Jeu de l'allusion dans l'Histoire Auguste ou vide de l'interprétation ? À propos de David Rohrbacher, The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta

Following on the footsteps of A. Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome, Rohrbacher’s The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta equivocates by refusing to put the HA before 385 and feints inasmuch as, for all that Rohrbacher admits the existence of a great many Christian allusions alongside numerous borrowings from the works of Jerome, neither the polemical quality of the collection nor its religious stance seems to exist in his eyes, more Cameroniano. Like his model, he returns to Syme’s old model of the self-indulging, rogue grammaticus, yet with a twist of his own which is the raison d’être of the book – the Historia Augusta is not completely pagan, owing to the all-embracing fondness of the Anonymous for the games of literary allusion and citation.

Rohrbacker has clearly drawn the thread of his verbosity far finer than the staple of his argument. His modus operandi, or rather what passes off as such, is strictly doxographical: literary scholarship of the past two or three decades looms large, with a magisterial disregard for the Quellenforschung and all attending Spezialforschung. The political, religious and intellectual context of the Theodosian era was not even allowed to play a part. Since the author has not read nearly as much Greek, Latin and secondary literature as someone who would have us read the Historia Augustaas a mere jeu d’esprit needs to, and since he falls signally short of the standards of critical thought and intellectual powers without which such a thesis cannot be upheld, the book ends up being a clumsily formalistic attempt to rob the collection of everything that makes it attractive to scholars.

The present contribution attempts to provide the reader with a detailed overview of the contents, showcasing their abundant weaknesses and following the elusive thread of the author’s originality in a book that most resembles an apparatus fontium writ large. [Author]