Firmus and the Crocodiles Revisited: Paradoxography and the Historia Augusta's Life of the Four Tyrants

Abstract

This article reassesses the Historia Augusta’s Vita Quadrigae Tyrannorum as a source for paradoxographical allusions in the collection. Prior studies have noted occasional intertexts to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia in the Vita, but the thematic and structural significance of the author’s engagement with Plinian and paradoxographical miscellany has been largely overlooked. As this article illustrates, identifying the Vita’s Plinian and paradoxographical intertexts is key to understanding the author’s characterisation of his last pseudonymous narrator, ‘Flavius Vopiscus’, and allows for a reexamination of the author’s unusual interest in usurpation at a critical juncture at the closure of the series.