The Roman History

...so that Eutropius gathers Roman affairs from the founding of the city original: ab urbe condita; the traditional dating system for Rome, beginning in 753 BC until his own age. Eutropius performs this task with some elegance; his Breviary original: Breviarium; an abridged history or summary (as it is called) still survives today. When he reaches the history of his own time, he says that he is reserving it to be told in a grander style, with greater diligence in writing. Whether he actually fulfilled that promise, I do not know.

But all is well. At the same time and in the same court lived Ammianus Marcellinus, who fulfilled this task abundantly. He was a military man, certainly, but such a literate soldier and so devoted to ancient literature that there is nothing he does not investigate. For he says in Book 15 that he even read what had been carved on the monuments of the Gauls regarding their ancient origins. In short (to say it in one word), he is a most diligent writer.

To be sure, his Latin prose is rough—naturally so for a man from Constantinople Ammianus was a native Greek speaker from the East, which often resulted in a complex, non-native Latin style—but it is filled with learned matters. It includes a varied, complex, and profound range of reading; indeed, he explains at length history that no one else has set forth. Finally, I would dare to compare this Marcellinus with Tacitus, from whose end point he began his own history. I previously said that Tacitus shared only as much similarity with Livy as the Republic original: Respublica of the one had with that of the other; now I will say much more: that Marcellinus is not unlike Tacitus, yet he is more abundant. Now indeed, if his surviving commentaries on...