Ammianus is derived from allusions in his own writings. Sprung of noble lineage, he passed early into the ranks of the Protectores Domestici,' a corps d'élite which may be compared to our Guards Brigade, and was soon attached to the person of Ursicinus, a distinguished and experienced soldier who inspired the confidence and admiration of his youthful aide-de-camp. A better opening for an ambitious and enterprising young man, fond of travel, adventure and companionship, could not have been contrived; and, before Ammianus had reached the age of thirty, he had voyaged on military and official errands from Mesopotamia to Gaul and from Gaul to Mesopotamia, and had tasted the excitements of a siege, a reconnaissance and a campaign. It is one of our misfortunes that, with a few rare exceptions, he refrains from recounting his personal experiences, and that his impressions of travel, which must have been various and diverting, are sacrificed to the austere tradition of classical history. Nevertheless here and there we descry traces of his activity. He was at Cologne with Ursicinus in 355, and witnessed the downfall of the rebel Silvanus and the beginnings of Julian's work in Gaul. Two years later he returned to the East, when Roman rule was once more exposed to grave peril from the energy and ambitions of Shapur the Great, the most formidable of the Sassanian kings of Persia. As he recounts this period of his career, Ammianus drops for a moment the impersonal tone which generally marks his history. He describes with some vividness of feeling his own part in the Persian campaign-how he was sent on a mission to the Emir of Corduene, how he took part in the famous defence of Amida (the modern Diarbekr), and joined in that expedition to the Tigris which resulted in Julian's death and the repulse of the Roman legions at Ctesiphon. After that catastrophe he returned to Antioch and for many years vanishes from history. When he emerges, it is as the spectator of the high-treason trials at Antioch in 371, as the tourist visiting the plain of Adrianople that he may inspect the site still strewn with the whitened bones of Goth and Roman, or finally as the man of letters, recently established in Rome and receiving the compliments of his friend, Libanius, upon a successful course of historical lectures. The sun-browned veteran

was, in fact, reading instalments of his magnum opus to the intellectuals of the capital and tasting the sweets of literary fame. We may guess that his last reading was not later than 392.

It has been conjectured, on the ground of his interest in legal affairs, that, after the death of Julian, Ammianus abandoned a military for a civil career, and that the later part of his life was divided between judicial and literary pursuits. Such a development is not impossible, for the 'Protectores Domestici' constituted a school of training for civil as well as for military duties. Nor is it easy to suppose that a man of so active a temperament would have retired altogether from public life at so early a point in his course. But there is no direct evidence, and we must be content with surmises. We only know that, resembling the Father of History in curiosity and love of movement, Ammianus travelled widely, visiting Egypt and Greece as well as Thrace, and carrying, as we may conjecture, in his head, the exciting design of the great book, the Tacitus brought up to date, which was to be recited before an exacting and distinguished audience in the marble capital of the Empire.

The circumstance that the history was intended for recitation was unfavourable to its quality as a work of art. It is a common experience that lectures, effective enough on first delivery, fail through some lack of subtlety and finish to preserve their power when issued to the world in cold print; and the historical lectures of the Syrian veteran were probably injured for posterity by too close an attention to the recondite tastes of an affected public. Ammianus had a rough but powerful mind, and, what is even more important in an historian, and priceless by reason of its rarity in that age, an essential sincerity and justness of judgment. Unfortunately he thought it necessary to conform himself to a literary fashion which we suspect to have been foreign to his real nature. His narrative is stuffed with turgid declamation and interrupted by long stretches of encyclopædic learning which a modern author would omit or at least consign to footnotes or appendices. He breaks off to describe a prodigy, an omen, a cause célèbre, in order that out of the studied variety of his matter he may provide a stimulus, appropriate to the varying

appetites of his audience. Probably, if he had taken literature less seriously, he would have written better, for he is capable, when off his guard, of a simple and soldierly narrative. But, though modest as to his own attainments, he cherished a secret flame of literary ambition. He read furiously. He soaked himself in Livy and Cicero and Virgil, in geographical and scientific handbooks, as well as in the proper and authentic sources for an historical narrative; and he succeeded in manufacturing a declamatory style of which we can say nothing more charitable than that accurate statements and moderate judgments have seldom been presented in a vesture so artificial and inappropriate.

