For his contribution to Robert Markus’ Festschrift, published in 1999, Robert Wilken pointed out that while Augustine's City of God is one of the most well-known texts from late antiquity, it should nevertheless be seen as one member of a trio of apologetic treatises all written in the early fifth century, the other two being Theodoret's Cure for Greek maladies and Cyril of Alexandria's Against Julian.Footnote 1 Though Wilken did not explore the relation between these three contemporary works any further, putting them alongside one another provides a snapshot of how the tradition of Christian apologetic, which began in the second century with figures like Justin Martyr and Tatian the Assyrian, was transformed once the Nicene faith became the unrivaled standard of belief throughout the Mediterranean. In other words, though it may be true that these works stand ‘at the end of the long tradition of Greek apologies that reach back to the second century’,Footnote 2 the political and social situation facing their authors differed drastically from that earlier period and would indeed have been unimaginable to Justin, Tertullian or even Origen. Therefore, analysis of the treatises of Cyril, Augustine and Theodoret should allow us to see some of the continuities and discontinuities in the apologetic tradition across these three centuries.Footnote 3
The present paper is an initial foray into this comparative project, and, rather than attempting to draw any grand conclusions just yet, a modest way of beginning will be to consider a text that served as a common source for both Augustine and Cyril, though notably not for Theodoret. At key stages in their respective arguments, the bishop of Hippo and the bishop of Alexandria drew extensively upon the Chronicle composed roughly a century earlier by Eusebius of Caesarea.Footnote 4 Augustine tells us this explicitly and repeatedly in his City of God. Cyril does not name his source but there is no doubt that he too was relying upon the same work, though possibly mediated through a later author. This coincidence of source is all the more striking given that Cyril and Augustine were composing their respective works, certainly in the same decade of the early fifth century, and perhaps even during precisely the same years.Footnote 5 Though they are often thought of as belonging to two different worlds, North African Christianity on the one hand and Alexandrian Christianity on the other, we have here a case of two prominent authors using exactly the same source at the same crucial transitional moment in late antiquity, in order to author apologetic works that exerted a significant influence on the later tradition.
Because these two authors drew so extensively upon Eusebius, a comprehensive comparative analysis of their use of his Chronicle is impossible within the limited scope of the present article. Fortunately, the foundational source critical work for each of them has already been done, largely thanks to an article on Cyril by E. Hiller published in 1870 and one on Augustine by C. Frick in 1886, along with the critical editions of these two texts, whose apparatuses note the relevant portions of Eusebius’ Chronicle that our authors were using at each stage of their argument.Footnote 6 Building upon this mapping of textual dependency, the aim of the present study is to highlight two continuities in the function that the earlier text performed for these later readers. First, both Augustine and Cyril relied on book ii of Eusebius’ Chronicle, the so-called Chronological tables, to provide a series of precise synchronisms in world history, effectively setting forth a larger narrative framework that dislodged the primacy of Graeco-Roman culture. Second, in the use that they made of Eusebius’ text, both authors focused primarily not upon political history, but instead upon what we might call theological history, that is, the view of God held by various ancient peoples. Writing as they were little more than a century after Eusebius had composed his Chronicle, Augustine and Cyril are our earliest evidence for the reception of this important work,Footnote 7 so in conclusion a few observations are in order about what their treatises reveal about the Wirkungsgeschichte of Eusebius’ innovative text, as well as what their arguments imply about the development of the apologetic tradition between the second century and the fifth.
