Seven Books of History against the Pagans (review)

In Paulus Orosius’s Historia adversus paganos (c. 418 AD) we possess the only universal history surviving intact from the ancient Greco-Roman world, its narrative starting from Adam himself and ending with the Visigoth king Vallia in 415. To have this monumental work well translated, introduced, and annotated is a timely boon, and not only for historians of antiquity but also for classicists and patrologists. We should not let the previous English translator of the Historia go unappreciated, for Roy Deferrari, who rendered a version for the series The Fathers of the Church that he edited, was surely one of the great Catholic educators of the twentieth century and a brilliant Latinist. But Deferrari completed his account later in life (attempting to better Irving Woodward Raymond’s efforts in the 1930s), and Andrew T. Fear’s translation is tighter, coming also with a more up-to-date knowledge of research into later antiquity that the newly prestigious series Translated Texts is meant to purvey.

For every name mentioned in the text, readers are provided with short biographical notes or directions to a relevant prosopographic entry, and with most place names clarifications are provided (often with cross-references to mentions in other ancient authors). Whenever Orosius cites his sources or they can be traced, the relevant details are provided, and occasionally one finds incisive comments on his idiosyncratic interpretations. It is not as if Fear were the first to attempt this—and perhaps attention should have been given to Enrique Gallego-Blanco’s and also Rodrigo Furtado’s prior forays into this exercise, in Spanish (1983) and Portuguese (2000) respectively—yet the English result is more accomplished. The end product shows the benefits of the massive (largely Anglophone) industry in researching late-antique history over the last half-century.

The apparent chief aim of Fear’s enterprise here is to orient readers to Orosius as a source of historical facts. There are a few described events exclusive to Orosius, and at times he offers special additional (although also likely “doctored”) material to known accounts. He had access to texts no longer available to us, and as a Galician he made special use of fellow Spaniard and anti-imperialist Pompeius Trogus (flor. 40s AD), whose great Philippic History has come down to us only through an epitome by Justinus and in various fragments. So there are matters of facticity and slant that interest historians of late antiquity especially, and Fear is above all concerned to tackle these. There also is the question of Orosius’s chronological methods, since he covered such a vast tract of time, valiantly setting so many occurrences in their proper temporal order. Fear helpfully shows how a combined use of official Capitoline fasti, the Jerome-Eusebius Chronicon, and Pompeius’s nonextant and Iberian modus operandi is crucial for the Orosian achievement, and these relate also to the structuring of the Historia into seven books. Whether Orosius’s choice to cover history in seven books is affected by any of his predecessors or some other “sentiment” (the biblical Days of Creation or the classical “seven ages of Man”) cannot be decided. That the whole outcome, on Fear’s account, is “Secular Religious History” (p. 13), not just Christian historical apologetics, is an interesting and well-taken summary of the opus in view.

Because Orosius’s historiographical outlook (his retributive logic, providentialism, and supernaturalist explanations) is not Fear’s main focus, references to such authors as Hans-Werner Goetz, Kurt Artur Schöndorf, and Lloyd George Patterson are lacking. For the future years in which differing perspectives will be explored, however, this fine translation and its apparatus will stand us in good stead.