The Poet Nemesianus and the Historia Augusta

Abstract

Lurking in the Historia Augusta's life of the short-lived Emperor Carus is what appears to be a reference to the genuine contemporary poet Nemesianus and an extant work by him, the Cynegetica. Given the HA's predilection for ‘bogus authors’, this is rather surprising, but because some of what the HA says about Nemesianus is true, the otherwise unique details of his life and works that it provides have been generally accepted. We show first that the reference to the Cynegetica is an incorporated gloss in the text of the HA, one that reveals that the text was being read and studied in northern Francia. We then demonstrate that the name ‘Olympius’, which the HA gives to Nemesianus, is not authentic, offering an analysis of the text's onomastic habits more generally. We show that ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ is one of several invented authors in the HA, lent a superficial plausibility by borrowing the name of a real ancient writer. Finally, we reflect on the way that these conclusions might undermine two developing tendencies in the study of the Historia Augusta.

I INTRODUCTION

The Historia Augusta (HA) is richly stocked with bogus authors.¹ It abounds with fraudulent compositions by invented writers, on whom it intermittently offers commentary, with a pose of critical sophistication. Many of these shadowy figures serve an obvious role as putative sources for the alleged scriptores: the ephemeris of that ‘most noble and truthful man’ Turdulus Gallicanus, indispensable for writing about the emperor Probus, springs to mind (Probus 2.2). Others seem simply to reflect the glee that the work's true author took in invention (not that the two goals were mutually exclusive). These imagined writers are a particularly marked feature of the latter parts of the HA, while by no means confined to them.² Given all this, it comes as something of a surprise to find apparent mention of a genuine author and an authentic work in their correct historical context at almost the very end of the HA. In the text's account of the short-lived emperor Numerian (r. 283–284), son of Carus (r. 282–3) and brother of Carinus (r. 283–5), the author digresses on the boy-prince's poetic abilities (the text is Hohl's):

versu autem talis fuisse praedicatur [sc. Numerianus], ut omnes poetas sui temporis vicerit. Nam et cum Olympio Nemesiano contendit, qui ἁλιευτικὰ κυνηγετικὰ et ναυτικὰ scripsit qui[n]que omnibus coloribus inlustratus emicuit, et Aurelium Apollinarem ‹i›amborum scriptorem, qui patris eius gesta in litteras ret‹t›ulit, [h]isdem, qu‹a›e recitaverat, editis veluti radio solis obtexit (Carus 11.2).³

He is said, however, to have been so talented at verse that he bested all the poets of his age; for he competed with Olympius Nemesianus, who wrote Halieutica, Cynegetica, and Nautica, and who was brilliantly illustrious on account of all his style. When he published what he had recited, like a ray of sun he overshadowed Aurelius Apollinaris, the iambic poet who had described the deeds of his father in writing.

Aurelius Apollinaris, the iambic poet cum historian of the emperor Carus, is a fairly obvious fiction.⁴ Nemesianus, however, really was a poet active in the joint reign of Carinus and Numerian. While the Halieutica and Nautica look like inventions of the HA, a Cynegetica by Nemesianus survives (alongside four Eclogues) and contains a miniature panegyric of the brother emperors (ll. 63–85).⁵

On the strength of this coincidence, most scholars have been prepared to accept that the HA offers a modicum of truth here. Even Sir Ronald Syme, most arch of the HA sceptics, concluded that ‘nothing that the HA relates about authors and writings subsequent to Marius Maximus deserves credit, except for the reference to the poems of Nemesianus of Carthage’.⁶ François Paschoud, doyen of recent HA Forschung, echoes this judgement in the notes to his edition of the Vita Cari: ‘Némésien est l'un des rares écrivains réels mentionnés dans les biographies de la seconde moitié de l’HA’.⁷ So too the author of the most recent English monograph on the HA, David Rohrbacher: ‘the poet Nemesianus is the only person mentioned by name in the entire Life of Carus, Carinus, and Numerian (with the exception of the emperors themselves) who is not fictional’.⁸ At first sight, the HA's recollection of Nemesianus is one of those awkwardly verifiable facts that keeps the work, even at its most extravagant, somewhere in the borderland between history and fiction.

That appearance is, however, deceptive. To understand what is really going on here, we need to look first at the text of this passage in the HA and then at the name — Olympius — with which it furnishes Nemesianus. What we will discover is far more interesting than a tale of the chance transmission of true information. The reference to the Cynegetica is not authentic to the text of the vita Cari and the poet Nemesianus did not have the name Olympius. What we have here is a combination of the HA's predilection for inventing bogus scriptores vaguely modelled after real authors, and of honest medieval scholarship floundering in the face of the work's addiction to bafflement.

II TEXT

For some 500 years, every edition of the Historia Augusta has printed ἁλιευτικὰ, κυνηγετικὰ, ναυτικὰ in this passage, three Greek words in Greek characters. It might, then, come as a slight surprise to students of the text that the most important manuscript of the HA, Vat. Pal. lat. 899 (P), produced in the ninth century and of uncertain origin, does not transmit all three in Greek letters.⁹ Instead it offers a strange hybrid (f. 214v):

nam &cum olympionemesiano contendit quialieutica ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA &nautica scripsit

This peculiar inconsistency is also found in all the manuscripts of the HA derived from P, including Bamberg Msc. Class. 54 (B) (f. 207r) and Paris lat. 5816 (L) (f. 109v).¹⁰ On this evidence, printing these three words in Greek might seem like a logical editorial decision, since all three are Greek words and one of them is written in Greek characters. Yet the reason why every edition since the early sixteenth century does indeed print them in Greek is not sound editorial practice — P, after all, was not widely known for more than a century after the first printed edition had been produced — but rather sheer textual inertia.