Cyril's usage of Eusebius’ Chronicle in Against Julian
Despite the fact that the stated aim of Cyril's Against Julian is, as the title suggests, to answer the polemic against Christianity brought by the Emperor Julian in his Against the Galileans, Cyril's direct engagement with his adversary is postponed until the second book of the work. Book i of the treatise instead begins with an argument about the competing genealogies of wisdom claimed by the Christians and the Hellenes.Footnote 8 Cyril was aware that some readers might take issue with this strategy. At the start of his detailed survey of chronology, he called on his readers not ‘to have a dainty appetite’ when consuming the list of names and dates, an exhortation that implicitly acknowledges that many would find such details difficult to understand or irrelevant.Footnote 9 Moreover, at the start of his second book, he imagined a reader who chastised him for delaying the needed reply to Julian's slanders by ‘throwing [himself] into genealogies’ in the first book. Against such criticisms, he claimed that ‘it was very reasonable for us to pile up in advance, as it were, raw material useful for refutations – that is, a clear and most evident proof that the book of the most excellent Moses is older than the Greek wise men and, moreover, proof of the fact that anyone should realise the tradition of the Christians’ faith is incomparably superior to the views those people have propounded’. ‘Had he not done so’, so Cyril says, the rest of the treatise would have been filled with ‘extensive digressions’.Footnote 10
These statements suggest that Cyril envisioned the argument pursued in book i, which relied heavily upon Eusebius’ Chronicle, as foundational for the entirety of his rebuttal of Julian that followed. Being such a skilled polemicist, he no doubt intuited that doing so would allow him to draw as sharply as possible the boundary line between himself and Julian as representatives of two competing communities, each with their own histories and authoritative texts. On the one side are the ‘teachers’ (διδάσκαλοι) of the Greek ‘children’ (παῖδες) – and here Cyril names Anaximander, Empedocles, Protagoras and Plato – and on the other side stand Moses and the later evangelists and Apostles who followed him.Footnote 11 At the outset of this detailed chronological section of book i, Cyril stated the premiss of his argument using a proverb from the lyric poet Bacchylides that had previously been cited by Clement of Alexandria: ‘One wise person comes from another’ (‘σοφὸς ἄλλος ἀπ’ ἄλλου’).Footnote 12 If it is true that someone can only attain wisdom by learning it from another, then logically one should be able to trace a genealogy of wisdom to discern its ultimate source, as well as the deviations from that lineage that occurred over time. This Cyril set as his aim: ‘by scrutinizing the books written accurately by the chroniclers, we aim to establish clearly that the divinely inspired Moses was older – I mean according to the date of his birth – and that those others came after him, much later in time’.Footnote 13
Hence, if Moses was older than the Greek sages, then they must have become wise under his influence; at least so Cyril's argument suggests. He began his recounting of world history with Noah, and his dependence upon Eusebius immediately becomes apparent. In order to prove that the stories of Genesis are not mere ‘myths’ (‘μύθους’),Footnote 14 he cited four passages from the Greek historians Alexander Polyhistor and Abydenos: two from each of them about Xisuthrus and the great flood, which Cyril took to be a garbled reference to Noah; as well as two from each of them about the divine destruction of the tower of Babel and the consequent confusion of languages.Footnote 15 These passages had been included by Eusebius in book i of his Chronicle, which no doubt served as Cyril's source.Footnote 16 This already reveals one difference between the use Cyril that made of Eusebius and that of Augustine, since Augustine was only able to read the second book of the Chronicle, in light of Jerome's decision to translate only the latter half of Eusebius’ two-part work. Unlike Augustine, Cyril therefore had access to the entirety of Eusebius’ treatise in Greek, though he took no interest in the extensive and detailed discussion of historical sources that the Caesarean historian had surveyed in his first part, choosing simply to extract these four passages and move on.
Cyril next turned to the second half of the Chronicle and drew much more extensively from it. The next twelve pages of the new GCS edition of Against Julian are, with but one exception, a summary of material that he took from Eusebius’ chronological tables summarising Greek and barbarian history.Footnote 17 He began with Abraham, as had Eusebius, dating him to the reigns of Ninus over the Assyrians and Europs over the Sicyonians,Footnote 18 thereby mentioning three of the four columns present at the start of Eusebius’ chronological tables.Footnote 19 Cyril then moved forward from this point all the way to the birth of Christ during the reign of Augustus, giving a total of forty-one chronological reference points spread out across this two thousand year historical span. His survey of this material had moved in four stages. First, he treated Abraham's birth as year 1, and counted forward from there to Moses's birth 425 years later. At the start of the next phase Cyril said, ‘let us take [Moses] as a second chronological starting point and put Moses’s birth at the start of the numbers we count subsequently’.Footnote 20 He then carried onwards from Moses’s first year to the fall of Troy 410 years later. Why he chose to proceed in this manner is not clear. Eusebius had not counted the years after Moses's birth, but instead from that of Abraham, so to arrive at the figures that he provides Cyril had to determine the difference between the two at each point.Footnote 21
