Most of the surviving part of Ammianus' history describes Rome's armies defending the Empire's borders in great battles from Gaul to Persia. The passages describing the city of Rome portray it mostly as decadent and declining. The last surviving book, book 31, describes the Huns (before the birth of Attila) besieging Constantinople -- unsuccessfully. But with hindsight, the tone of the entire history is quite ominous. I cannot honestly say how much this is due to my knowing, as Ammianus did not know, that the city of Roman, and the western half of the Empire, was within a century of collapsing.
Ammianus saw himself as continuing the work of Tacitus, who wrote a history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, AD 14, to the death of the Emperor Domition in 96. Tacitus had seen himself as continuing the work of Livy, who wrote a history from the legendary beginnings of Rome until the time of Augustus. However, great portions of the work of all three authors have disappeared, so that we can no longer read this history of Rome in one continual sweep, from the end of the Trojan war until near the end of the Western Empire, as it was intended to be read. That could be done for probably only a couple of centuries, as it seems that it was in the late sixth century AD that large parts of these histories, along with much of the rest of Classical Latin literature, began to disappear, whether from the destruction of wars, or from indifference on the part of readers, or the decisions of scribes to copy this text and therefore not that one, or from the disdain of Christians for "pagan" accounts of history, or what have you.
Today, the text of Ammianus derives from the fragments of a 9th-century manuscript, M, another 9th-century manuscript, V, which has been shown to have been copied from M, and 14 manuscripts of the 15th century, all of which have been shown to be copies of V.
Few if any readers would place Ammianus in the same class as Livy and Tacitus as a writer. Livy and Tacitus are justly celebrated as great prose stylists. Latin was not Ammianus' first language, and it is therefore not surprising that his work is rarely praised on purely stylistic grounds. As a recorder of historical events, however, some have held him in very high esteem. For example, Edward Gibbon, who in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when he reaches the point in his own narrative where Amminaus' history ends, says of him:
"It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary."
Not everyone would agree with Gibbon that Ammianus is unusually unprejudiced, and, let's not dance around the issue, atheists tend to praise him more highly than Christians. Ammianus was not a Christian; seems to have put little stock into religion of any kind; served in the army under the Emperor Julian, who was the only non-Christian Emperor after Constantine the Great and has often been seen as a great monster by Christians and a great hero by atheists; has mostly high praise for Julian, but criticizes what he sees as the fanaticism in Julian's promotion of "pagan" (that is: traditional Roman polytheistic) religion. In short: however prejudiced Ammianus may have been, let's not pretend that the evaluation of Ammianus has been without religious prejudice. I won't pretend that I haven't been drawn to Ammianus to a great degree because of his non-Christian standpoint.
11 of the remaining 18 books of Ammianus' history are devoted to the exploits of the non-Christian Emperor Julian. Julian is often referred to, often sarcastically, as Ammaianus' hero. I think it's fair to say that Ammianus sees Julian as a hero, although I don't think that the sarcasm is necessary -- or effective, either, if you're trying to look like a serious critic of Ammianus and his view of history. As far as whether Gibbon was correct when he characterized Ammianus as unusually unprejudiced -- I think that would be much easier to judge if we could read the missing 13 books of his history, which cover the period between Ad 96 and 353. If Julian were praised in those 13 books, during the discussion of events centuries before his own birth, then I would find the accusations of prejudice more credible.
in the mail yesterday and began reading it right away. I began writing notes about it, and it occurred to me that I might want to write a review of the book here in The Wrong Monkey after I was done reading. But then I decided not to wait that long, because I don't know how long it will take me to read the entire book, and because I already have quite a few notes. Maybe I won't have much to say about the rest of the book. (Or maybe I'll write many blog posts about it, who knows.)