The Emergence of Augustus' Monarchy in the Polemic between Pagans and Christians of the post-Alarician Rome as Mirrored in the New History of Zosimus
Abstract
In the paper, the modern controversy over the interpretation of the New History of Zosimus is reviewed, especially the question of the nature of his use of sources, not reflected yet in the Czech and Slovak scholarly literature. The author himself espouses the approach of François Paschoud and others, considering Zosimus' text based uniquely on two sources, the Histories of Eunapius and the ὕλη συγγραφής of Olympiodorus of Thebes, and through them mirroring some of the thoughts of the last pagans of the post-Alarician Rome.
Special attention is then paid to the so called 'antimonarchical excursus'. It is found out that if there are some parallels within the thought of antiquity, they meet only particular items contained in the excursus, yet both these parallels as well as the peculiarities of the excursus support the idea of its emergence in the milieu of the Roman senatorial aristocracy.