AUGUSTA, a city of Georgia, in the United States of America, the capital of the county of Richmond. It is situated in a beautiful plain, on the Savannah River, 231 miles from its mouth, and has extensive railway communication. Like other American cities it is spacious and regular in its plan, Greene Street, for example, being 168 feet in width, with a row of trees extending along each side. The principal buildings are the city hall, a masonic hall, an oddfellows’ hall, the Richmond academy, the Georgia medical college, the opera-house, and an orphan asylum. Besides these, the city possesses an arsenal, water-works, a number of banks, newspaper offices, extensive cotton factories and flour mills, several foundries, two tobacco factories, <fcc. Water-power is abundantly supplied from the river by the Augusta canal, which was constructed in 1845. Augusta was an important place during the revolutionary war, and continued to flourish amazingly till the opening of the Georgia railway. A temporary decline then took place, owing to the change in the methods of traffic; but a new current of prosperity speedily set in, which still continues. Population in 1870, 15,386.

The importance of the Augustan history as a repertory of information is very considerable, but its literary pretensions are of the humblest order. The writers’ standard was confessedly low. “My purpose,” says Vopiscus, “has been to provide materials for more eloquent persons than myself.” Considering the perverted taste of the age, it is perhaps fortunate that the task fell into the hands of no showy declaimer, who measured his success by his skill in making surface do duty for substance, but of homely, matter-of-fact scribes, whose sole concern was to record what they knew. Their narrative is most unmethodical and inartificial; their style is tame and plebeian; their conception of biography is that of a collection of anecdotes; they have no notion of arrangement, no measure of proportion, and no criterion of discrimination between the important and the trivial; they are equally destitute of critical and of historical insight, unable to sift the authorities on which they rely, and unsuspicious of the stupendous social revolution comprised within the period which they undertake to describe. Their value, consequently, depends very much on that of the sources to which they happen to have recourse for any given period of history, and on the fidelity of their adherence to these when valuable. Marius Maximus and Junius Cordus, to whose qualifications they themselves bear no favourable testimony, were their chief authorities for the earlier lives of the series. For the later they have been obliged to resort more largely to public records, and have thus preserved matter of the highest importance, rescuing from oblivion many imperial rescripts and senatorian decrees, reports of official proceedings and speeches on public occasions, and a number of interesting and characteristic letters from various emperors. Their incidental allusions sometimes cast vivid though undesigned light on the circumstances of the age, and they have made large contributions to our knowledge of imperial jurisprudence in particular. Even their trivialities have their use; their endless anecdotes respecting the personal habits of the subjects of their biographies, if valueless to the historian, are most acceptable to the archaeologist, and not unimportant to the economist and moralist. Their errors and deficiencies may in part be ascribed to the contemporary neglect of history as a branch of instruction. Education was in the hands of rhetoricians and grammarians; historians were read for their style, not for their matter, and since the days of Tacitus, none had arisen worth a schoolmaster’s notice. We thus find Vopiscus acknowledging that when he began to write the life of Aurelian, he was entirely misinformed respecting the latter’s competitor Firmus, and implying that he would not have ventured on Aurelian himself if he had not had access to the MS. of the emperor’s own diary in the Ulpian library. The writers’ historical estimates are superficial and conventional, but report the verdict of public opinion with substantial accuracy. The only imputation on the integrity of any of them lies against Trebellius Pollio, who, addressing his work to a descendant of Claudius, the successor and probably the assassin of Gallienus, has dwelt upon the latter versatile sovereign’s carelessness and extravagance without acknowledgment of the elastic though fitful energy he so frequently displayed in defence of the empire. The caution of Vopiscus’s references to Diocletian cannot be made a reproach to him.

No biographical particulars are recorded respecting any of these writers. From their acquaintance with Latin and Greek literature they must have been men of letters by profession, and very probably secretaries or librarians to persons of distinction. They appear particularly versed in law. Spartianus’s reference to himself as “Diocletian’s own” seems to indicate that he was a domestic in the imperial household. They address their patrons with deference, acknowledging their own deficiencies, and seem painfully conscious of the profession of literature having fallen upon evil days.

The first edition of the A ugustan History was printed at Milan in 1475, by Bonus Accursius, along with Suetonius. Being based upon the best MSS. it is superior to any of its successors until Casaubon’s (1603). Casaubon manifested great critical ability in his notes, but for want of a good MS. left the restoration of the text to Salmasius (1620), whose notes are a most remarkable monument of erudition combined with acuteness in verbal criticism and general vigour of intellect. Little has since been done for the improvement of the text, which is still in a very unsatisfactory state. The most accurate edition is that by Jordan and Eyssenhardt (Berlin, 1863), grounded on a collation of the Bamberg MS. with the Palatine (now the Vatican) used by Salmasius. The most important separate dissertations on the Augustan historians are that on the sixth volume of Heine’s Opuscula Philologica ; Brocks’s essay on the first four of them (Königsberg, 1869); Dirksen’s elucidation of their references to Roman jurisprudence (Leipsic, 1842); Peter’s critical emendations (Posen, 1863); Brunner’s monograph on Vopiscus in the second volume of Biidinger’s Untersuchungen zur Römischen Kaiser geschichte, and J. Muller’s disqui ∙ition in the third (Leipsic, 1868-69). There is no English translation.