Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abstract:
The year 2018 saw the Dutch scholars’ philological and historical commentary onAmmianus Marcellinus eventually reach Book XXXI. These volumes will remain a seminalreference work in the times to come. The best way to honour the outstanding achievement ofthe Dutch commentators is to keep on bringing Ammianean exegesis to further depth. Here weare going to read anew four passages of Ammianus (22,8,31 and 41; 27,5,6; 31,2) in order tosharpen our understanding of his methods and his perspective as a historian and a literaryauthor. Those passages concern 1) the tribes anachronistically living around Lake Maeotis, 2)the Sindi called meaningfully ignobiles and advisedly put in the wrong place of northern BlackSea, 3) the strange appearance of the ethnonym Greuthungi (exonym of the Eastern Goths),instead of the right one Tervingi (exonym of the Lower Danube Goths), in the first Gothic warof Valens, 4) the ethnographic digression on Alans and Huns as well as its substantial veracity.