Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
There were other enemies within, whose ravages were constant, while the expedition of the Huns from without occurred only once. These enemies were the freebooters who dwelt in the Isaurian mountains, wild and untamed in their secure fastnesses. Ammianus Marcellinus describes picturesquely the habits of these sturdy robbers.
These were in turn followed and absorbed by the Huns, and the whole Roman Empire was finally faced by Mongol foes. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote racily of these events at the time of their occurrence.
Yet notwithstanding all this care and diligence he was utterly incapable of approaching in language and style so close to the great original he pretended to be as to be confounded with him; he was, indeed, not a bit more successful in approaching his prototype, than that emulous imitator of Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus.
Matthew and Luke were good enough for barbarian ears like theirs. We need not pause to note the impolicy of an edict which Julian's own admirer Ammianus wishes 'buried in eternal silence. Its effect on the Christians was very marked. Marius Victorinus, the favoured teacher of the Roman nobles, at once resigned his chair of rhetoric.
'We will rest content with offering to our readers the following portrayal, quoted from Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. xiv, chap. 6, and lib. xxviii, chap. 4. will not presume to attempt any translation after having read Gibbon's version of the combination of these two chapters. "The greatness of Rome was founded on the rare and almost incredible alliance of virtue and of fortune.
The judicious reader will not always approve of the asperity of censure, the choice of circumstances, or the style of expression; he will perhaps detect the latent prejudices, and personal resentments, which soured the temper of Ammianus himself; but he will surely observe, with philosophic curiosity, the interesting and original picture of the manners of Rome.
These sombre, tortuous, gamy verses, crammed with terms of ordinary speech, with words diverted from their primitive meaning, claimed and interested him even more than the soft and already green style of the historians, Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victorus, Symmachus the letter writer, and Macrobius the grammarian and compiler.
His line of argument is that the Greek and Latin texts are misunderstood, but that, if the Greeks did turn tables, that is no proof that tables do not turn, but rather the reverse. A favourite text is taken from Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. xxix. ch. i. M. de Gasparin does not appear to have read the passage carefully.
He said that he was unable to procure any transcripts, though he visited some of the principal libraries, and must have seen that the collection at the Grey Friars at least was 'well stocked with books. He was more successful on the Continent, where he brought the History of Ammianus out of a German prison into the free air of the republic of letters.
For they were a long time chosen by the People, as we may see by the sedition raised about the Election, between Damascus, and Ursinicus; which Ammianus Marcellinus saith was so great, that Juventius the Praefect, unable to keep the peace between them, was forced to goe out of the City; and that there were above an hundred men found dead upon that occasion in the Church it self.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking