A Reader's Guide to the Historia Augusta

The question has occupied scholars for generations, and the answer — insofar as one exists — is rather more complicated than either the ancient sources or modern popular historians would have us believe. To understand the problem properly, we must first strip away two millennia of accumulated mythology and look at what the primary sources actually say, as opposed to what later commentators chose to read into them.

Roman political culture was built on precedent, on the careful accumulation of tradition that the Romans called the mos maiorum — the customs of the ancestors. To deviate from this tradition was not merely politically dangerous; it was a kind of sacrilege, an assault on the fabric of Roman identity itself. This is why even the most ambitious reformers of the late Republic took such pains to dress their innovations in the language of restoration. They were not, they insisted, doing anything new. They were merely returning Rome to its pristine, uncorrupted past.

The evidence from the archaeological record complicates this picture considerably. Excavations carried out in the latter half of the twentieth century have revealed a degree of continuity that the literary sources — themselves products of a particular class with particular interests — consistently underplayed. The Romans were not passive recipients of Greek culture; they were active and often critical consumers, taking what served their purposes and discarding or transforming what did not.