The Historia Augusta's six authors were probably one ancient hoaxer
A key Latin source for a century of Roman emperors claims to be the work of six biographers writing for Diocletian and Constantine. In 1889 a German scholar argued that all six were invented, and most historians now agree: one unknown writer, working decades later, forged letters, speeches and even whole usurpers.
The collection offers thirty biographies of emperors, heirs and pretenders from 117 to 284, from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian, apparently modelled on Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars. It contains around 150 supposed documents, including 68 letters and 60 speeches. A stretch covering several mid-third-century emperors is missing from every manuscript; some suspect the gap was deliberate, sparing the author reigns with little source material. Meanwhile it devotes whole books to fleeting or non-existent usurpers.
Cracks were noticed early. In 1776 Edward Gibbon, who nonetheless relied heavily on the work, observed that one of its biographers, supposedly writing in 305 to 306, cited another who wrote after 324. In 1889 Hermann Dessau pointed to anachronistic terms, colloquial Latin and a stream of plainly fake names, and to borrowings from mid-fourth-century historians such as Aurelius Victor and Eutropius. He concluded that a single author wrote in the late fourth century, probably under Theodosius I. Ronald Syme later devoted three books to reinforcing the case, dating it to around AD 395.
Not everyone surrendered. Theodor Mommsen imagined a later editor tidying genuine work, and Arnaldo Momigliano rebutted Syme book by book, insisting the matter was still to be decided. Alan Cameron has more recently argued for composition between 361 and the 380s. The current consensus, though, is a lone author who wove contemporary politics, religion and society into third-century lives, planting fictions as a sly game of allusions to writers such as Cicero and Ammianus Marcellinus.
Its survival is tangled too. The chief manuscript, the Codex Palatinus, was copied at Lorsch in the early ninth century and corrected over six centuries by readers including Petrarch. The title Historia Augusta itself comes from Isaac Casaubon's edition of 1603. Historians cannot simply discard it: for much of its period it is the only continuous account in Latin, so it must be used, but only with great caution.
Source: Historia Augusta
