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pires of Iran and Rome and now joined the caliphal capitals of Damascus and
Baghdad.
Eusebius was not simply the first to write an extensive and politically con-
textualized history of the Church from Augustus to the twentieth year of
Constantine (325).^35 His greatest contribution was to see the coincidence in
time of Augustus and Christ not as an accident but as providential. This
opened up a powerful, totalizing vision of history in which Rome facilitated
Christianity’s rise and dissemination, not of course because it desired this
outcome—after all, some emperors were persecutors—but because it was in
the right place at the right time. Eusebius’s view of this as divine design we
may reject, but scarcely either the synchronicity or the relationship of empire
and Church, let alone the impact of Eusebius’s vision on contemporaries and
posterity.
Eusebius’s view that there was—at the very least—a connection between
Christ and Augustus had been anticipated in the Gospels’ careful allusions to
both Roman imperial history and the local Herodian dynasty.^36 And from
quite early on, Christian leaders had to persuade the authorities not to perse-
cute. Common ground, a shared history, had to be established, if Church and
empire were to coexist.^37 In an address to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
(161–80) we find Melito, bishop of Sardis (d. c. 190), pleading for an end to
persecution and asserting that, although a barbarian “philosophy” in its first
origins, Christianity flowered under Augustus and was of good omen given
the empire’s prosperity from that time. After Augustus, only Nero (54–68)
and Domitian (81–96) had shown Christians serious hostility, while Hadrian
(117–38), notably, had protected them.^38 In the following century Origen
(d. c. 254) observed how
Jesus was born during the reign of Augustus, the one who reduced to
uniformity, so to speak, the many kingdoms on earth so that he had a
single empire. It would have hindered Jesus’s teaching from being
spread through the whole world if there had been many kingdoms.^39Next we find the Emperor Constantine himself, in his Oration to the saints
(variously dated between 313 and 327), reading a prophecy of Christ’s com-
ing into Virgil’s reference in his fourth or “Messianic” Eclogue, probably
35 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [ed. E. Schwartz and T. Mommsen, Eusebius Werke 2.1–3 (Berlin
1903–9); tr. K. Lake and J. E. L. Oulton (Cambridge, Mass. 1926–32)].
36 Matthew 2; Luke 3:1.
37 In general, see Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana [3:31] 365–69.
38 Melito of Sardis in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 4.26.5–11.
39 Origen, Against Celsus [ed. and tr. (French) M. Borret (Paris 1967–76); English tr. H. Chadwick
(Cambridge 1965, corrected reprint)] 2.30.