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Historia Augusta, Volume I (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R744
Discovery Miles 7 440
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Historia Augusta, Volume I (Hardcover)
Series: Loeb Classical Library
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R764
Discovery Miles: 7 640
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The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the
model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and
covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117-138)
to Carinus (r. 283-285), with a lacuna between the lives of the
Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a
collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is
now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual
writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth
century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature,
and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of
Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have
existed. While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving
source for the second and third centuries, often providing details
beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for
historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic,
unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by
better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and
inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional. The
Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the
connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay,
puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions,
and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of
emperors both good and bad. This revision of the original Loeb
edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation
that are fully current with modern scholarship.
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