72 | CHAPTER 3
Perhaps at this date or later, the Syriac poet- theologian Ephrem of Nisibis (d.
373) elaborated similar conceits in his Hymns on the Nativity:
In the days of the king who enrolled people
For the poll tax, our Saviour descended
And enrolled people in the Book of Life.^45
Whatever his reservations about Rome, though, Eusebius was not so naïve
as to regard the happy conjunction of Augustus and Christ as the pure fruit
of providential fiat, in no need of historical explanation or at least contextu-
alization. As a student of the Old as well as the New Testament, and as bishop
of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine, a city with numerous
polytheist, Jewish and Samaritan inhabitants, Eusebius was well aware of
Rome’s diversity but also of its being the heir—and indeed (in the case of
Iran) still the neighbor—of prestigious earlier civilizations. Furthermore, he
understood that, if his account of Christ’s life as the universal redemptive
event was to convince, he had to locate Jesus of Nazareth not just in a remote
Roman province (as Tacitus had^46 ), but at the culmination, and in some
sense as the resolution, of previous history. In this way Eusebius became a
historian of civilizations, and necessarily a periodizer as well.^47 This is not his
concern in the Ecclesiastical history, which begins with the life of Christ and
goes on to trace the rise of the major sees, the course of the persecutions, the
progress of Christian letters, the formation of the scriptural canon, and the
lives of the most eminent Church leaders, through to the reign of Constan-
tine. The ancient civilizations are surveyed in another work, quite different
in form, namely the Chronicle. This became so fundamental to Greek Chris-
tian chronography that it was superseded and lost. The surviving Latin and
Armenian translations/versions show the breadth of its influence, from the
Sasanian frontier lands to far- away Ireland.^48
If in the Ecclesiastical history Eusebius intertwined the story of Rome and
the Church over three centuries in a continuous prose narrative, the Chroni-
cle had far more stories to tell over a much longer period. In parallel columns
across each opening of his book, Eusebius coordinated the year numbers
45 Ephrem of Nisibis, Hymns on the Nativity [ed. and tr. (German) E. Beck (Louvain 1959); Eng-
lish tr. K. E. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns (New york 1989) 61–217] 18.2.
46 Tacitus, Annals [ed. S. Borzsák and K. Wellesley (Leipzig 1986–92); tr. M. Grant (London
1996, revised reprint)] 15.44.
47 It is harder to separate Eusebius’s theological motivation from his historiographical performance
than P. Van Nuffelen would like: “Theolog y versus genre? The universalism of Christian historiography in
late Antiquity,” in P. Liddel and A. Fear (eds), Historiae mundi (London 2010) 162–75 (correctly point-
ing out, though, that Eusebius’s coverage gets less universal as he approaches his own day).
48 Eusebius, Chronicle [ed. R. Helm, Eusebius Werke 7 (Berlin 1984^3 ); cf. M. Wallraff (ed.), Iulius
Africanus Chronographiae (Berlin 2007) XXXII nn. 76–77]; A. A. Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Euse-
bius and Greek historiographical tradition (Lewisburg 1979); B. Croke, “The origins of the Christian
world chronicle,” in id., Christian chronicles and Byzantine history, 5th–6th centuries (London 1992) iii.