Historia Augusta

Some old Roman dude to make this article look more authentic.

The Historia Augusta is a chronicle of Roman emperors, their families, their heirs, their usurpers, and other notable people from 117 to 284. It was supposedly written by six different authors sometime in the 4th century AD, but was later proven to be the fraudulent work of a single literary forger. At the time of its writing, the Roman Catholic Church was paying great amounts of gold for old Greek, Roman, and Christian texts. Because of this, the forging or downright fabrication of ancient literature was a lucrative business.

Additionally, others contend that the Historia Augusta originated in a circle of scholarly readers with an interest in biography, and that its allusions and parodies were meant as puzzles and jokes for a knowing and appreciative audience.

What makes the Historia Augusta most notable out of these forgeries is the fact that Edward Gibbon used this manuscript as a major source for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, making a majority of what we know about the late Roman Empire mostly false.

This is volume I:

Historia Augusta is a part of a series on Media

Historia Augusta

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