successor, he regained his position. He accompanied this emperor, for whom he expresses enthusiastic admiration, in his campaigns against the Alamanni and the Persians; after his death he took part in the retreat of Jovian as far as Antioch, where he was residing when the conspiracy of Theodorus (371) was discovered and cruelly put down. Eventually he settled in Rome, where, at an advanced age, he wrote (in Latin) a history of the Roman empire from the accession of Nerva to the death of Valens (96-378), thus forming a continuation of the work of Tacitus. This history (Rerum Gestarum Libri XXXI.) was originally in thirty-one books; of these the first thirteen are lost, the eighteen which remain cover the period from 353 to 378. As a whole it is extremely valuable, being a clear, comprehensive and impartial account of events by a contemporary of soldierly honesty, independent judgment and wide reading. “Ammianus is an accurate and faithful guide, who composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary” (Gibbon). Although Ammianus was no doubt a heathen, his attitude towards Christianity is that of a man of the world, free from prejudices in favour of any form of belief. If anything he himself inclined to neo-Platonism. His style is generally harsh, often pompous and extremely obscure, occasionally even journalistic in tone, but the author’s foreign origin and his military life and training partially explain this. Further, the work being intended for public recitation, some rhetorical embellishment was necessary, even at the cost of simplicity. It is a striking fact that Ammianus, though a professional soldier, gives excellent pictures of social and economic problems, and in his attitude to the non-Roman peoples of the empire he is far more broad-minded than writers like Livy and Tacitus; his digressions on the various countries he had visited are peculiarly interesting. In his description of the empire—the exhaustion produced by excessive taxation, the financial ruin of the middle classes, the progressive decline in the morale of the army—we find the explanation of its fall before the Goths twenty years after his death.
The work was discovered by Poggio, who copied the original MS. Editio princeps (bks. 14-26) by Sabinus, 1474; completed by Accursius, 1533; with variorum notes, by Wagner-Erfurdt, 1808; latest edition of text, Gardthausen, 1874–1875. English translations by P. Holland, 1609; Yonge (Bohn’s Classical Library), 1862; also Max Büdinger, Ammianus Marcellinus und die Eigenart seines Geschichtswerkes (1895); F. Liesenberg, Die Sprache des Ammianus Marcellinus (1888–1890); T. R. Glover, Life and Letters in the Fourth Century (1901); Abbé Gimazane, Ammianus Marcellinus, sa vie et son œuvre (Toulouse, 1889), a work containing a number of very doubtful theories. For a criticism of his views on Roman society see S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (London, 1898).
AMMIRATO, SCIPIONE (1531–1601), Italian historian, born at Lecce, in the kingdom of Naples. His father, intending him for the profession of law, sent him to study at Naples, but his own decided preference for literature prevented him from fulfilling his father’s wishes. Entering the church, he resided for a time at Venice, and afterwards engaged in the service of Pope Pius IV. In 1569 he went to Florence, where he was fortunate in securing the patronage and support of Duke Cosimo I., who gave him a residence at the Medici Palace and the Villa Zopaja on the understanding that he should write his Istorie Fiorentine (1600), the work by which he is best known. In 1595 he was made a canon of the cathedral of Florence. He died in 1601. Among the other works of Ammirato, some of which were first published after his death, may be mentioned discourses on Tacitus and genealogies of the families of Naples and Florence.
AMMON, the Graecized name of an Egyptian deity, in the native language Amūn, connected by the priests with a root meaning “conceal.” He was, to begin with, the local deity of Thebes, when it was an unimportant town on the east bank of the river, about the region now occupied by the temple of Karnak. The XIth dynasty sprang from a family in the Hermonthite nome or perhaps at Thebes itself, and adorned the temple of Karnak with statues. Amenemhē, the name of the founder of the XIIth dynasty, was compounded with that of Amūn and was borne by three of his successors. Several Theban kings of the later part of the Middle Kingdom adopted the same name; and when the Theban family of the XVIIth dynasty drove out the Hyksos, Ammon, as the god of the royal city, was again prominent. It was not, however, until the rulers of the XVIIIth dynasty carried their victorious arms beyond the Egyptian frontiers in every direction that Ammon began to assume the proportions of a universal god for the Egyptians, eclipsing all their other deities and asserting his power over the gods of all foreign lands. To Ammon the Pharaohs attributed all their successful enterprises, and on his temples they lavished their wealth and captured spoil.
Ammon is figured of human form, wearing on his head a plain deep circlet from which rise two straight parallel plumes, perhaps representing the tail feathers of a hawk. Two main types are seen: in the one he is seated on a throne, in the other he is standing, ithyphallic, holding a scourge, precisely like Min, the god of Coptos and Chemmis (Akhmim). The latter may be his original form, as a god of fertility, before whom the king ceremoniously breaks up the ground for sowing or cuts the ripe corn. His consort was sometimes called Amaune (feminine of Amūn), but more usually Mūt, “mother”: she was human-headed, wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, and their son was Khons (Chon or Chons), a lunar god, represented as a youth wearing the crescent and disk of the moon. A great temple was built to Mūt at Karnak not later than the XVIIIth dynasty, and another to Khons not later than the XXth dynasty.
The name of Rē, the sun-god, was generally joined to Ammon, especially in his title as “king of the gods”: the rule of heaven belonged to the sun-god in the Egyptian cosmos, and this identification with Rē was only logical for a supreme deity. Ammon was entitled “lord of the thrones of the two lands,” or, more proudly still, “king of the gods.” Such indeed was his unquestioned position when suddenly he was overthrown and his worship proscribed. Not even a henotheist fervently worshipping one of many gods, Amenophis (Amenhotp) IV. of the XVIIIth dynasty became the monotheist Akhenaton; discarding all the gods of Egypt, and especially persecuting Ammon the arch-god, he devoted himself to the purer and more sublime worship of Aton, the sun. But he failed to win the permanent adhesion of the people to his reform, or to conciliate or entirely crush the enormously powerful priesthood of Ammon. A few years after the reformer’s death, the old cults were re-established and the monuments of Aton studiously defaced. Hymns were then addressed to Amen-rē, which are almost monotheistic in expression. The cult of the supreme god spread throughout Egypt and was carried by the Egyptian conquerors into other lands, Syria, Ethiopia and Libya, and was accepted by the natives both in Ethiopia and in the Libyan cases, where civilization was low and Egyptian influence permanent. After the XXth dynasty the centre of power was removed from Thebes, and the authority of Ammon began to wane. In the XXIst dynasty the secondary line of priest kings of Thebes upheld his dignity to the best of their power, and the XXIInd dynasty favoured Thebes: but as the sovereignty weakened the division between Upper and Lower Egypt asserted itself, and thereafter Thebes would have rapidly decayed had it not been for the piety of the kings of Ethiopia towards Ammon, whose worship had long prevailed in their country. Thebes was at first their Egyptian capital, and they honoured Ammon greatly, although their wealth and culture were not sufficient to effect much. Ammon (Zeus) continued to be the great god of Thebes in its decay, and notwithstanding that a nome-capital in the north of the Delta and many lesser temples, from El Hibeh in Middle Egypt to Canopus on the sea, acknowledged Ammon as their supreme divinity, he probably in some degree represented the national aspirations of Upper Egypt as opposed to Middle and Lower Egypt: he also remained the national god of Ethiopia, where his name was pronounced Amane. The priests of Amane at Meroe and Napata, in fact, regulated through his oracle the whole government of the country, choosing the king, directing his military expeditions (and even compelling him to commit suicide, according to Diodorus) until in the 3rd century B.C. Arkamane (Ergamenes) broke through the bondage