The editio princeps of the HA, which was published at Milan in 1475, did not print any of the words in Greek (or leave them blank to be filled in by hand).¹¹ Instead, it offered a (clumsy) Latin transliteration (sig. S8r):

nam & cum Olympio Nemesiano contendit: qui in halienitica cynegetica. & nautica. scripsit¹²

Now this is interesting because the sources of the editio princeps are L (or a derivative of it) and an unknown manuscript belonging to a widely dispersed fourteenth-century family known as Σ, which itself is probably ultimately derived from P with extensive contamination and tampering.¹³ The earliest manuscript of that family, Florence Laur. Plut. 20 sin. 6 (D), does not transmit any of the words in Greek (f. 103v):

nam cum Olympio Nemesiano contendit: qui Alyeutika hynegetica et nautica scripsit¹⁴

For this reason, it seems very likely that the source for the Latin transliteration of the cynegetica in the ed. pr. is its (unidentified) Σ source. The second edition of the HA was printed at Venice in 1489: as has recently been demonstrated, it is extremely valuable because it is based on the ed. pr. and a separate tradition of the text, independent of P and transmitting authentic information.¹⁵ Unfortunately, for this passage, it merely reproduces the reading from the ed. pr., including the gross error in halienitica (sig. M6r).

The next edition, printed roughly 500 years ago, was (unlike its two predecessors) prepared by a respected humanist scholar with a critical eye for philological matters, Johannes Baptista Egnatius, and issued from the venerable house of Manutius in Venice in 1516. The basis for his text was the earlier Venetian edition of 1489, but Egnatius also had occasional recourse to yet another Σ manuscript, which was housed in the Marciana in Venice.¹⁶ More to the point, however, Egnatius was an adventurous editor, never hesitant to make radical changes to the transmitted text, where sense, order, or style demanded it.¹⁷ For example, he separated the lives of Caesars and usurpers from the main sequence of Augusti and printed them after the rest of the text, to make the first part read more like a normal imperial history, treating just the emperors in sequence.

For our purposes, however, the most relevant of Egnatius’ interventions are on a rather smaller scale. In the life of Alexander Severus, the HA explicitly quotes the Greek of a proverb it has given in Latin (18.5, in Hohl's text):

idem addebat sententiam de furibus notam et Gr<a>ece quidem, quae Latine hoc significat: ‘qui multa rapuerit, pauca suffragatoribus dederit, salvus erit’, quae Graece talis est Ὁ πολλὰ κλέψας ὀλίγα δοὺς ἐκφεύξε[ν]ται.

He was in the habit of using a well-known bon-mot on thieves, indeed one in Greek, which means this in Latin: ‘if he who has stolen a lot gives a little to his advocates, he will be acquitted’, which in Greek is as follows: ‘He who has stolen a lot and given a little will be acquitted’.

P did not transmit the Greek in Greek characters, but instead offered a curious Latin transliteration opolla clepsas oliga dus ecfeuxente (f. 107r). The first two printed editions just left a blank space where the Greek should be. This was not good enough for Egnatius, but his manuscript probably offered him no aid.¹⁸ Instead, he boldly inserted his own translation: ὅστις ἄν πολλὰ κεκλόπημεν [sic] ὀλίγα δὲ τοῖς βοηθοῦσιν ἔδωκεν σῶος ἔσται (sig. q4r, f. 124r).¹⁹ Hence it should come as no surprise that when Egnatius came to Carus 11.2, he chose with no manuscript authority to print all three titles in Greek (sig. 2g5v):

nam & cum Olympio Nemesiano contendit, qui ἁλιευτικὰ κυνηγετικὰ & ναυτικὰ scripsit

Every edition since, down to the Budé published by Paschoud in 2002, has followed suit. Hence, we arrive at the present paradoxical state of affairs: every edition prints κυνηγετικὰ not because P transmits ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA, but rather because of the bold liberties Egnatius took five centuries ago with his text.

As a result, no one has ever thought to question why P reads ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA. It is, in every respect, anomalous. The word stands out on the page: it is written in much larger letters than the surrounding Latin characters and the letter-forms are awkward and laboured. And no wonder, for they are, in fact, the only Greek characters written in the whole manuscript. In every other instance where the HA offers Greek, P transmits a Latin transliteration, as in the passage of Alexander Severus discussed above, or at Pertinax 13.5, where it offers the awkward christologum (f. 49v).²⁰ By chance, this passage survives in one of the few fragments from the other ninth-century manuscript of the HA written at Murbach (M), preserved in a list of collations included in the 1518 Froben edition of the text published at Basel: it has instead the (misspelled) χρησόλογος.²¹ In addition, according to Froben, the Greek of the saying in the life of Alexander discussed above was found in M.²² P's treatment of Greek is also generally anomalous. It is not uncommon for individual Greek words to be written in Latin characters by medieval scribes and indeed, in many cases, such transliteration may go back to the original author.²³ Writing out a whole line in Latin transliteration is, however, much less common and usually restricted to texts which were meant to be publicly recited in a liturgical, monastic, or pedagogical context. Extant examples include prayers like the Pater noster and Greek creeds.²⁴ These transliterations almost invariably reflect contemporary pronunciation of Greek.²⁵ We have, however, a few manuscripts which contain Greek passages with an interlinear Latin transliteration.²⁶ Sometimes these are individual words, such as in Adomnán's life of St Columba in London, British Library Add. 35110 (s. xii), f. 97r, where an original πhpicthra is transliterated above syllable by syllable as pe ris te ra, or in Jerome's commentary on Ecclesiastes in Montecassino MS 284, p. 355, where προcωποποιeiαν is transliterated as pros apo pogeian.²⁷ Slightly longer passages of transliterated Greek can be found in Cologne, Dombibliothek Cod. 58, a ninth-century copy of Jerome's commentaries on Paul from Lorsch, on for example, f. 9v, which has aποτουευ kai του δοκεiν, with the slightly comic misinterpretation apo tu eu castu dochin written above.²⁸ Another manuscript of Jerome, the commentary on Daniel, Sankt Gallen 120 (780–820) has frequent transliteration of Greek words.²⁹ So too do the remaining folios of a ninth Murbach manuscript containing his commentary on Isaiah.³⁰ Paris lat. 10910 (Fredegar), of the early eighth century, features a striking drawing of Eusebius and Jerome (with attendant goose) on f. 23v. There is a Latin caption written in Greek letters underneath them, which a ninth-century hand has transcribed.³¹ An alternation between writing in Greek characters and transliterating to Latin is also found in a glossary (which shows an interest in late ancient historical texts) which is plausibly associated with Saint-Denis and its abbot Hilduin (814–43).³² In all these cases too, there are hints of roughly contemporary pronunciation, Greek and Latin.³³ This may tell us something about the Historia Augusta. Three of our ninth-century witnesses – P, Π, and M – are derived from the same archetype. The natural explanation of their divergence is that that archetype offered Greek text for the (surprisingly few) points where the HA transmits Greek, with a Latin transliteration above the line. The conscientious scribe of M copied out the Greek, where the slightly hastier copyist of P generally offered the Latin.

