the Wars of Seven Hundred Years Taken from Livy, is a relatively short but complete work. As the title of ‘epitome’ suggests, it is not entirely original, but a condensed version of a much longer, existing work: Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, that titanic 142-book history of Rome from the time of Romulus and Remus to the reign of the emperor Augustus.

Epitomes were very common from the late Republican period onwards. They served at least two purposes. Before the invention of the printing press, wordy histories had to be laboriously copied by scribes, meaning that they were extremely expensive. Epitomes were the perfect means of disseminating the information contained in longer works of history to a wider audience. They could also be used like a modern index to find particular sections in the miles of papyrus scrolls of the original versions. Some authors even wrote epitomes of their own works, but many were written by other people, often after the original author’s death. Although this method was intended to pick out the important parts of the original work and express them in fewer words, epitomists, as we shall see, could also put their own unique spin on the narrative.

Florus set out to epitomise Livy’s work, summarising his accounts of the kings of Rome, expansion within Italy, the threat of Hannibal, and the conquests of Greece and parts of western Asia more or less faithfully, although with considerably more chronological confusion. However, accounts of the late Republic appear to be drawn from other sources as well, with notable similarities between Florus’ and Julius Caesar’s autobiographical account of the Gallic wars. Florus even seems to copy some of Caesar’s self praise in this section, including vivid devices completely superfluous to the basic narrative, such as the sea seeming to bow down before Caesar’s authority when crossing, victorious, back to Gaul from Britain. Florus’ account of the Jugurthine War, fought between Roman forces and Numidia in northern Africa, seems to be an extremely brief summary of Sallust’s book on the same war. Here, he borrows Sallust’s haughty characterisation of the African king Jugurtha as an exotic and conspiratorial mastermind whose manipulative behaviour was crushed by superior Roman military strength.

A silver denarius minted by Sulla in 56 BCE to commemorate the dictator’s victories in North Africa. Jugurtha, a starving and bound prisoner of war, kneels in submission on the right. The coin bears the legend ‘Felix’ (‘lucky’ or ‘blessed’) to indicate divine favour for Sulla and Rome’s victories.

War

In order to examine the Epitome, it is necessary to compare its themes with that of the original Ab Urbe Condita. One of the particular aspects of Livy’s work is that he combines his descriptions of the military campaigns of the Romans with other events he deemed notable. One of these is portents, or strange and foreboding phenomena that superstitious Romans saw as signs of divine displeasure and connected them with disasters in current affairs. Livy describes these in the manner of weather reports, listing events such as showers of stones, phantom ships, women giving birth to animals, and even, at one point, an ox throwing itself from a three-storey building (enthusiasts of such stories may read the work of another epitomist, Julius Obsequens, which consists entirely of portent reports taken from Livy). Another of Livy’s favourite devices is speeches, contrived as illustrations of significant Senate proceedings and internal politics. Florus dispenses almost entirely with direct speech and the discussion of portents, instead choosing to focus entirely on the theme of war. While this may seem as if he is putting a more rational focus on events that actually mattered rather than superstition or insignificant internal debates, Florus rather lacks charm in his work, uncoloured by digressions and discussions of political characters. Those who are fatigued by reading endless speeches in Livy may be given a newfound respect for them by knowing how monotone the work of Florus is!

According to his theme, each book of the Epitome is split up into short chapters, the titles of which are mostly the names of campaigns undertaken against different groups of people, such as The Samnite War, The Macedonian War and, of course, the Punic Wars. This stark division of history into the conquest of different ethnic groups displays Florus’ priority: glorifying Roman expansion and conquests of ‘barbarians’. By contrast, Livy, even in his description of wars, chooses to measure and punctuate time with political rather than military events, pausing frequently to report who was elected consul or tribune in the year he is describing. Florus is markedly uninterested in the internal politics of Rome, only bothering to comment on domestic intrigues when there were actual troops being manoeuvred and foreign forces were involved – even his description of Octavian and Marc Antony’s rivalry is heavily coloured by the context of conflict in the eastern empire and the supposed barbarism of Antony under the influence of Cleopatra.

Another one of Florus’ telling structural decisions is his division of the evolution of the Roman state into the developmental stages of ‘infancy’ (the regal period), ‘youth’ (the early Republic), ‘manhood’ (the late Republic) and ‘old age’ (the imperial period). This is not an original idea, but one probably copied from the works of Seneca the Elder, who explained the same concept in his writings around one hundred years earlier. Florus uses this metaphor of an aging man to illustrate how passionately he was in favour of Roman expansion, praising the state’s vigorous youth and manhood, during which the most territories were conquered. He criticises the imperial period when he labels it as the ‘old age’ of the state. Though he briefly admits that Augustus bringing peace was a positive step for the internal state, he criticises the emperors in general, saying that “because of the inertia [inactivity] of the Caesars, the state has all but grown old and degraded, except for during the reign of Trajan”. Florus is referring here to military inactivity, as the concerns of the emperors largely rested on maintaining Roman authority over the places that had already been conquered rather than constantly pursuing further expansion. Trajan’s conquest of Dacia (roughly modern-day Romania), immortalised on Trajan’s Column, was a major exception to this.

