ZOSIMUS.
The New History of Count Zosimus, sometime Advocate of the Treasury pf the Roman Empire. With the Notes of the Oxford Edition. In six Books. To which is prefixed Leunclavius’s Apology for the Author. Newly Englished.
London, Joseph Hindmarsh, 1684.
Small 8vo, pp. [xxxvi], 416; a fine, fresh copy, fore-edges occasional untrimmed in contemporary speckled calf, marbled edges; the Macclesfield copy, with blindstamps, shelfmarks, and North Library bookplate.
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The New History of Count Zosimus, sometime Advocate of the Treasury pf the Roman Empire. With the Notes of the Oxford Edition. In six Books. To which is prefixed Leunclavius’s Apology for the Author. Newly Englished.
First edition of this anonymous translation of the Historia nova, translated from the Oxford text of 1679 (an edition that Gibbon owned). Zosimus’s history of the Roman Empire covers the period from Augustus to 410 AD (the sack of Rome by the Visigoths). For the fourth century and the collapse of the Empire, he is a chief authority. He is also the principal historical source for the British revolt of 409 AD and the ‘Rescript of Honorius’, the document in which, as Western Roman Emperor, Honorius directed Britain’s civitates [local authorities] to take up arms and ‘look to themselves’ – effectively admitting that the Roman order had broken down (pp. 405-12).
Of Zosimus himself little is known, but, ‘being a Heathen’, he blamed the decline of the empire on the rejection of the pagan gods, and for this he was ‘assaulted with abundance of ill language, bespattered, cursed and given to the Devil for a most wicked Fellow’ by later Christian authorities; against these attacks, the historian Joannes Leunclavius (Löwenklau) defends him here, in thirty-two pages of prefatory material, ‘there being no doubt but that the Christian Princes were guilty of many Enormities’. The New History remained the only English version of this important text until the nineteenth century.
Wing Z 16.