What we have here, then, are three independent anomalies. One is the fact that the HA, in an utterly uncharacteristic fashion for one of the later lives, appears to transmit genuine literary lore in saying that Nemesianus wrote a Cynegetica. The second is that P puts this work's title into Greek characters, while transmitting the titles of the other two (invented) works in Latin letters. The third is that everywhere else P uses Latin transliteration for Greek, even for extended quotation, in a manner that is essentially unparalleled for the genre. Any one of these individually could be explained away through special pleading, but their conjunction exceeds the limits of credibility. One hypothesis, however, could explain all three: what if ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA is an incorporated gloss?

Nemesianus’ Cynegetica is a rare text, but we have hints that it was not quite so rare in the early ninth century.³⁴ In the course of a lengthy denunciation of his homonymous nephew, the bishop of Laon, Hincmar, archbishop of Reims from 845 to 882, tells us that he had read the work as a schoolboy:

… aliter respondere non potui, nisi, ut venatores ferae lustra sequentes agere auditu et lectione puer scolarius in libro, qui inscribitur Kynegeticon, Cartaginensis Aurelii didici, hac illaque discurrendo, retrograda etiam vestigia repetendo anfractus tuos vestigando explicare studerem.³⁵

… I could not otherwise answer, except that I should hasten to unravel your circumlocutions by running about, also seeking out your backwards-hastening footsteps, and investigating them, as hunters do when seeking the lairs of wild beasts, which I learnt from listening and reading when a schoolboy in the book which is entitled Cynegeticon, written by Aurelius of Carthage.

A few lines later, he goes on to quote the poem's opening:

… et etiam cum tuam novam subscriptionem, quin potius tuam novam praesumptionem adiens, mille vias tristesque labores / discursusque citos, securi prelia ruris et sincero corde lites domesticas subire compellar.³⁶

… and since I am even compelled, approaching your new subscription, or I should say your new presumption, to undergo with a pure heart personal quarrels: ‘their thousand ways and mournful toil; their swift running hither and thither, and the battles of the untroubled countryside’.

Hincmar of Reims is one of the Carolingian authors about whose life we know enough to understand exactly what he is saying in this reminiscence: he had read the Cynegetica during his education at Saint-Denis in Paris in the 810s, or perhaps even the early 820s, studying under Hilduin.³⁷ Somewhat disappointingly, the extant ninth-century manuscript of the Cynegetica (written in northern France, probably at Saint-Denis itself), Paris lat. 7561, does not transmit the name of the work in Greek characters (p. 18):

finit. m. aurelii nemesiani kartaginiensis cynegeticon³⁸

The rest of the slim manuscript tradition follows suit.³⁹ If, however, we take a closer look at Hincmar, we find him referring to the text in a garbled combination of Greek and Latin letters, at least according to the manuscript of his Against Hincmar of Laon produced at Reims during his lifetime (Paris lat. 2865, f. 115r), KYNEGETICON.⁴⁰ Evidently, the text of Nemesianus that Hincmar had read did have a title in Greek, or at the least, in his school-days there was a fashion for referring to it in Greek. This was rather a concession to Hellenism on his part, since elsewhere in the same work he fulminated against his namesake:

Although there are sufficient and adequate Latin words, which you could have put in those places, where instead you have put Greek and obscure ones, now and then even Irish and other barbarous, as you fancied, bastardised and corrupt things.⁴¹

It is a striking fact that the only two ninth-century mentions of Nemesianus’ work outside the actual manuscript that transmits it spell the title KYN-. Chronologically speaking, Hincmar's halcyon schooldays take us awfully close to the period in which P itself was copied, probably sometime between 825 and 830.⁴²

In this context, it seems probable that in P's archetype somebody inserted the Greek word ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA in the margin next to Nemesianus’ name, because they recognised the name of the poet. Greek writing was popular in medieval scholia: a Venn diagram of pedants who enjoyed putting their rudimentary Greek skills on display and people who wrote glosses would have a very substantial overlap.⁴³ This would have produced a mise-en-page something like this⁴⁴:

P's copyist blithely incorporated the gloss in the text — as indeed he was wont to do on any number of other occasions.⁴⁵ Indeed, in one case on the culinary predilections of Aelius (pernam at Ael. 5.4), we have good evidence that P and M incorporated an interlinear gloss at two different places in the line.⁴⁶ In another, discussing the literary output of the Emperor Trajan, P transmits nam et de suis dilectis multa versibus composuit amatoria carmina scripsit. (Hadr. 15.9). Casaubon judiciously deleted amatoria carmina scripsit as an incorporated gloss. In the same passage, Π transmits amatoria carmina versibus composuit (f. 142v, shamefully not recorded in any edition since Gruter). The most reasonable interpretation of this passage is that amatoria carmina was an interlinear gloss on de suis dilectis, which displaced the original in Π and was incorporated into P with the addition of scripsit for sense. If ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA were a gloss like these, it would not have been equipped with the usual transliteration above the line, and the scribe would have had actually to copy the characters as he saw them, hence why this is the sole word in Greek characters found in P.⁴⁷