As he moved on in his recounting of world history, using Moses's birth as a new year zero, Cyril mentioned in passing a number of historical details at various points in the timeline. His presentation, consisting as it does of a series of unrelated, random historical details tied to specific dates, resists easy summary, but a sense of his methodology can be gained through a representative paragraph such as the following:
They say that in Moses’ seventh year Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Atlas (Prometheus’ brother) were born, along with the all-seeing Argos. During Moses’ thirty-fifth year, Cecrops, who was nick-named ‘two natures’, became the first king in Athens. They say that he was the first person to sacrifice an ox and to call the highest of the gods among the Greeks by the name of Zeus, as they say. They say that it was in Moses’ sixty-seventh year that Deucalion's flood occurred in Thessaly, the same time that Phaethon, whom the Greeks claim was the son of Helios, was burned up in Ethiopia. In the seventy-fourth year of Moses, Hellen, the so-called son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, gave the Hellenes their name, although they were formerly called ‘Greeks’.Footnote 22
This smattering of names and events were all drawn from Eusebius’ Chronicle, with Cyril presumably flipping the pages of his codex and selecting a random assortment of historical notices to include in his brief survey.Footnote 23 He followed this same method for the third and fourth phase of his historical narration. In the third stage, he took the fall of Troy as a new year zero and once more counted forward, mentioning again a number of historical details, though without ‘dwelling on the intervening generations, but rather anchoring the account to only the essential persons’.Footnote 24 Included in this date range are, for example, the rule of Aeneas over the Latins, the priesthood of Eli among the Hebrews, and the birth of Homer and Hesiod.Footnote 25 Finally, 405 years after the fall of Troy the first Olympiad occurred,Footnote 26 and the counting of Olympiads then became Cyril's fourth and final system of reckoning, which he followed until he came to the 194th Olympiad, ‘when Augustus Caesar was ruling over the Romans, [and when] our Lord Jesus Christ was begotten according to the flesh’.Footnote 27
Cyril's conclusion drawn from this breathless run through two millennia and a myriad of kingdoms and persons is straightforward:
Hence, from the exact record of the times and even the generations, how is it not clear to everyone that the divine Moses was older than all the Greek wise men, who instead are youths, almost as if they had only just shown up? For they were not even born until long after the list of the Olympiads had begun.Footnote 28
If one admits the premiss that Cyril stated at the outset – that wisdom can only be gained by learning it from another – then his chronological argument implies that the philosophers famous among the Greeks became wise through acquaintance with the doctrines that Moses had originally propounded. Though he gave no sustained attention to the details that he mentioned in the course of his argument, this section of his treatise comes across to the reader as an impressive display of historical erudition, since Cyril confidently runs through a myriad of names and events, dating them with precision in his narrated timeline, all thanks to the economical and effective display of material that he found in Eusebius’ Chronicle.
One final comment before moving on to Augustine. As noted earlier, Cyril's access to Eusebius might have been mediated by a third source. It is known that around the year 400 two Alexandrian monks named Panodorus and Annianus produced their own Chronography, which took over much of Eusebius’ Chronicle, though with some modifications and additions, and it was this version of Eusebius’ work that later influenced the Byzantine chronologer George Syncellus.Footnote 29 On at least one occasion Cyril preserves a minor historical detail that appears in Syncellus’ Chronography but not in either the Latin or Armenian versions of Eusebius’ Chronicle. While the Armenian and Jerome's Latin version mention that Cadmus had a daughter named Semele, who gave birth to Dionysius,Footnote 30 Cyril and Syncellus both point out that Zeus was Dionysius’ father, using very similar phrasing.Footnote 31 It is difficult to know how much to make of this minor agreement, but it could indicate that Cyril was using not Eusebius’ original version (assuming this is what is represented by the Latin and Armenian in this passage), but the revision by Panodorus that was carried out only a decade or so prior to his writing Against Julian, which was also known to Syncellus several centuries later. Whatever the case, the work of Panodorus and Annianus at least indicates that Cyril was not the only Christian intellectual in Alexandria in the early fifth century who was interested in the calculation of dates. In fact, one of the overriding aims of Panodorus’ revision of Eusebius was to go further in ‘reconciling pagan sources [especially Berossus and Manetho] with Scripture’,Footnote 32 an intent that is also evident in Cyril's own treatise with its many citations from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Porphyry, among others. Panodorus and Cyril, therefore, seem to have responded in similar fashion to the pluralistic intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria around the turn of the fifth century.Footnote 33