If we had to single out the special excellence which marks Ammianus as a writer of history, we should find it in his distinct gift for life-like portraiture. He has provided us with a series of personal sketches than which of their kind there is nothing better in ancient literature; for the lives of Plutarch, incomparably more beautiful and attractive, do not come up for comparison, belonging as they do to the category of idealistic literature, whereas the work of Ammianus is founded upon a close and dispassionate study of mixed character. Historians are largely creatures of tradition; and the portraits of Ammianus may have owed something to a gossipy book, then greatly in vogue but now only surviving in a few scanty fragments, the satirical Lives of the Emperors by Marius Maximus. In any case, it is reasonable to infer from the success which Ammianus achieves in a most difficult branch of the historian's art that the study of human character was one of the few departments of intellectual enquiry in which considerable progress had been made in the later years of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately the faculty of discerning portraiture was lost as soon as it had reached a point of distinguished excellence in the careful workmanship of Ammianus. The great calamities of the succeeding generation afforded no leisure for that habit of minute and engaging causticity which flourishes in sheltered and critical communities and is nourished by the drama, the satire and the novel. For eight centuries no greater actor in the stage

* Historicorum Romanorum Fragmenta,' ed. H. Peter, pp. 331-9.

of European history is so well depicted for posterity as are the Constantius, the Julian and the Valentinian of Ammianus. Nor was the full spirit of penetrating psychology recaptured for Europe until the Renaissance of the 16th century.

History having to do with the business of the State, it is certainly no disqualification in a writer of history that he should have some real working knowledge of one of the great public callings. Ammianus approached history from the angle of a soldier, and his work is a repository of military information. He is, indeed, our principal authority upon the art of war in the fourth century, and has left us some careful descriptions, more appropriate to a dictionary than to an historical narrative, of the poliorcetic engines of his time. Nevertheless we cannot regard him as a good military historian, and that for a reason which may seem curious, in view of the large space which he allots to geographical surveys. He never seems to understand, or rather he never enables his reader to understand, the strategy of a campaign. He seems to put his geography in one department and his military history in another, and never to bring them into fruitful connexion. A siege he will often describe with intelligent particularity, but his battle-pieces are confused, his campaigns sketchy and imperfectly grounded; and it is curious to note that, though he records failure after failure, his work is not greatly distinguished for strategical commentary or criticism. Poliorcetics, however, he thoroughly understands; and the serious interest in practical things, which makes him a master of this branch of military science and betrays itself in a great range and variety of technical disquisitions in other spheres of knowledge, is only part of that masculine sanity of character which constitutes his principal force and attraction.

It is not to be claimed for Ammianus that he never talks nonsense. He talks a deal of nonsense. He believes in omens and prodigies, and delights in describing them to an audience which did not think the worse of a popular lecture for an admixture of the sensational and the ghostly. But the general balance of his judgment was undisturbed by such concessions to vulgar superstition. His mind was essentially strong and secular,

averse from all religious extravagance and as far removed from the exalted temper of the sects as the first Lord Shaftesbury from the Cameronians. In one passage he condemns his master, Julian, for the intemperance of his paganism, in another he applauds Valentinian for his policy of religious toleration-verdicts not to be explained on Epicurean grounds, but as the considered expression of that moderate and reasonable spirit which formed part of the Greek ideal of virtue. It is therefore possible from a study of Ammianus to derive a notion of the best secular moral standard which prevailed among cultivated pagans of the Roman Empire in the later part of the fourth century.

That standard was by no means low. The conscience of the soldier-historian was revolted by idleness and profligacy, cruelty and intemperance, trickery and injustice. In the main, our virtues and vices were his virtues and vices also. He had sources of moral sustenance which are not ours, but which may not have been inferior in potency to any that modern civilisation brings to bear on a character analogous to his. He was inspired by the great classical authors of Greece and Rome, and especially by Cicero, whose writings formed the Bible of humane wisdom as long as the humanities retained their value in the Western world. He had the strong Roman respect for the reign of law, coupled with a hearty detestation of that capricious Asiatic cruelty which, in his own time, had begun to debase the administration of Justice. Life in the army had given him a code of honour which is certainly not inferior to that which now regulates the conduct of some modern armies professedly Christian. Finally, he was moved by a deep sentiment of devotion to the Empire as a providential system for the governance of the world.

War is the supreme touchstone of ethical principle. Ammianus recounts, without adverse comment, the pitiless massacre of women and children in the barbarous fighting of the frontier wars. When a Roman general, after making a truce with a marauding band of Saxons, contrives for them an ambush so, that they perish to a man, he observes that a just judge would condemn the act as perfidious and disgraceful, but that reflexion