From a conventional standpoint, this is a somewhat perverse suggestion: the normal process of editing seeks to purge errors that have crept into the text over the centuries of its transmission, not remove truths. The nature of the HA, however, forces a reversal: because the text, particularly in its later lives, is so determinedly fictive, we ought to be very suspicious of that in it which seems to be true, especially with regard to literary matters. The ‘truth’ of the HA is generally falsehood and invention and what is true in the usual sense of the term is normally error in the HA. What, indeed, are the chances that, of the literally dozens of invented authors and facts about literary history in the later lives, just one happens to be true? Given that we know Nemesianus was being read in one school, at least, and indeed recalled fondly by a former schoolboy, around the time that P was being copied, it seems far more likely that a Carolingian reader was telling the truth, and that the HA was engaged in its customary obfuscation. At any rate, the fact that the title is written in Greek characters in P, against its otherwise universal practice, demands some explanation, and one that respects what we know of ninth-century scribal habit.

If this hypothesis is true, it gives us a tantalising hint about the much-discussed question of the Schriftheimat of P, and where the archetype of the HA was preserved. The old idea that P was written in Italy has recently been discredited: indeed, the fact that its two siblings, M and Π, are both northern (the former written at Murbach, the latter at Lorsch) makes it virtually impossible that P was copied from the same archetype close to the same time in Italy.⁴⁸ Perhaps instead we ought to look for the sort of centre which had the tradition of Greek study that might have inspired transliteration, and one in which Nemesianus’ Cynegetica was used in schools. In other words, Saint-Denis itself, or a place closely associated with it.

III NAMES

The one obviously authentic detail about Nemesianus provided by the HA may very well be an interpolation. That has considerable implications for its other claims for him. Despite occasional attempts to identify the Halieutica and Nautica with extant Latin poems, it should now be even clearer that they are pure inventions, designed to pad the résumé of the poet.⁴⁹ The name ‘Olympius’ has, however, achieved broader acceptance. It was enshrined in the second edition of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani and in The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire.⁵⁰ Similarly, both Syme and Paschoud were inclined to accept it.⁵¹ From these authoritative sources, ‘Olympius’ has bled into other more general works of reference and is now comfortably accommodated in the broader scholarly literature – not a bad career for a datum from one of antiquity's least reliable informants.⁵² Clearly, it requires more systematic treatment.

In the late third and fourth centuries a.d., the onomastic landscape of the Roman world had changed radically from that of the early empire.⁵³ Individuals were generally referred to by a single name — invariably their last if they had more than one — which scholarship has come to call the ‘diacritic’. Trawling through the letters of Symmachus, for example, illustrates quite how ubiquitous this system of reference had become in even the stuffiest of circles.⁵⁴ In official usage, e.g. consular dates in papyri, the diacritic was often supplemented by one more name, always placed before it.⁵⁵ Depending on the bearer's background and the context, this additional name might indicate descent — usually a gentilicium, but sometimes also a cognomen that had come to play a similar role — or status: Flavius, the nomen of the emperor Constantine, is the obvious example.⁵⁶ Much more rarely, in elevated literary or epigraphic contexts, we find individuals with four, five, or even more names, generally gentilicia but occasionally even praenomina as well, something that hints that the ‘diacritic system’ conceals the full richness of late ancient onomastics.

The manuscripts of the Cynegetica call the poet M(arcus) Aurelius Nemesianus.⁵⁷ That was clearly true also of the text Hincmar had read, since he refers to him as Aurelii.⁵⁸ The archetype of those manuscripts of the Eclogues which attribute the poems correctly seem to have called their author Aurelianus Nemesianus, Aurelianus an easy slip from Aurelius by dittography.⁵⁹ There is nothing in the rich tradition of Nemesianus’ work — direct or indirect — that suggests he had any other names but these.⁶⁰ Moreover, the names transmitted by the manuscripts of Nemesianus are entirely compatible with what we know otherwise of late antique onomastics and obviously authentic. Nemesianus — a cognomen derived from the Greek names Nemesis or Nemesios — is a rare but attested diacritic in the Latin-speaking regions of the Roman world.⁶¹ Given the poet's association with Carthage, it is perhaps particularly interesting that the bishop of Thubunae in Numidia in the time of St Cyprian was one Nemesianus.⁶² He was still being commemorated as a martyr in the middle of the fourth century and is mentioned (indeed quoted) by St Augustine.⁶³ The gentilicium ‘Aurelius’, sometimes with its attendant praenomen ‘M(arcus)’, was extremely common in the later Roman empire, including in Africa.⁶⁴ That was because it had been widely taken by those whom the constitutio Antoniniana of a.d. 212 had enfranchised, to commemorate their benefactor, the emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla).⁶⁵ Generally, though of course not in every individual instance, the Aurelii were the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the broad mass of the population who had not achieved Roman citizenship before the early third century.⁶⁶ It is likely that (say) Nemesianus’ grandfather was one of those suddenly elevated in status by Caracalla. This would make the poet, with his aristocratic interest in the chase and his transparently sophisticated literary culture, an interesting example of the rise of these ‘new Romans’ and their descendants to positions of power and privilege.

There is no particular reason to sully this coherent picture on the testimony of the HA alone. Given that it is a text famous for its made-up names, the economical solution is that this too has simply been invented. To instead accept that Nemesianus had the name ‘Olympius’, there are two routes that we could take, neither of which has much to recommend it. One option, canvassed occasionally in the early modern period, is that it was a genuine additional family name of Nemesianus.⁶⁷ There are two major reasons to reject this. First, it is difficult to understand how it would have been omitted from an archetype that was formal enough to include the poet's praenomen (a rare item indeed by Late Antiquity).⁶⁸ Second, in Late Antiquity Olympius was a common diacritic, but only very rarely used as an additional (familial) name, perhaps precisely because it was so common and thus not usefully distinctive.⁶⁹ It seems unwise to accept something that is inherently unlikely because the HA claims it. The alternative explanation of Olympius, superficially more plausible and adopted by both PIR ² and PLRE I, is to treat it as a signum.⁷⁰ Signa were nicknames (a category sometimes referred to as supernomina), ending in -ius, used fairly widely in the third and fourth centuries, generally in high-status and literary contexts.⁷¹ They could replace the diacritic: hence the writer called Firmianus, generally known to us by his signum Lactantius. They could also be combined with it as a dual name, and the order signum + diacritic is attested.⁷² While sometimes ubiquitous, they were often used only occasionally: L. Aurelius Avianius Symmachus, father of the famous orator, had the signum ‘Phosphorius’, but though he is unusually well attested, the nickname is known to us only from a single inscription.⁷³ The rather slippery nature of signa is perhaps why the idea of ‘Olympius’ Nemesianus has seemed plausible. To see why it should be rejected, we must briefly consider the way that the HA used names.