Augustine’s usage of Eusebius’ Chronicle in The city of God
More can be said about Augustine's access to Eusebius’ Chronicle than about how Cyril obtained a copy of the work. Thanks to a letter preserved in Augustine's corpus,Footnote 34 it is known that in 394 Alypius requested a copy of the Chronicle from Paulinus of Nola, who in turn contacted a certain Domnio in Rome, who seemed to have functioned as a sort of literary agent for Jerome. Upon Paulinus’ request, a manuscript of the work was sent to Carthage where a copy was made and forwarded on to Alypius at Thagaste.Footnote 35 Augustine evidently quickly found Eusebius’ Chronicle to be a valuable source book ‘indispensable for any work on exegesis’,Footnote 36 referring to it already sometime in 396 or shortly thereafter in book ii of his De doctrina Christiana.Footnote 37 However, his most extensive engagement with the text is in City of God book xviii, the longest of the treatise's twenty-two books. Within this section of the work, Jerome's Latin translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle served as Augustine's main source of historical information, occasionally supplemented by Varro. According to Frick, thirty-three of the fifty-four paragraphs of this book contain information derived from Eusebius.Footnote 38 At the outset of book xviii, Augustine helpfully gave a summary of his argument up to this point. Beginning in book xi, he set out to explain the ‘origin’, ‘course’ and ‘end’ of the two cities. Book xviii falls in the midst of his extended discussion of the ‘course’ that the two cities follow throughout history. At this point, his narration of the history of the city of God has progressed to the advent of Christ, while his account of the earthly city has gone no further than Abraham. Book xviii therefore picks up with Abraham and moves the story of the earthly city forward all the way to the first century.Footnote 39 It is appropriate that the Chronicle should serve as his main source at this point since, as noted earlier, Eusebius began his chronological canons with Abraham as well.
In keeping with the length of his exposition, Augustine drew a great deal of historical detail from Eusebius, much more than had Cyril, though the material that they took over from their common source does sometimes overlap. For example, like Cyril, Augustine mentioned that Abraham was born during the reign of Ninus over the Assyrians and Europs over the Sicyonians, information gleaned from the first page of Eusebius’ chronological tables.Footnote 40 On one occasion the bishop of Hippo used Eusebius to correct Varro:
Our own authors who have written chronicles – first Eusebius, and then Jerome, both of whom certainly followed earlier historians in forming their view – indicate that the flood of Ogygus actually took place more than three hundred years later [than Varro had said], during the reign of Phoroneus, the second king of the Argives.Footnote 41
Furthermore, Augustine also highlighted the introduction of the cult of Serapis, which Cyril also acknowledged. Both authors expanded on Eusebius’ brief note by explaining the origin of the name ‘Serapis’, with Cyril passing on a tradition that he found in Clement of Alexandria and Augustine giving the version that he read in Varro.Footnote 42 Moreover, Augustine noted, for example, who was reigning over various kingdoms during the lifetime of Moses (Saphrus over the Assyrians, Orthopolis over the Sicyonians, Criasus over the Argives),Footnote 43 what fables the Greeks composed during the period of the judges (for example, Triptolemus, the Minotaur, Bellerophon),Footnote 44 and who was in power when Aeneas arrived in Italy (Latinus in Italy, Menestheus over the Athenians, Labdon over the Hebrews).Footnote 45 Not surprisingly, Augustine gave much greater attention to the founding of Rome, emphasising that this event occurred just as the Assyrian empire came to an end, such that Rome became a sort of ‘second Babylon’, heir to the first as the dominant instantiation of the worldly city.Footnote 46 Again, like Cyril, Augustine highlighted the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, an event that they both read in Eusebius.Footnote 47 In keeping with his more transparent use of his sources, Augustine even on occasion acknowledged that certain historical information that he had hoped to find in Eusebius was absent, such as a date for the Hebrew prophets Obadiah, Nahum and Habakkuk.Footnote 48
To give further instances of Augustine's use of Eusebius’ Chronicle would be tedious, and the above sampling suffices to give a sense of the way in which his discourse in book xviii of City of God depends upon the work of the Caesarean historian. He carried his argument forward at a much more leisurely pace than Cyril, taking time to expand upon and discuss all sorts of historical details included in Eusebius’ chronological tables, and he did not engage in the sort of repeated calculation of dates that one finds in Against Julian. Nevertheless, both authors similarly used their predecessor's work as a source book and navigated both up and down the individual columns as well as horizontally across the columns on the page, effectively turning into prose the graphic display of information that Eusebius had so painstakingly compiled and so efficiently presented.
