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Appian of
Alexandria (c.95-c.165): one of the most underestimated of all Greek
historians, author of a Roman History. The part on the Civil Wars
survives.
Life
Appian of Alexandria wrote an autobiography, but it is almost completely
lost, and consequently we hardly know anything about the historian from
Alexandria. We have to distill information about his life from his own
writings and a letter by Cornelius Fronto, a famous littérateur
living in Rome in the mid-second century, and the tutor of the future emperor
Marcus
Aurelius.
In spite of this lack of information, it is certain that Appian was
born in c.95 in Alexandria,
the capital of Roman Egypt, and belonged to the wealthy upper class. After
all, his parents were Roman citizens and could pay for their son's formal
education. He became a barrister and boasted in the introduction to his
Roman
History "that he pleaded cases in Rome before the emperors".
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Life
The Roman history
Literature
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Antoninus Pius
(Agora Museum, Athens)
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This must have happened after c.120, because Appian states in one of
his surviving fragments that he managed to escape from a band of Jewish
looters who pursued him in the marshes of the Nile (more).
This strange piece of information can only be dated to 116-117, when the
Jews of the Cyrenaica
and Egypt revolted, believing that one Lukuas
was the Messiah
(more...).
As Appian was still in Egypt by the end of the reign of Trajan,
he must have moved to Rome at a later date, and the emperors whom he claims
to have addressed must therefore have been either Hadrian
and Antoninus
Pius or Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.
The Roman History was finished before 165, because Appian mentions
the river Euphrates
as the eastern frontier of the Roman empire, which was no longer true after
the campaigns of Lucius
Verus. Perhaps we can be a bit more precise. Appian mentions
that during the reign of Hadrian, parts of Italy were ruled by a proconsul
(13.38). He adds that this policy was reversed by Antoninus Pius, but is
unaware of its reintroduction by Marcus Aurelius in 162. This suggests
that the Roman History was completed during the reign of Antoninus
Pius. This does not exclude the possibility that Appian pleaded cases before
Marcus Aurelius, who was co-emperor with Antoninus Pius after 147.
Fronto's letter, a request on behalf of Appian to give him the rank
of procurator,
can be dated during the coregency, i.e., between 147 and 161. It is interesting
that he applied for this office, because it means that he belonged to the
equestrian
class, the "second class" of Roman citizens (after the senatorial
order). We know that Appian actually won his office, but it is not certain
whether it was merely a honorific or a real job.
This is all we know about Appian of Alexandria: born as a member of
a wealthy family in c.95, working as a barrister in Rome after 120, becoming
procurator after 147, he published a Roman History that appeared
before 162.
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The most remarkable aspect of this work, as Appian announces in his
Preface,
is its division. For example, Book 4 describes the wars against the Gauls
from the very beginning, the sack of Rome in 387/386 BCE, to Caesar's
conquest
of Gaul, more than three centuries later. Although this organization
is sometimes confusing (e.g., when Appian ignores Caesar's creation of
a power base in Gaul in his account of the civil war against Pompey), the
advantage of his system clearly outweighs these minor irritations. Appian
offers much more topographical clarity and gives us a better look on the
the strategic choices made by commanders. His account of the Mithridatic
wars is a case in point.
Moreover, Appian is not faced with the problem that historians who strictly
adhered to the chronological sequence of events had to cope with: if an
enemy of Rome has a specific custom, they had to explain it twice or leave
it unexplained.
Finally, it should be noted that this way of arranging the subject matter
prevents the story from becoming too much centered on Rome. This might
have been fine with earlier historians (e.g., to Livy),
but in the second century, the provinces
of the Roman empire were almost equals of Italy, and a Rome-centered narrative
was no longer acceptable.
Although Appian uses a geographical division of his subject matter,
the people whose subjection he describes are mentioned in chronological
order. He places the various people who fought against Rome in the order
in which they first made contact. Only Books 13-17 do not fit in this scheme:
Romans fighting against Romans. These books are the first ones of the second
half of the project, and this is no coincidence. In the first twelve books,
Rome has conquered the world; now it, has to fight its most formidable
opponent - itself.
The next four books continued this story: the war against the Egyptian
queen
Cleopatra
VII Philopator was, of course, a civil war between the two leaders
of the faction of Julius Caesar, Octavian
and Marc Antony. In calling these books "the Egyptian war", Appian followed
the official propaganda of Octavian. He treated the subject matter at great
length -one sixth of the total Roman History-, not because he thought
that the conquest of his own native country was important, but, on the
contrary, because he understood that it was more than just another foreign
war.
Like his younger colleague Cassius
Dio, Appian rarely mentions his sources, and probably for the same
reason: he does not follow one single source, but has checked more than
one older text. His contemporary Arrian
of Nicomedia did the same in his book on Alexander
the Great: where his two main sources agreed, he accepted their story
as the truth, mentioning divergences only when they seemed important. Ancient
historians did not often check the sources of their sources (which meant
a visit to an inaccessible archive, if there was an archive at all), but
there is one instance where we can see Appian paraphrasing an original
document (Marc Antony's funeral speech of Julius Caesar; text)
and there are no doubt other instances, which we do not recognize.
Appian is a far better historian than most twentieth-century classicists
have been willing to accept. He identified good sources and used them with
due criticism (e.g., using the Commentaries on the Illyrian wars
by the emperor Augustus,
and complaining about their incompleteness). It must be stressed that he
is the only ancient author who recognized the social causes of the
Roman civil wars, for which Appian remains one of the most important sources.
He is also a fine writer, who can vividly describe events, and knows how
to evoke the smaller and larger tragedies that are history. He includes
nice digressions, has an eye for the better anecdote, and does not ignore
the interesting detail. Never has the stylistic device of repetition been
used more effectively than by Appian in his shocking account of the persecution
of the enemies of the Second
Triumvirate, which belongs to the finest that was ever written in Greek.
In other words, Appian falls short of no meaningful standard, except that
of the hyperprofessionalized study of history of our own age.
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