74 | CHAPTER 3
Chronicle ends on a high point, with Constantine’s twentieth anniversary
celebrations in 325.
In one sense, Eusebius was both late and antique to his fingertips. Late,
because while he looked forward to the spread of Christianity “to the very
limits of the inhabited world” under Constantine’s dynasty extending “to un-
aging time,”^54 and rejected his predecessor Sextus Julius Africanus’s (d. c.
250) overprecise eschatolog y, still he believed history was gradually heading
toward its end, the Second Coming.^55 Antique, because although he saw in
Antiquity an abundance of empires, while his own age was dominated only
by Rome, still Rome had grown organically out of the earlier narrative. We
should not, though, underplay the uniqueness of Christianity and Rome—
especially their combination—in Eusebius’s vision of things. And the God-
willed coming together of Christian monotheism and Roman monarchy he
no doubt expected to endure as long into the future as was necessary.
In the century after Eusebius, it is true, the compromises and ambiguities
of Christianization, especially the spread of Arianism, caused some to take a
less rosy view. So too did a lingering awareness that imperial Rome had de-
stroyed the more virtuous (but inconveniently pre- Christian) Republic.
There were mounting pressures on the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Then
came the sack of Rome in 410.^56 In Antioch, Bishop John Chrysostom (d.
407) was acutely aware of the gap between the reality of life in a nominally
Christian empire and city, and the ascetic ideal he exhorted his flock to live
by. Bishop Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), who gladly used Eusebius’s chronol-
og y, nevertheless turned his gaze toward the City of God and away from
Rome/Babylon and the triumphalist alignment of Church and empire under
Augustus and his successors. Blame for Rome’s humiliation he deflected
away from Christianity by drawing attention to the disasters of its pagan past
starting with the sack of Troy.^57 He toyed, true enough, with polemical ap-
plications of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue; while his intense boyhood to old age
dialogue with the poet’s whole oeuvre bridged the four centuries from Au-
gustus to Alaric and is among the notable spiritual and literary experiences
which bind the First Millennium’s phases together. yet Virgil, however ad-
mired (already in his own day) as the touchstone of Romanitas, was not the
Scripture, and remained deeply ambivalent in Christian eyes.^58
54 Eusebius, In praise of Constantine, as quoted above, p. 71; id., Life of Constantine [ed. F. Winkel-
mann (Berlin 1991^2 ); tr. Av. Cameron and S. G. Hall (Oxford 1999)] 1.9.2.
55 Inglebert, Romains chrétiens [3:42] 169–70; Grafton and Williams, Christianity [3:50]
148–54.
56 Inglebert, Romains chrétiens [3:42] 177–502.
57 I. Sandwell, “Christian self- definition in the fourth century AD,” in I. Sandwell and J. Huskin-
son (eds), Culture and society in later Roman Antioch (Oxford 2004) 35–58 (reference courtesy of Myrto
Malouta), with some ambivalences noted by MacCormack, Shadows of poetry [3:40] 212–14.
58 MacCormack, Shadows of poetry [3:40] 29–31 (Ecl. 4) and passim, esp. 7–38, 138–39,
225–31.