Continuities in the reception of Eusebius’ Chronicon
In light of this survey of Cyril and Augustine's use of Eusebius’ Chronicle, what can be said about the state of the tradition of Christian apologetic in the early fifth century? It is obvious that significant differences exist between Against Julian and The city of God. For example, the bishop of Alexandria had a definite adversary in view whose argument dictated the twists and turns of his treatise, while Augustine's exposition was determined by his own conceptualisation of the two cities, and was therefore more theoretically ambitious. Nevertheless, in important respects the strategies of the two authors coincide in the sections that are the focus of this study. Here are highlighted just two of the most significant features, one that is implicit and one that is explicit. First, as might already be evident from some of the passages cited above, much of the relevant sections of these two treatises consists of a series of synchronisms that juxtapose details from biblical history with details from classical history. For example, Cyril stated at one point,
So, in the fifth year after the fall of Troy, Aeneas ruled over the Latins and Demophon, son of Theseus, over the Athenians, while Samson was judge among the Hebrews. Sixty-five years after the fall of Troy, the priest Eli died, as it is written in the first book of the Kings, and foreigners carried away the ark into their own land.Footnote 49
Augustine similarly wrote about a moment several hundred years earlier:
It was during the reign of Baleus, the tenth king of the Assyrians, and Messapus, the ninth king of the Sicyonians …, and while Apis was ruling as the third king of the Argives, that Isaac died at the age of 180 and left his twin sons, who were then 120 years old.Footnote 50
In speaking thus, Cyril and Augustine were, of course, simply following Eusebius’ lead, since the rows of his chronological tables represented a series of synchronisations across the individual national histories that he had compiled in each column.Footnote 51
These repeated synchronic juxtapositions carry an implicit message that goes beyond the mere calculation of dates. That is, the rhetorical effect of Cyril and Augustine's discourses would be severely diminished if one distilled their arguments to the proposition that Moses, for example, was older than Homer, or that Jesus was born in the 194th Olympiad. Theodoret, their contemporary, makes just such claims in his Cure for Greek maladies, without going through the listing of historical detail that Augustine and Cyril provide.Footnote 52 What is the additional message conveyed by their presentation in contrast to his? I suggest that with this repeated juxtaposing of biblical and classical history Eusebius and his later readers were engaged in a sophisticated and sustained attempt to make familiar the unfamiliar (non Graeco-Roman history, especially biblical history) and to unsettle the familiarity of what was taken for granted (Graeco-Roman cultural prestige). For a classically educated non-Christian of the fifth-century, names such as Samson, Eli, Isaac and so on would not only have sounded linguistically foreign, but would also have had no place in their existing schemes of historical reference, which were populated instead by people like Agamemnon and Aeneas, Solon and Socrates. Theodoret himself, in fact, provides evidence for this dynamic in a passing comment:
But why speak of our contemporaries? Even in antiquity there has been considerable dispute about these matters. Some reckon among the sages Periander of Corinth, others Epimenides of Crete, or Acousilaos of Argos, or Anacharsis of Scythia, or Pherecydes of Syros. Plato himself counted Myson of Chenea among them. These men, then, are not even known by our contemporaries. By contrast, the names of Matthew, Bartholemew, James, and even Moses, David, Isaiah, and the other apostles and prophets are as well known to them as the names of their own children. Now the Hellenists poke fun at these names as being somewhat barbarian. But we only pity their folly, since we see that those barbarian-speaking men have vanquished Greek eloquence, that the elegant myths have been entirely expelled, and that the solecisms of the fishermen have destroyed the Attic syllogisms.Footnote 53
