Old fake news

Last year I did a post about the remarkable Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, whose passion for history (coupled with an understanding of how fragile and easily lost books are) led him to compile a 53-volume set of transcripts of the writings from historians of antiquity.  His work preserved accounts for which we have no other copies, so without his tireless efforts, huge chunks of the history of early Europe would now be unknown and unknowable.

And that's even taking into account that of his original 53 volumes, only four of them survived.

So many works of ancient writers are lost forever, some to natural disasters like fire, flood, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, but others to deliberate destruction -- often motivated by religious fervor, or the desperation by rulers to discredit their rivals and predecessors.  This latter, which was all too common after there'd been conflict over succession, led to the systematic purging of works painting previous regimes in a positive light.

The loss of primary sources makes the job of modern historians hard enough.  But a further complication arises when you consider the question of what happens when one of the documents that did survive is unreliable.

This is exactly the situation with regards to a major source of our knowledge of the later Roman Empire, from the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (117 - 138 C.E.) to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Carinus (283-285 C.E.).  The document is called the Historia Augusta and seems to have been written during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (285-305 C.E.).  Diocletian himself was looked upon early in his reign as a usurper -- he wasn't of royal blood, but was a soldier who rose up through the ranks -- so it's no wonder that a writer during his reign would be motivated to dig up all the dirt he could on the preceding dynasties.

"Okay, they may have been royals, but a lot of 'em were loonies," seems to have been the approach.  "Diocletian, on the other hand, will Make Rome Great Again."

Cover of an eighteenth-century edition of the Historia Augusta, from Ettal Abbey, Germany [Image is in the Public Domain]

To be fair, there was a lot to be critical of, especially in the last half of the period the Historia covers.  The fifty-year time period between the assassination of the Emperor Severus Alexander (235 C.E.) and the accession of Diocletian is known to historians as the "Crisis of the Third Century" because it was marked by chaos, lawlessness, and one short-lived ruler after another.  

The problem with the Historia is that for a lot of the period, there's nothing to cross-check it against.  There are chunks of material that have no attestation anywhere else; it's literally the only source that's survived.  There's an ongoing debate amongst historians about its accuracy, and some believe that even many of the sources the Historia cites are themselves made up.  The historian Anthony R. Birley, of Universität Düsseldorf, did an analysis published in the journal Classica called "Rewriting Second- and Third-Century History in Late Antique Rome: the Historia Augusta" in which he estimates the total amount of reliable historical information in the document as only seventeen percent -- from a high of thirty-three percent in the section on the life of Marcus Opellius Macrinus all the way down to a flat zero for the accounts of the usurpers Firmus, Saturnius, Proculus, and Bonosus, all of whom immediately preceded Diocletian's rise to wearing the purple.

Probably not a coincidence, that.

Historical research always runs into the problem that accurate records are no more likely to survive than inaccurate ones.  Also, there's the whole "history is written by the victors" thing, which complicates our understanding of any period of history where there was regime change.  But considering the problem of the Historia Augusta has made me wonder how historians of the future will read the documents from the United States of 2025.  Not only are the members of the Trump regime lying their asses off about what's going on, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson's claim that the economy was tanking under President Biden, and that Trump's repeatedly playing Tariff Peekaboo with Canada, Mexico, and the E.U. is somehow going to get it back on track, they're actively destroying documents having accurate information about what's happening.

My fear is that the Crisis of the Twenty-First Century won't end up any better understood by historians than the Crisis of the Third Century is.

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