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Quentin Skinner has argued that an understanding of the original intention of the author is crucial to understanding the text:

...to understand a text must be to understand both the intention to be understood, and the intention that this intention should be understood, which the text itself as an intended act of communication must at least have embodied. The essential question which we therefore confront, in studying any given text, is what its author, in writing at the time he did write for the audience he intended to address, could in practice have been intending to communicate by the utterance of this given utterance. It follows that the essential aim, in any attempt to understand the utterances themselves, must be to recover this complex intention on the part of the author.113

In a narrower sense the author‘s intention for how the work was to be understood can be discerned by the language used to refer to the text within the text. In his research on Gregory of Tours Martin Heinzelmann has similarly understood the title as a clue to the genre of a work. Writing in the sixth century, Gregory used Orosius‘s Historiae as a source, occasionally making reference to the text.114 Gregory recorded that he had written ‗...ten books of history, seven of miracles, one of the Life of the Fathers‘.115 Heinzelmann therefore concludes that:

[t]here is no longer any doubt that Decem libri historiarum or Historiae was the title wanted by the author, the correct title, and not Historia ecclesiastica, Historia Francorum or some other such description given to the work during the eighth and ninth centuries.116

112 _{Alfred (trans. by Barrington), (1773), Preface, p. iv.}

113 _{Skinner, (1969), pp. 48-9. This analysis is counter-balanced by Goffart: ‗It is risky to judge a book}

only by the description its author provides.‘ Goffart, (1988), p. 348.

114

Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum: 1 praefatio; 1.6; 2 praefatio; 5 praefatio.

115 _{Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, 10.31: Decem libros Historiarum, septem Miraculorum, unum}

de Vita Patrum scripsi.

116

Heinzelmann, (2001), p. 106. Compare with Croke, Emmett, (1983), p. 9: ‗Despite its [Gregory‘s Historia] popular title, it is not a history of the Franks but of Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries in the context of world history.‘

This allows Heinzelmann to reach the conclusion that ‗Gregory wrote history and defined and introduced his work in the context of the historiographical genre of historia or historiae...Regardless of whether these technical terms were in the singular or in the plural, they both denoted an historical work.‘117

In contrast to Gregory‘s explicit designation of the genre of his work, no such statement has reached us from Orosius, and it has been established that the title of Orosius‘s work does not indicate if he intended the Historiae to be conceived of as ‗History‘. Similarly Justin‘s ‗Epitome‘ of Pompeius Trogus is nowhere referred to in the text as an epitome; Orosius describes Justin as an epitomizer (breviator), and Justin states that he excerpted (excerpsi) material from Trogus.118 The claim that Orosius referred to his work as History is not uncommon, but the author seems careful not to designate the text in such terms, at least where the reader could most expect to find such an occurrence.119 This is where the ‗programmatic authorial statements‘ arise, the markers of the historian‘s voice, that are particularly evident in places like the Prologue.120 But the narrative voice describes the

Historiae in neutral categories, as opus, ‗a work‘ (Prologue 8), uoluminis, ‗a book, roll‘

(Prologue 10), and operam, ‗work‘ (Prologue 13).121 The text is deliberately referred to in ways that do not align the text to a genre and, in doing so, bound it by certain

conventions. In this way Orosius avoided the obligation to conform to the expectations of writing History.

This research explores Orosius‘s attitude to genre, what he thought he was doing in writing the Historiae, and what he thought the text was. Orosius‘s rhetorical claim, or absence of one, to be writing history, what impact this has on the text, and the location of the Historiae within the context of history writing will also be examined. The intention here is not to reconstruct Orosius‘s conception of History and consider his own conformity to and deviation from that model. Partly this comes from a

117 _{Heinzelmann, (2001), p. 107.}

118 _{Orosius‘s description of Justin as an epitomizer: 1.8.1, p. 25; 1.8.1, vol. 1, p. 49. Yardley, (1997), p.}

15.

119

For example, Laistner states that Orosius ‗professed to write history‘, and interprets this as a justification for ‗appraising the historical worth of the book.‘ Laistner, (1940), p. 251; p 252. Deen Schildgen understands that Orosius claimed to be writing history but does not accompany the statement with evidence: ‗Orosius claims to be writing history, and indeed, inventing western or Latin universal history he begins with a king of the Assyrians, Ninus, and follows a chronological order up to the Romans after the invasions of the early fifth century.‘ Deen Schildgen, (2012), p. 17.

120 _{Bravo, Węcowski, (2004), p. 145.} 121

opus: Prologue 8, vol. 1, p. 7; ‗work‘: Prologue 8, p.4. uoluminis: Prologue 10, vol. 1, p. 8; ‗book, roll‘: Prologue 10, p. 4. operam: Prologue 13, vol. 1, p. 9; Deferrari translates operam not as ‗work‘ but as ‗task‘.

dissatisfaction with such a model, that literary works can be fitted so easily into ancient or modern categories. But also Orosius‘s notion of what History and a work of History was, if he had fixed ideas about this at all, is not available to us through the Historiae; no comment or mention is made. Similarly this research does not attempt a broader definition of what History writing was in the ancient world, as Brian Croke and Alanna Emmett have attempted to do using Lucian of Samosata‘s How to Write History as a starting point.122 The genre of historical literature in antiquity was not governed by common conventions, as recognised by John Marincola:

It is not the case that these [the settled tendencies of the major surviving historical works] were universal procedures (we must not impose a specious uniformity on the historical works of the Romans), nor were other historical approaches necessarily deviant or invalid.123

For this reason this research will not try to reconstruct the fixed boundaries of the genre of history in the ancient world and apply them to the Historiae in order to determine the authenticity or not of the work as a piece of historical prose narrative. According to Lucian‘s model there is probably no text that fully deserves the title of ‗History‘.124

Not providing a definition of history writing does not make this analysis any less

meaningful. The Historiae is a text that particularly defies categorisation, and a new genre must be created for it in order that it is properly understood and received.