A scene from Trajan’s Column depicting a battle between the Romans and the Dacians. This is actually one of very few depictions of armed conflict on the monument: though many pitched battles were fought during the invasion, Trajan’s propaganda was largely keen to highlight infrastructure projects and religious ceremonies carried out by Roman soldiers. This is in contrast to Florus’ view of the emperor’s exploits as being gloriously violent.

Florus sums up the extent of his enthusiasm for conflict and conquest in his account of the Ligurian War, which Rome waged against Gallic tribes in northern Italy in the late third century BCE. For a brief period before the war, the doors of the temple of Janus were closed, a symbol of peace throughout the empire, supposedly for the first time for hundreds of years. Romans usually hailed this rare event as a remarkable achievement of stability. Florus, however, welcomes the bloodshed of the Ligurian War that opened the temple doors again, commenting that it must have been “incited by a god, lest [Roman] arms rust and decay”.

Style

Compared to that of his sources, Florus’ writing style is highly rhetorical. Despite the fact that he spends one or two paragraphs where Livy would spend an entire book, Florus manages to include an extraordinary number of rhetorical questions, exclamations, superlatives, and imaginative adjectives. One example is the contrast between Florus and Livy’s descriptions of the announcement that Greece had been liberated from Macedonia, made by the consul Quinctius Flaminius at the Isthmian Games at Corinth in 196 BCE. Livy describes the historic scene by calmly reporting that there was great celebration among the newly liberated Greeks in the crowd. Florus, on the other hand, as well as confusing the location with the Nemean Games, invents more detail and says “what joy there was … and how the audience members competed with one another in their applause!” followed by three more long-winded exclamations. In reading the whole work overall, the constant use of such devices is mildly amusing for the first few chapters but quickly becomes very tiresome.

As the work goes on, Florus makes more and more use of the word ‘nos’ (‘we’) and its associated verb endings. The first appearance is in the description of the First Punic War, when the general Calpurnius Flamma rescues his army from the jaws of its Carthaginian counterpart. Florus says that ‘we extricated ourselves’ and continues to identify himself with the category of ‘Romans’ for the rest of the work. The interesting factor here is that Florus was not originally Roman. The only thing about him of which we are almost certain is that he was born in northern Africa, part of the Roman Empire by his day, but certainly not at the time of the events he is describing during the early Punic Wars. It is far from certain that he would even have been a full Roman citizen, but his use of the first person pronoun speaks volumes about his self-identification as a member of the Roman project and his wish to be perceived as such by his readers. His political alignment rather than his birthplace or possible ethnicity was what mattered, setting him apart from ‘barbarians’.

Reception

We do not have much information on the contemporary reception of the Epitome of Roman History, aside from the fact that it was copied out and survived, indicating some level of popularity. The most interesting part of its reception actually comes from the seventeenth century, when, as anybody now will be surprised to learn, Florus was actually a household name among European students of Roman history. The Epitome was used as a schoolroom textbook to give children efficient access to knowledge of the past. Thus Florus’ work ended up serving the same purpose one and a half millennia later as it had at the time: avoiding having to read all of Livy!

Florus’ macho attitude and his panegyric to the civilised state triumphing over barbarians aligned with the way that many educated Europeans saw the world in the seventeenth century. Florus put the great and all-conquering nature of the Roman state at the centre of his writing. His use of ‘we’ invited readers to join him in his worldview, making them identify themselves with the values Florus praised, as well as admiring the people and institutions canonically glorified as keystones of the Roman Empire. The Epitome had great appeal to those who pursued expansionist policies of conquest in their own day and felt some duty to ‘civilise’ other cultures, believing that they were backed by a divine power that justified not letting their own arms ‘rust and decay’.

So, can we redeem Florus in the 21^st century? He is brief, rhetorical, inconsistent and chauvinistic, and it is highly debatable whether he contains any historical information worth using that cannot be derived from other surviving sources in much more detail. For all his enthusiasm for war, he does not seem particularly expert in it, with little interest in military strategy. Whereas Frontinus attributes military success or failure to a complex range of factors and is reasonably even-handed in his treatment of Romans and non-Romans, Florus tends vaguely to reference semi-miraculous factors, such as the inherent glory and good fortune of Roman generals or the inevitable downfall of morally deficient kings and peoples. These are the statements of an armchair general who, I conclude, knew little of the realities of war. It is not even a reliable guide to contemporary attitudes to Roman expansion, as it is so much more extreme than mainstream elite Roman opinion found in the works of other authors. In Classics, we have already moved away from the idea that Roman expansion was glorious. It is, therefore, advisable to keep Florus’ tiresome opuscule shelved.

The title page from the 1657 edition of the Epitome published by the Dutch Elzevir Press. The choice of Romulus and Remus as its subject is not a very good illustration of what most of the book contains!

While there is a Loeb edition, for anybody interested in collecting rare books there is at least one original seventeenth century edition on EBay at the time of writing. I do not recommend either.

©FfionShute