true credit for the columnar arrangement belongs to the Christian bishop Eusebius
of Caesarea, whose Chroniclewe may briefly consider here, as the culmination of the
tradition I have been sketching, before we turn to the test case of Aulus Gellius.
The first edition of Eusebius’s Chronicleappeared around 300 c.e., comprising a
Chronographia,setting out “all his sources and the raw information that he de-
rived from them,” and the Chronological Tables (Cronikoi; kanovne", Chronici
Canones), “the synthesis and tabulation of the raw material in the Chronogra-
phia.”^105 All of this has been lost, but we have surviving Jerome ’s Chronicle,com-
pleted in 381 c.e., in which he not only translated the second, major part, the
Chronici Canones,from Greek into Latin but also continued the work down to the
very recent past, ending with the battle of Adrianople in 378.^106 Jerome preserved
the columnar layout very faithfully, and his work enables us to appreciate the
extraordinary innovation in design represented by Eusebius’s parallel time lines.
These works are part of a long-standing Christian project of synchronizing the
new sacred history with the old profane history of the pagans and the old sacred
history of the Jews so as to create a new truly universal human history, the plan of
God for salvation, one that was regularly interpreted as part of various end-time
obsessions.^107 In this tradition the pagan time lines confront and finally succumb to
the much greater antiquity of the Hebrew and Eastern tradition, in a classic exam-
ple of what Zerubavel calls “out-past-ing.”^108 The greater antiquity of the East had
been an issue for the Greeks ever since Hecataeus of Miletus, sometime around 500
b.c.e., had bragged to an Egyptian priest that his lineage went back a whole sixteen
generations to Heracles, and the priest had beckoned him around the corner and
shown him the statues of 345 successive high priests, going back 11,340 years.^109
In Eusebius and Jerome you could see this out-past-ing graphically embodied,
with pages of Hebrew and Asiatic history before any significant events in Greece,
or any events at all in Italy. The reader could follow the teleological direction of
human history in a series of parallel columns lined up in chronological unison
across the page. These columns presented the major monarchies and civilizations
of the world, and as you went through the book you would see their number col-
lapsing and shrinking through the theme of the succession of empires. On an early
page (see figure 1), you would see in parallel the time line of the Medes, the
Hebrew kingdoms of Judah and Israel, the Athenians, the Romans (or, before the
foundation of Rome, the Latins of Alba Longa), the Macedonians, the Lydians, and
the Egyptians. To accommodate all these columns, a full double spread was neces-
sary, covering both pages of the codex. Each column counts offregnal years of
each individual monarchy; the far left-hand column gives the Olympiads, marking
Christian Synchronistic Chronographers. 29