A NEW PERIODIZATION | 73(regnal or otherwise) of each people’s history, assigning primacy to the era of
Abraham (Abraham’s birth = year 1) and Olympiads. In a broad spatium
historicum in the middle of the page he made brief notes of salient events. In
this way he made clear at a glance the shape of world history and the relations
of its constituent parts. In his Hexapla the Christian scholar Origen, working
again in Caesarea but a couple of generations earlier, had already used a six-
column format in order to set out the relationship between the Hebrew
scriptures and their Greek versions. Both Origen and Eusebius deployed this
innovative layout, together with the flexible new book format known as the
codex,^49 in order to respond to a fresh intellectual need, the coordination of
Greek and non- Greek (“barbarian”) history and thought. At an increasingly
complex historical and cultural conjuncture—reflected in the Caesarea li-
brary’s extensive holdings of Greek books both pre- Christian and Christian,
along with the Hebrew scriptures—the codex and the columnar formatting
of the page proved ideal tools for Eusebius’s bold reorganization of historical
knowledge.^50
At his most expansive, Eusebius has columns for the Medes, Hebrews (di-
vided into Judah and Israel), Athenians, Latins, Spartans, Macedonians, Cor-
inthians/Lydians, and Eg yptians.^51 Gradually the number of columns de-
creases, the Oriental empires fade away, and history revolves round the heirs
of Alexander (notably the Ptolemies), the Romans, and the Jews. From the
beginning of Augustus’s rule, only the Romans and Jews remain, and after
Titus’s providential holocaust in the year 70 (sescenta milia uirorum inter-
fecit^52 ), the Jewish column disappears. Thereafter, Eusebius’s understanding
of history centers exclusively on Rome and the Church. (It is the same idea
conveyed in the quotation from In praise of Constantine, above.) The rise of
Sasanian Iran in the 220s remains offstage despite Caesarea’s position at the
western end of the Fertile Crescent, despite the Sasanians’ ability to chal-
lenge Rome militarily, and despite their numerous Christian subjects. The
Peace of the Church—or its “Liberty,” according to a recent attempt to re-
trieve Eusebius’s original Greek^53 —is recorded under the year 313. The
49 See below, p. 168.
50 A. Grafton and M. Williams, Christianity and the transformation of the book (Cambridge, Mass.
2006). For a newly discovered, perhaps Christian chronicle of ancient polities dated as early as the first
quarter of the second century, on a papyrus arranged in columns meant to be read consecutively, see D.
Colomo and others, “Die älteste Weltchronik,” and A. Weiss, “Die Leipziger Weltchronik—die älteste
christliche Weltchronik?,” Archiv für Papyrusforschung 56 (2010) 1–37. Historians and archaeologists still
struggle to produce a reliable relative and absolute chronolog y of the Near East based on synchronization
of regional chronologies: http://www.arcane.uni-tuebingen.de.
51 Eusebius, Chronicle [3:48] 83–86.
52 Eusebius, Chronicle [3:48] 187. For other inflated figures, see Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 3.5.5,
7.2.
53 R. W. Burgess, Studies in Eusebian and post- Eusebian chronography (Stuttgart 1999) 56, 62, 97,
102.