Theodoret's point here is twofold, both that the names of the Apostles and prophets betray their barbarian origin to his contemporaries who prize Atticisation, and secondly that for his Christian readers these names have come to replace the heroes of Greek antiquity. If it can be assumed that Theodoret's comment illustrates the sort of intellectual climate within which Against Julian and The city of God were attempting to speak, then perhaps one of the goals of these chronological sections was to further the sort of replacement that Theodoret says is underway. The foreign, barbarian history of the Jewish people now took on an aura of authority and legitimacy due to the fact that it could be coordinated with the history that late antique cultured persons already knew. Conversely, however, the established authority of Graeco-Roman cultural traditions was unsettled by this same process, since Eusebius’ project set these well-known persons and events on equal footing with a diverse array of other nations in an international world history.Footnote 54
This was not the first time that history had been used in this way. In his Sather Classical Lectures, published in 2007 under the title Caesar's calendar, Denis Feeney drew attention to the fact that these kind of synchronisms were a sheer necessity for ancient historians who had to deal with a variety of local dating systems. In the absence of a single, universally agreed-upon dating system, the past could only be narrated as a series of chronological relations between important events and persons. This necessity meant that, for ancient persons, the inclusion and exclusion of details from the historical record was always more foregrounded than is the case for moderns, and, as Feeney argued, ‘it is not a neutral process to choose which events and protagonists in one culture are going to be lined up against which events and protagonists in another culture; even more, … it is not a neutral process to choose which cultures are going to be lined up against each other in the first place’.Footnote 55 Earlier attempts at coordinating the history of the various Greek cities had been undertaken by Apollodorus, Eratosthenes and Castor of Rhodes, all of whom Eusebius used as sources. However, it was the Romans who most effectively exploited the power of synchronism for ideological purposes, writing themselves into the more respectable history of the Greeks. As Feeney explained, ‘the first practitioners of this kind of synchronization must have been intent on demonstrating that early Roman history ranked in dignity with the history of Greece and was entitled to the venerability of proper historiographical treatment’.Footnote 56 Seen against this background, it could be said that Eusebius, Cyril and Augustine were attempting to do to the Greeks and Romans what the Romans had once done to the Greeks, with one important difference. Whereas the Romans were obvious latecomers compared to the Greeks, a fact that Feeney argues was brought home to Cicero through his encounter with Atticus’ Liber annalis, the Christians never tired of pointing out that their history predated that of the Greeks in light of their connection to Moses and, even further back, to Abraham.Footnote 57 These Christian historians, in other words, bolstered the legitimacy of their community by synchronising their history with the respected histories of Greece and Rome, while also claiming to supersede those national histories by virtue of the greater antiquity of their intellectual heritage. They therefore exploited the prestige of the dominant cultural tradition precisely for the purpose of undermining it.Footnote 58
Finally, there is another important similarity between these two instances of Eusebian reception, an explicit feature of the arguments of both Cyril and Augustine that runs counter to scholarship on Eusebius’ Chronicle. For at least the past three decades it has been commonplace for scholars to regard the Chronicle as having strong political overtones. In his 1986 monograph The first Christian histories, Glenn Chesnut highlighted the fact that by the end of the chronological tables, the only column remaining was the one representing the Roman Empire.Footnote 59 If one views Eusebius as Constantine's court bishop, it seems only natural to see in this feature of his work the conviction that Rome stood as the culmination of God's action in history. In short, on this reading the Chronicle functioned basically as propaganda for a newly Christian empire.Footnote 60 In their influential 2006 book Christianity and the transformation of the book, Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams repeated Chesnut's political interpretation of the Chronicle, as did Denis Feeney in his Sather Classical Lectures.Footnote 61 The reason for drawing attention to this scholarly commonplace here is to observe that, whatever Eusebius’ own intentions may have been, neither Cyril nor Augustine made any mention of this aspect of the Chronicle. In fact, it is clear that their shared concern was theological rather than political, and neither of them even bothered with anything that happened after the incarnation of Christ during Augustus’ reign.
