And,
Exemplum iam patris habes, ut protinus et te
adgreget Ausoniis purpura consulibus;[1205]
and again, to Proculus:
Mille annos centumque et bis fluxisse novenos
consulis Ausonii nomen ad usque leges.[1206]
It is a pity that the main part of the work is lost, but probably its author merely followed the tendency of the age to epitomize, as he did in the summary of Suetonius’s lives of the Caesars. The study of history, in fact, was merely ancillary: ‘ut aliquid nitoris et copiae orationi afferrent (sc. historiae studia) et aliquid materiae carmini.’[1207]
The models followed by the historians are chosen chiefly for their literary brilliance. Sallust is the most famous, and he plays a large part in Ausonius’s syllabus. Orosius was greatly influenced by Tacitus, and Arnobius by Lucretius.
The truth is that the ancients always regarded history more as an art than as a science. The books of Herodotus came to be called by the names of the Muses, Sallust and Tacitus strove predominantly after stylistic effectiveness, and even Thucydides gave oratorical technique a much more important place than would now be accorded to it. Rhetoric had cast her spell over the historians as over all the other intellectuals. Polybius alone resisted, and suffered, in consequence, at the hands of the critics. ‘The only ancient historian’, Norden writes of him,[1208] ‘who opposed with all his might the influence of rhetoric on the writing of history, and who, therefore, is most closely related to the modern point of view, belongs, according to the judgement of Dionysius of Halicarnassus ... to those dull authors whom nobody can bear to read through.’ So far had rhetoric asserted its sway over history, that Cicero, to whom we look for the sane and balanced conception of rhetorical education, could say that it was permissible for a rhetor to falsify history for the sake of style,[1209] and could describe the function of the historian as essentially rhetorical (unum ... oratorium maxime).[1210] A custom that gave special scope to this view of history was the insertion of imaginary speeches such as we find in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus. And not only speeches, but letters and documents were set down in a fictitious form. Against this practice Quintilian, like Polybius, had warned. The orator’s task, he maintained, was different from that of the historian. ‘Id quoque vitandum, in quo magna pars errat, ne in oratione poetas nobis et historicos, in illis operibus oratores aut declamatores imitandos putemus. Sua cuique proposita lex, suus cuique decor est.’[1211] But the warning was in vain. The historians were still trained in the rhetor’s school, and the rhetor frequently used historical subjects. When Ammianus wrote his history, he stood in the great tradition of Asiatic rhetoric. Thus history continued to wear the fetters of oratory.