The HA is justly famous for its fraudulent inventiveness when it comes to onomastics, but focus on this has perhaps led to a neglect of the more prosaic but important subject of the way that it uses names.⁷⁴ This is not the place for a comprehensive investigation: this would be a major work in itself, and one complicated by the fact that so many of the individuals named are invented. Nevertheless, a few important onomastic habits of the HA can usefully be picked out, seen most clearly when set against what was otherwise standard practice. Most Latin historians of the fourth century referred to the vast majority of individuals by a single name, their diacritic. They particularly avoided referring to figures of the third and fourth centuries by more than one name, though they were slightly looser with those of earlier periods, perhaps because polyonomy had an antique flavour. They were especially parsimonious with the (to them) traditional combination of gentilicium and cognomen, usual in the works of Tacitus or the letters of Pliny (for example).⁷⁵ In the Res Gestae, more than 90 per cent of the men named by Ammianus are given only a single name: of the remainder, a considerable proportion are figures of Roman antiquity, whose (usually) dual names were hallowed by long usage.⁷⁶ Amongst actors in the narrative, the majority of those referred to by two names receive a diacritic and a nickname.⁷⁷ Only a handful are identified by gentilicium and cognomen, and Ammianus had a partiality (perhaps rhythmical) for reversing their usual order.⁷⁸ Ammianus was an idiosyncratic author, but in his use of names he was remarkably ordinary. Festus shows a very similar pattern in his account of the Roman Empire's dealings with the Parthians and Persians (Breviarium 19–29). He names 33 individuals: only six of these (18 per cent), none later than the early third century, have more than one name and only two of those are referred to by a gentilicium and cognomen.⁷⁹ There is a similar pattern in the tenth book of Eutropius’ breviarium, which covers 305–364. There are twenty-seven named individuals in the book. Of these, only three (11 per cent) have more than one name, only one of those is contemporary with the events described, and only one (much earlier) individual is given a gentilicium.⁸⁰

These were not habits that had suddenly emerged in the middle of the fourth century and thus likely to be avoided by any conscientious forger seeking to pretend their work was written in the era of Diocletian and Constantine. Our largest corpora of secular Latin prose from that period are to be found in the Mathesis of Firmicus Maternus and the nine contemporary speeches of the Panegyrici Latini.⁸¹ Firmicus mentions some forty-five historical individuals in the course of his lengthy astrological treatise.⁸² Of these, only two are referred to by more than one name: Germanicus appears as Julius Caesar and Cicero is called Marcus Tullius.⁸³ Firmicus always refers to contemporaries by a single name, even when he varies which of their names he chooses: his patron, for example, is either Mavortius (his signum) or Lollianus (his diacritic), but never both together.⁸⁴ The Panegyrici name some forty individuals from Roman history.⁸⁵ Of these, a mere five (12.5 per cent) receive more than one name: none of those five is later than the first century b.c. and only two of them are given a gentilicium.⁸⁶ We are not exactly over-endowed with Latin historiography from this period, but we do have Lactantius’ On the Deaths of the Persecutors (c. 315). Lactantius was interested in names, sensitive (for instance) to the fact that Diocletian had changed his (9.11). Yet, while he names some thirty-nine individuals in his narrative, only two (5 per cent) can really be said to receive more than one name: Tiberius Caesar (2.1, the praenomen is written out in full in the only manuscript) and Maximianus qui est dictus Herculius (8.1). Lactantius even curtly refers to Tarquinius Superbus as ‘Superbus’ (28.4). Clearly, the diacritic system was already well established for Latin authors of the late third and early fourth centuries.

In contrast to all this, the HA delighted in multiple names and especially in fathering them on (putatively) contemporary figures. In the Quadriga Tyrannorum, for example, it names some fifty-seven individuals. This is one of the shorter lives (c. 2,300 words) and gives some flavour of the sheer number of named individuals that the text flings at its readers (contrast Lactantius’ sparseness in the c. 11,000 words of the DMP). Of these, twelve (21 per cent) have more than one name.⁸⁷ The majority of those (eight) are made out to be contemporary with the author or with the events narrated: they are mostly putative sources or informants.⁸⁸ Most (nine) of those referred to by more than one name have a gentilicium. In fact, the HA's author was something of a connoisseur of gentilicia, deploying some very rare ones indeed: Aurunculeius, Larcius, Masticius, Verconius.⁸⁹ All this suggests that when confronted by the need to invent figures, his usual practice was to give them a gentilicium and a cognomen.⁹⁰ This is obvious, for example, from the names of the six scriptores to whom the lives are attributed: Aelius Spartianus, Iulius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus.⁹¹ So, confronted by the ‘Olympius Nemesianus’, our default assumption ought to be that the name is supposed to mirror the usual pattern of nomen + cognomen, just as the invented Aurelius Apollinaris in the same passage does, than which it is no more authentic. Nothing licenses us to make the rationalising assumption that this just happens to be a disguised signum.