Instead of political history, the story that these two authors recount is one in which humanity has, over the centuries, turned away from the worship of the one true God towards the worship of human-made deities. One sees this, for example, in Cyril's claim that ‘the people who were born from Adam until Noah revered one God, he who was by nature and in truth the fashioner of the universe and its Lord’.Footnote 62 It recurs in the praise that he bestowed upon Abraham: ‘He was an extremely wise man with wide learning, one of those who were most serious of all, who thought that the duty to know the truth and to know the identity of the creator and lord of all was something to be zealously pursued.’Footnote 63 Moses too, Cyril said, ‘proclaims One who is truly God by nature’.Footnote 64 Finally, when Cyril cited sources of Greek wisdom later in book i of Contra Julianum, including Plato, Orpheus, Homer, Porphyry, Pythagoras, Sophocles, Xenophon and Hermes Trismegistus, he had this same point in view, as can be seen in his remark introducing this new section of the first book: ‘Yet how is it not clear to everyone that even those accustomed to practice Greek philosophy (τὰ Ἑλλήνων φιλοσοφεῖν) thought it best to confess that there is one God, the Craftsman of the universe who is by nature beyond all things.’Footnote 65 In short, and in his own words, Cyril's main focus in this first book is with ὁ λόγος περὶ θεοῦ, a phrase that might suitably be translated simply as ‘theology’.Footnote 66 The primary reason, then, that he drew upon Eusebius’ Chronicle was to demonstrate that Moses antedated those Greek sources that present the same view of God, which implies that they must have learned their theological wisdom from Moses, the ancestor of the Christian community in whose defence Cyril writes. Cyril was, therefore, not narrating a generic genealogy of wisdom or cultural achievement, but a genealogy of a specific kind of theology that he thought was best represented by Moses.
Augustine's point is in fact the same as that of his Egyptian contemporary. After having narrated the message of the various Hebrew prophets who emerged at the same time as the founding of Rome, he asserted that among the proponents of Greek wisdom only the ‘theological poets’ (that is, Orpheus, Linus and Musaeus) predated the prophets, but ‘not even the theological poets predated our Moses, a true theologian, who truly proclaimed the one true God’.Footnote 67 Augustine also emphasised the inverse of this theme, much more so than had Cyril. As he traced the course of the worldly city through history, he frequently paused to note the moments when various false gods were created, mentioning, for example, Mercury, Hercules, Minerva, Dionysius, the Delphic Apollo, Matuta, Diomedes, Aeneas, Codrus, Romulus and so on, a practice that he said ended after Romulus was elevated to divine status by the Romans, but picked back up again under the emperors.Footnote 68 Almost all of this was material that Augustine also drew from Eusebius, who claimed in his preface to book ii that among the various information that he included in his tables was the identity of ‘the gods the various nations falsely believed in’ (‘qui diversarum gentium falso crediti dii’).Footnote 69 Augustine's conclusion to City of God book xviii brings this theme sharply into focus:
One of [the two cities], the earthly city, has made for itself whatever false gods it wanted, creating them from anything at all, even from human beings, and serving them with sacrifices. The other, the heavenly city, which is on pilgrimage here on earth, does not make up false gods but is itself created by the true God and is itself his true sacrifice.Footnote 70
Therefore, Augustine, like Cyril, understood the histories presented in Eusebius’ Chronicle as the story of the contrast between the worship of the one true God and the false deities that humankind had created in opposition to the Creator.
These two features of Cyril and Augustine's expositions have been presented here in serial form to clarify each individually, but it would be a mistake to see them as disconnected. In fact, they are part of a single argument, one that frames theological truth claims within ethnic categories. As Aaron Johnson has written with respect to Eusebius’ own ‘apologetic methodology’ in his Praeparatio evangelica,
One of the fundamental tasks of apologetics was not merely the criticism of doctrinal positions on a theological or philosophical level, but the formulation of a viable vision of the world in which Christianity makes sense and looks attractive. The Praeparatio is, then, concerned with painting a picture of the world of nations in such a way that the other nations are seen in a negative light, while the nation of the Hebrews (and so of their descendants, the Christians) are depicted positively … For Eusebius, the argument was only a matter of ‘religion’ in so far as it was embedded within the lives and histories of the forefathers of the nations.Footnote 71
Eusebius used this same strategy of embedding theology within ethnic descent not only in his Praeparatio but also in his Chronicle, albeit in a more implicit form. Both Cyril and Augustine similarly assumed that the exposition of certain doctrinal positions was, for apologetic purposes, best presented in the form of history, specifically the history of nations, and that their present community was a continuation of the story of the Hebrews of long ago.
