Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The production of complex literary narrative requires economic and physical security. In Late Antiquity, the economic and physical security that most of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had enjoyed since the time of Augustus came to an end. It was for that reason that the period witnessed the rise and triumph of the chronicle as the primary vehicle for the transmission of historical knowledge. A chronicle was, in essence, a list of successive years, and included one or more brief notices concerning events that had occurred during each year. It differed little, either in content or in form, from the annales maximi that the pontifex maximus had kept at Rome during the republican period. Roman historiography ended, therefore, much as it began, and we are forced to rely upon various sparse chronicles for our knowledge of much of the period c . ad 300–750, particularly for events in the west. Fortunately, the different political fortunes of the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire insured that the production of complex historical narrative did not cease at the same time throughout the empire as a whole. The production of complex historical narrative in the west seems to have ceased with the work of Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whose history covered the period from c . ad 395 to 425. There was a long hiatus then, before the production of the next complex historical ... log in or subscribe to read full text