In fact, we can go somewhat further than this. Rather unsurprisingly, the HA had a fondness for nicknames. Yet its author did not generally introduce them to the reader without some flourish (where was the fun in that?). Instead, he tended explicitly to signal that they were nicknames, by using some formula: cognomine, appellatus est, cognominatus, cognomento, etc.⁹² He also delighted in offering (sometimes elaborate) explanations for them. So, we learn that Gordian I was nicknamed ‘Africanus’ not because he was proclaimed emperor in Africa, but because he was descended from the Scipios. The HA's author further informs us that ‘in very many books’ he has found that Gordian and his son were also both nicknamed Antoninus or Antonius.⁹³ We get similarly elaborate explanations for why Antoninus was ‘Pius’, why Septimius Severus was nicknamed Pertinax, and why Aurelian mockingly suggested the Senate call him carpisculum, amongst many other instances.⁹⁴

Signa were, of course, a kind of nickname and crucially the HA's author showed exactly the same desire to highlight and explain them as he did for other sorts of supernomina.⁹⁵ In fact, the HA provides one of our very few explicit ancient discussions of how someone gained their signum, in its account of the reign of Commodus:

Menses quoque in honorem eius pro Augusto Commodum, pro Septembri Herculem, pro Octobri Invictum, pro Novembri Exsuperatorium, pro Decembri Amazonium ex signo ipsius adulatores vocabant. Amazonius autem vocatus est ex amore concubinae suae Marciae, quam pictam in Amazone diligebat, propter quam et ipse Amazonico habitu in harenam Romanam procedere voluit.⁹⁶

His flatterers even renamed the months in his honour: ‘Commodus’ for August, ‘Hercules’ for September, ‘Invictus’ for October, ‘Exsuperatorius’ for November, ‘Amazonius’ for December, from his signum. He was called Amazonius, moreover, due to his love of his concubine Marcia, whom he delighted to see painted as an Amazon and on whose behalf he himself wanted to enter the arena at Rome in the dress of an Amazon.

The HA's author did not understand signum narrowly to be a nickname in -ius (as we would generally define it today).⁹⁷ He refers, for instance, to the emperor Aurelian as receiving in his army days the signum of manu ad ferrum to distinguish him from another tribune, also called Aurelian.⁹⁸ He also says that ‘Antoninus’ was the verum signum of the emperor Antoninus Pius, by which he must mean his ‘real name’.⁹⁹ Yet the passage shows very clearly that what we would call a signum was not something to be introduced without some fanfare. The (very few) possible signa in the HA are all either brought up in discussions of nicknames, or explicitly marked as such.¹⁰⁰ So, we are told that Lucius Verus had on his staff an actor called Agrippus, cui cognomentum erat Memfi, informed that Clodius Albinus was nicknamed Porfyrius by his nurse because he was swaddled in purple, and introduced to Aurelius Victor, cui Pinio cognomen erat.¹⁰¹ In other words, were the HA trying to lumber Nemesianus with the signum Olympius, everything about its practice elsewhere suggests that it would tell us that was what it was doing, not leave us to work it out. We can conclude, with considerable confidence, that the HA's ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ is not actually meant to be a genuine reference to M. Aurelius Nemesianus. Perhaps the name was just a weak pun, inspired by that more famous competition at Olympia, on the idea of Numerian's poetic contests? In any case, if Olympius is not actually part of the historical Nemesianus’ name, there is even more reason to suppose that ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA is an interloper in the text.

IV SCHOLIA

There is one final piece to this onomastic puzzle. Anyone who consults PLRE I or PIR ² will be told that Nemesianus is referred to as Olympius in the ancient scholia to Statius’ Thebaid. At first sight, this seems powerful supporting evidence for the HA, one reason (perhaps) why scholars have generally taken the text at its word. In fact, however, this is a remarkable example of the durability of misguided early modern ideas. The scholia do not refer to Nemesianus by name. In a comment on Thebaid 5.388–9, they quote a poet called Olympius:

Ab iunctis ergo ὑφ’ ἕν noli accipere. operta autem pinus pellibus, ut mos est. abiunctis quidam ὑφ’ ἕν legunt: divisis. Sic in Olympio: ‘abiungere luna iunices’.¹⁰²

From the connected [ab iunctis]: do not understand this as a single word. The pine covered also with skins, as is the custom. Some read unyoked [abiunctis]: meaning divided. Olympius uses it so: ‘to unyoke the young cows from the moon’.¹⁰³

There is absolutely no reason to associate this half-line with Nemesianus: it does not appear in his poetry, does not relate to themes that he discussed, and is not attributed to him by the text. It is the work of some unknown poet called Olympius, which was (as we have seen) a common enough name. Similarly, in a comment on Thebaid 2.58, the scholia cite a poet called Olympus:

Mediaeque s(ilentia) l(unae) philosophi lunam terram ‹aetheriam› esse dicunt, quae circa nostrum hoc solum circulo altiore suspensa est. Haec autem omnia corpora maiora gignit, utpote quae vicina sit caelo. Poetae denique omnes asserunt leonem de his polis ortum, quem Hercules prostravit, ut etiam Olympus ait.

The silence of the middle moon the philosophers say that the moon is a ‹heavenly› body, which has been hung up on a loftier orbit around this our earth.¹⁰⁴ This moreover gives birth to all the greater bodies, namely those which are next to the sky. All the poets allege that the lion, which Hercules defeated, sprang from these heavens, as also Olympus says.

