bishop of Rome at Arles) to which the Council as a whole could have deferred
to.
Before examining how thisfirst resolution is presented in Constantine’s
letter, we may consider the narrative context in which it is cited—Eusebius’
story of the Council of Nicaea—if only for what it tells us of Eusebius’
personal,first-hand perspective on the events. According to Eusebius, indeed,
thefirst resolution responded directly to a situation that the Council of Nicaea
had been called to address; in this respect, its formulation was a foregone
conclusion. For after describing the outbreak of the Arian controversy,
Eusebius writes:
There was already another very dire sickness of longer standing than these, which
had been a nuisance to the churches for a long time: the disagreement over the
Feast of the Saviour. Some claimed that one ought to follow the practice of the
Jews, and some that it was right to observe the exact time of the season, and not
err by following those who were outside the grace of the Gospel. So in this matter
too the congregations everywhere had already for a long time been divided, and
the divine ordinances were in disarray, since for one and the same festival the
divergence of date caused the greatest difference between those keeping the
festival: some were disciplining themselves with fasting and mortification, when
other were devoting leisure to relaxation. No human being was able tofind a cure
for the evil...(Life of Constantine3. 5. 1–2)^97Particularly noteworthy, in this passage, are the highly charged references to
calendar diversity as‘very dire sickness’ (íüóïò IæªÆºåøôÜôÅ) and‘evil’
(ŒÆŒüí). These phrases are the earliest evidence of a negative attitude to
calendar diversity in Christian literature, possibly even in the history of
calendars in Antiquity as a whole.
The theme of unity, already evident in this passage in connection with the
date of Easter, is then elaborated in more general terms in Eusebius’narrative,
with Constantine summoning at public cost a council of bishops from all the
provinces of the Roman Empire (VC3. 7),‘who were furthest separated from
each other, not only in spirit, but in physical presence and territories and
places and provinces’(3. 6. 2). Eusebius’emphasis on the oecumenical nature
of the Council sets again the scene for the content of its ultimate decisions. In
his subsequent description of the proceedings of the Council, he focuses
almost entirely on the Arian heresy; Easter is mentioned almost only in
passage, with the rather enigmatic statement that‘the same date for the
Festival of the Saviour was agreed on all sides’(3. 14)—the brevity of which
betrays, no doubt, the absence of any clear decisions on the date of Easter at
the Council. But far more information appears in the letter of Constantine that
(^97) Cameron and Hall (1999) 123, whose translations I have used with minor modifications.
Cf. SocratesHE1. 8, in which much of Eusebius (VC3. 5–7 and following) is paraphrased and
directly quoted.
398 Calendars in Antiquity