What then does the preceding study reveal about the reception of Eusebius’ Chronicle and the development of the apologetic tradition in late antiquity? The first thing that must be said is that the reliance of both these authors upon Eusebius highlights the importance of the Caesarean bishop as a historiographical source already in late antiquity. Eusebius’ historical works exerted an outsized influence on the later Christian tradition, and the fact that both Cyril and Augustine relied upon him suggests that the significance of his achievements in this domain was already apparent less than a century after his death. The Chronicle was quite simply the most eclectic and ambitious chronological work that had ever been assembled, standing in a league of its own not merely among Christian texts but against the backdrop of the entire late antique Mediterranean literary culture. With this powerful reference tool, Cyril and Augustine were able to rattle off with confidence one historical synchronism after another, giving the impression of great erudition and expertise. Indeed, the style of their presentation in these two sections of Against Julian and The city of God would not have been possible in the absence of Eusebius’ chronological tables or something very similar to them, and the forcefulness and persuasive power that the Chronicle enabled them to display must have, to some degree, contributed to the transformation of the classical world into medieval Christendom and Byzantium. It is not likely a coincidence that both these authors drew upon the same section of Eusebius’ Chronicle – the period from Abraham through to Augustus – and within this section chose to focus primarily upon non-biblical historical details, though incorporating notices of biblical history along the way. This is where Eusebius had done his most original, ground-breaking research, to the point that he serves as a valuable historical source even today.Footnote 72 The singularity of his achievement is only highlighted further by the fact that neither of these authors had much to add to the information that they drew from the Chronicle, aside from the tidbits Augustine incorporated from Varro. In short, Eusebius has determined the way in which much of pre-Christian Mediterranean history has been remembered and received in the past seventeen hundred years, and this was already true less than a century after his writing for learned figures like Cyril and Augustine – each a giant of sorts in terms of his own influence.
From this analysis there emerges with equal clarity the thesis that the Christian apologetic tradition, at least in terms of those features considered here, changed little from the second century to the early fifth, aside from an increasing sophistication in its manner of presenting its central claims, for the two similarities between the expositions of Cyril and Augustine were already present in the writings of the apologists. Justin had famously identified parallels between Plato and Moses and claimed that the former must have learned from the latter.Footnote 73 His student Tatian set forth a more scholarly form of this argument by using Greek chronological works to count backwards and prove that Moses must have lived centuries earlier than Homer.Footnote 74 Both apologists also contrasted the worship of the one true God among the Christians with the corrupt polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, and Tatian especially couched his stance in ethnic terminology, presenting himself as an adherent of an ancient ‘barbarian’ philosophy.Footnote 75 Such claims were astonishingly ambitious for a tiny fledgling religious sect in the midst of a religiously diverse cultural setting like second-century Rome, but remarkably this ambition had been rewarded with unexpected success by the time that Cyril and Augustine set pen to codex. Nevertheless, despite the well-established political and cultural dominance of pro-Nicene Christianity in the post-Theodosian era, Christian apologetic carried forward these same emphases from its much earlier, humbler days.Footnote 76 The increasing sophistication with which Christian authors made these claims becomes evident when one sets alongside the chronological sections of these fifth-century treatises the concluding chapters of Tatian's Oration. In the course of proving the anteriority of Moses to Homer, Tatian covered much of the same chronological ground as Cyril and Augustine, rattling off many of the same names (for example, Inachus, Apis, Ogygus, Cecrops, Orpheus, Pythagoras), but through it all the only biblical figures whom he named were Moses, Solomon, Hiram and Nebuchadnezzer.Footnote 77 In contrast, thanks to Eusebius’ innovative Chronicle, Cyril and Augustine were able to integrate the story of the Hebrews into the timeline of Graeco-Roman history as a constant foil for such storied cultural heroes.
The persistence of these themes is all the more striking in light of the major theological developments that took place between the second and the fifth century with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity as well as the recently won dominance of Christianity within the Roman Empire; despite such significant, and indeed controversial, intellectual and social shifts, these apologetic claims remained the same. Perhaps one reason why these themes persisted into these fifth-century apologetic treatises is simply that the argument was compelling to the late antique imagination. In short, it worked. In light of the knowledge available at the time, the Greeks and Romans had little defence against the claim that Moses antedated their cultural heroes, and, as Arnaldo Momigliano highlighted years ago, the Greeks and Romans had long been primed to think highly of ‘alien wisdom’ coming from the east. To moderns this might appear as a fortuitous coincidence. To Cyril and Augustine, it would have seemed like the sure work of providence.