Once again, the origin of the Nemean lion is not a subject mentioned by Nemesianus, is not obviously relevant to the themes of his poetry, and is not here ascribed to him, or indeed even to ‘Olympius’. Modern editors generally insert an i into the name Olympus, but there is no particular reason so to do. While seemingly not so common as Olympius in Late Antiquity, Olympus is a very well-attested name in its own right.¹⁰⁵ Given that these are two references in the same set of scholia, both seemingly related to heavenly bodies, it might make sense to assume that they are references to the same poet, but there is no particular reason to favour Olympius over Olympus as the name of this presumably late antique author.¹⁰⁶

To understand why these two references have become part of the story of Nemesianus, we have to turn to the first volume of Johann Christian Wernsdorf's Poetae Latini Minores, published at Altenburg in 1780.¹⁰⁷ This was principally taken up with the Cynegetica of Grattius and Nemesianus, extensively annotated, but also offered a selection of other works with a field-sports theme, and some short essays on points raised by them. Among the testimonia for Nemesianus, Wernsdorf printed the scholion to Statius, Thebaid 5.389.¹⁰⁸ His reasoning, as he explained, was that no other poet called Olympius was known from antiquity. He also silently assimilated the Olympus of the scholia to this composite figure: the source of the emendation in modern editions.¹⁰⁹ The identification of Olympius as Nemesianus, while obviously weakly grounded, is not so surprising in an era before Dessau, when the HA was still mostly taken to be more or less what it claimed.¹¹⁰ Wernsdorf, however, had a more daring aim than simply to ascribe another fragment to Nemesianus. In a substantial preface, he proceeded to argue on the basis of the scholia that Nemesianus was also the author of the Laus Herculis (LH), a late antique poem attributed to Claudian in the only surviving manuscript (of the eighth century).¹¹¹ The Laus Herculis, Wernsdorf suggested, was really a panegyric of the emperor Maximian, colleague of Diocletian, who was closely associated with Hercules.¹¹² As he explained, when he first noted the scholion about the Nemean lion, he began to hunt for parallels. This led him to the Laus Herculis, which says that the Cretan Bull came from the moon. He acknowledged that this was not the same thing, but suggested that the scholiast wished to include Olympius as the poet who in particular had treated the labours of Hercules.¹¹³ Hence Olympius was the author of the Laus Herculis. That Olympius and Nemesianus were one and the same he deduced from some stylistic parallels between the Cynegetica and the Laus Herculis.¹¹⁴ From there he attempted to squeeze some biographical details from the LH, which he suggested were entirely compatible with what we know of Nemesianus.¹¹⁵

This is an argument of considerable ingenuity and is made with gusto, but it is also plainly wrong. Leave to one side the question of the HA's reliability, and ignore the silent assimilation of Olympius and Olympus: Wernsdorf's theory is simply incompatible with the text of the scholion on Thebaid 2.58, the whole point of which is that Olympus had said that the Nemean lion came from the moon, something the LH conspicuously does not mention.¹¹⁶ There is, moreover, nothing remotely like the quotation in the scholion on 5.388–9 to be found in the Laus Herculis, so one has to posit that the scholiast had access to a different lost poem by Olympius, on a similar astronomical theme. The stylistic parallels invoked by Wernsdorf are barely worthy of the name: one of them is that both poets claim inspiration from the Castalian Spring.¹¹⁷ As Volpilhac also pointed out in the 1970s when there was an attempt to revive the theory, the author of the LH takes some liberties with quantities which are unthinkable in Nemesianus and difficult to imagine even in the considerably later Claudian.¹¹⁸ For these reasons (and others, no doubt), Wernsdorf's theory appears to have been very largely ignored by scholars of the Laus Herculis.¹¹⁹ They tend to locate the poem at some point after Claudian in the fifth or perhaps sixth century, without much certainty as to the precise date.¹²⁰ Yet, in spite of this, for some reason the idea that the scholia to Statius relate to Nemesianus has stumbled on.¹²¹ It is past time that it was put to rest.

V BOGUS AUTHORS

Hence, there is nothing that we can learn about our Nemesianus from the HA. Instead, the evidence suggests that the activity of the poet M. Aurelius Nemesianus in the time of Carus and his sons inspired the author of the HA to fabricate a Doppelgänger, Olympius Nemesianus. And this is hardly surprising: Nemesianus was an author widely read in Late Antiquity.¹²² A complete survey of his reception would be a major task in itself, but a few examples can give a sense of his popularity.¹²³ In his account of Carus and his sons (written c. 360), the historian Aurelius Victor describes how the father was made Augustus and Carinus and Numerian were ‘clothed in the raiment of emperors (augusto habitu)’.¹²⁴ This rather awkward periphrasis is almost without parallel in Latin. Almost, because the one other place it occurs is in Nemesianus (Cyn. 80–1), who fancies that he can already see the ‘imperial raiment’ (augustos habitus) of the brothers. The rarity of phrasing and the context strongly suggest that Victor was consciously alluding to Nemesianus here. A few decades later, Ausonius quoted Cynegetica 268 in his Gratiarum actio (14.65).¹²⁵ Further allusions to the same work can be found in the poet Avienius, in Claudian and in Dracontius.¹²⁶ The Eclogues were also popular: known to the authors of the Carmen contra Paganos and the Einsiedeln Eclogues.¹²⁷ A line from one of them was even used in a Christian epitaph from Rome, of the fourth or fifth century.¹²⁸

There was a fair chance that any educated reader who came across the alleged poetic rivals of the emperor Numerian would feel a flicker of recognition at the name Nemesianus. Perhaps that was the point. The HA is crowded with ‘bogus’ authors, but when they are put under the microscope, they often transpire to have a ‘fake but accurate’ feel to them. The works cited or the names given are slightly wrong, but at least some of the core details, most often the rough date, are plausible. We can even sort the bogus authors into two general categories. In the first, we might put those who are indeed real authors, but to whom the HA attributes fake works. Examples include Gargilius Martialis, who may well have lived at the time of Alexander Severus, but actually wrote on horticulture; and Phlegon of Tralles who was a freedman of Hadrian and did write historical works, but whom the HA claims (almost certainly falsely) transmitted the letter of Hadrian that it reproduces.¹²⁹ In the second category, we might put bogus authors whose names are redolent of actual literary figures, but themselves invented: the historian Onesimus, for example, is very close to the name of the sophist Onasimus; and the Aurelius Victor, cui Pinio cognomen erat, mentioned above shares the first two names with the actual historian Aurelius Victor (since the chronological conceit means that he cannot actually refer to Victor, who was probably born c. 310–20). A particularly striking example is Suetonius Optatianus, a supposed writer of (later) imperial biographies, whose first name is shared with the famous biographer, and whose second (coincidentally or not) is shared with a Constantinian poet Porfirius Optatianus.¹³⁰ Even sceptical scholars have been tempted to put Olympius Nemesianus in the first category — an actual author with fake works fathered on him — but since ‘Olympius Nemesianus’ cannot actually be the name of M. Aurelius Nemesianus, perhaps this instance might actually be better assigned to the second. The fact that Nemesianus was a real author with a known context was used to mint a new poet, who did not write on the terrestrial matters of husbandry and hunting, but on the maritime pastimes of sailing and fishing.

These made-up references to real authors and bogus authors fabricated on the model of genuine ones were the result not simply of a delight in pure invention, but rather of the need to lend a wash of authority to what the HA claimed about the history it described.¹³¹ That ought to make us take a closer look at some of the outwardly more respectable authors cited by the HA – Marius Maximus, for example, or Florus.¹³² Perhaps the imposture has just been particularly successful in such cases. Students of the HA ought, as always, to be on their guard.

VI CONCLUSION

Recent scholarship on the Historia Augusta has tended in two opposite directions. One strand, typified by Rohrbacher's 2016 monograph The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta, has emphasised the literary qualities of the collection, even to the point of glossing over its historical fraudulence. Rohrbacher makes the reference to Nemesianus the centrepiece of a sophisticated engagement with the tradition of Latin pastoral in the Carus.¹³³ Were this true, it would provide a powerful counterpoint to the arguments we present here, showing that the scriptor definitely had the genuine Nemesianus in mind and expected the same of his readers. First, he adduces one Julius Calpurnius (mentioned earlier in the same life, 8.4) as the author of a letter about the death of Carus.¹³⁴ Following a well-worn, if unacknowledged, early modern track, Rohrbacher associates this figure with the (probably third-century) bucolic poet Calpurnius Siculus.¹³⁵ He then moves to the fact that, much later in the life, Numerian's brother Carinus is described as having a jewelled belt (17.1 balteum … gemmatum in P). Rohrbacher notes that there is also a belt with jewels in Nemesianus’ Cynegetica, used to describe the garb of Diana, gemmatis balteus … nexibus, ‘a girdle with jewelled fastenings’ (Cyn. 92). In concluding, he points out, in very careful terms, that Calpurnius Siculus ‘has the same collocation, “balteus en gemmis”, in his seventh eclogue’.¹³⁶ Were this all true, then the HA would show a deep knowledge of Latin bucolic poetry in general and of Nemesianus’ works in particular, which might be thought to undermine the arguments advanced here. In fact, however, none of Rohrbacher's arguments withstand scrutiny. Leaving to one side the fact that jewels in connection with belts is a rather common idea, there is no parallel between the two belts: Carinus’ is evidently itself set with gems, where the one described by Nemesianus has jewelled clasps.¹³⁷ Indeed, balteus is used in two different senses in the two passages: sword-belt (i.e. ζωστήρ) in the HA and woman's girdle (i.e. ζώνη) in Nemesianus.¹³⁸ The real parallel with Carinus’ belt is found in the HA itself, where the louchest of emperors and a fitting antitype of the wastrel Carinus, Gallienus, is described as ‘using a jewelled belt’ (HA Gallieni duo 14.6: gemmato balteo usus est). Calpurnius’ balteus has even less to do with Carinus’. The reason for Rohrbacher's slight obliquity in phrasing is that Calpurnius’ balteus en gemmis … radiant (7.47–8) has nothing whatsoever to do with clothing: instead, it refers to the aisle of an amphitheatre, probably the Colosseum (i.e. διάζωμα). Hence, there is no connection whatsoever between Calpurnius, Nemesianus and the HA in this phrase. The whole notion that there is some obscure engagement with the bucolic tradition in the life of Carus and his sons depends upon the idea that the bogus Olympius Nemesianus is meant actually to refer to the real bucolic poet M. Aurelius Nemesianus. Take that away — as it must be when the Cynegetica is removed — and there is no reason to even bring pastoral to mind. Students of the HA inclined to find considerable literary subtleties in the work may be themselves victims of a much more basic imposture.

The second tendency in recent HA scholarship is to attribute varying degrees of the text's fraudulence to its Carolingian transmission. Shedd, for example, has recently argued that the six fake authors are not all intrinsic to the HA as composed, but actually the result of medieval tampering, or at least misguided scholarship.¹³⁹ Even more extreme, Baker has attempted a wholesale rehabilitation of the basic reliability of the HA, suggesting that its incoherence as a collection is due to it having been assembled in the Carolingian period.¹⁴⁰ Neither study can actually provide evidence that the transmission of the HA is not a straightforward case of medieval copying, like that of Suetonius' De vita Caesarum, a work of the same genre, with a parallel structure, and transmitted via the same milieu.¹⁴¹ By contrast, the evidence we have adduced here shows that if anything, medieval interventions in the text tried to tame its idiosyncrasies and introduce facts into the farrago of fantasy. Shedd is not wrong to note that the HA as we have it contains ‘unprecedented fictions’, but the genesis of those fictions is to be found in the text itself, whenever and by whomever it was composed, and not in medieval scholarship of the generation before our earliest manuscripts were copied.¹⁴²

This inquiry has brought us, by roundabout paths, to several fairly simple conclusions. (1) The text of Carus 11.2 should be printed cum Olympio Nemesiano contendit, qui Halieutica et Nautica scripsit, with ΚΥΝHΓΕΤΙΚA bracketed or banished to the apparatus and the other two works rendered in Latin characters. (2) M. Aurelius Nemesianus should no longer be saddled with the name Olympius. (3) Olympius Nemesianus should be added to the list of ‘bogus authors’ in the HA. Alongside these, we have come to two more tentative findings which merit further exploration. (1) The onomastic practices of the author of the HA deserve further study: just because the people referred to are fake does not mean that the onomastic practice by which they are named is also. (2) The archetype of the tradition of the HA might have been housed and annotated in the first decade of the ninth century in a place like Saint-Denis, where Nemesianus’ works were studied.