Jnl of Ecclesiastical History, .

© Cambridge University Press  

doi:./S

The Influence of Eusebius’ Chronicle

on the Apologetic Treatises of Cyril of
Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo
by MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
Australian Catholic University
E-mail: matthew.crawford@acu.edu.au

In the early fifth century, both Cyril of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo used Eusebius of
Caesarea’s Chronicle in the writing of their respective apologetic treatises – Against Julian
for Cyril and The city of God for Augustine. The present study compares the use that these
two authors made of their predecessor and argues for two continuities between these acts of
reception: the use of synchronisms between biblical and non-biblical history and the tracing
of Mosaic monotheism through time. In both these respects, Cyril and Augustine were carrying
forward themes of Christian apologetic that reached back to the second-century apologists.

or his contribution to Robert Markus’ Festschrift, published in ,

F Robert Wilken pointed out that while Augustine’s City of God is one
of the most well-known texts from late antiquity, it should neverthe-
less 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. 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 trad-
ition 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’, the political and social situation facing


Robert L. Wilken, ‘Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Iulianum’, in William E. Klingshirn
and Mark Vessey (eds), The limits of ancient Christianity: essays on late antique thought and

culture in honor of R. A. Markus, Ann Arbor, MI , . Ibid.

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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 trad-
ition across these three centuries.
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. 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 com-
posing their respective works, certainly in the same decade of the early fifth
century, and perhaps even during precisely the same years. 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


On the apologetic tradition in late antiquity see especially Mark J. Edwards, Martin
Goodman, Simon Price and Chris Rowland (eds), Apologetics in the Roman Empire:
pagans, Jews, Christians, Oxford .

Eusebius’ Chronicle has mostly perished in its original Greek form and must be
reconstructed using various sources. For the Armenian translation of the treatise,
which covers most of the two books of the original, see Joannes Baptista Aucher,
Eusebii Pamphili Caesariensis Episcopi Chronicon Bipartitum, Venice . The Armenian
version was translated into German in Josef Karst, Die Chronik des Eusebius aus dem arme-
nischen übersetzt, Leipzig . For Jerome’s Latin translation and continuation of the
second book see Rudolf Helm, Die Chronik des Hieronymus, GCS xlvii, Berlin .
The surviving Greek fragments are included alongside Jerome’s Latin and a Latin trans-
lation of the Armenian in Alfred Schoene, Eusebi Chronicorum libri duo, Berlin ,
. On the Chronicle see especially Anthony Grafton and Megan Hale Williams,
Christianity and the transformation of the book: Origen, Eusebius, and the library of Caesarea,
Cambridge, MA , –. On the wider context out of which the work emerged
see R. W. Burgess and Michael Kulikowski, Mosaics of time: the Latin chronicle traditions
from the first century BC to the sixth century AD, Turnhout . Eusebius’ Chronicle is
discussed at pp. –.

Augustine wrote The city of God between  and  in response to the sack of
Rome in . Cyril’s Against Julian was once thought to date from the s/s but
has recently been redated to the period –; cf. Christoph Riedweg and Wolfram
Kinzig (eds), Kyrill von Alexandrian I: Gegen Julian, I: Buch –, GCS, NF xx, Berlin
, pp. cix–cxvi.

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
to author apologetic works that exerted a significant influence on the later
tradition.
Because these two authors drew so extensively upon Eusebius, a compre-
hensive 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  and one on
Augustine by C. Frick in , 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.
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,
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 trad-
ition 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


E. Hiller, ‘Eusebius und Cyrillus’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie xxv (), –;
C. Frick, ‘Die Quellen Augustins im . Buch seiner Schrift De civitate Dei’, Programm des
Gymnasiums Höxter cccxxxii (), –. The edition of City of God used here is De civitate
dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, Turnhout , and the translation is by William Babcock
and Boniface Ramsey, The city of God, Hyde Park, NY –. The text of Contra Iulianum
used is from Riedweg and Kinzig, Kyrill von Alexandrien, and all translations are the joint
work of myself and Aaron P. Johnson, with whom I am currently preparing an English trans-
lation of the entire treatise.

Alden A. Mosshammer pointed out that Cyril’s ‘excerpts constitute the earliest
Greek witness’ to the Chronicle: The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek chronographic tradition,
Lewisburg, PA , .

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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. 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 appe-
tite’ when consuming the list of names and dates, an exhortation that impli-
citly acknowledges that many would find such details difficult to
understand or irrelevant. 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 incompar-
ably 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’.
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 histor-
ies 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. 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’). If it is true that someone can
only attain wisdom by learning it from another, then logically one should


On the relation of book I to the rest of the treatise see William J. Malley, Hellenism
and Christianity: the conflict between Hellenic and Christian wisdom in the Contra Galilaeos of
Julian the Apostate and the Contra Julianum of St Cyril of Alexandria, Rome , –.
 
Cyril, Contra Iulianum I.. Ibid. II..

Ibid. I.. On Cyril’s rhetorical casting of the debate between Christians and pagans as
one between competing ‘teachers’ of wisdom see Matthew R. Crawford, ‘Cyril of
Alexandria’s Contra Iulianum, imperial politics, and Alexandrian philosophy (c. –
)’, in Ken Parry and Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides (eds), Eastern Christianity and late
antique philosophy, Leiden , –.

Cyril, Contra Iulianum I., citing Bacchylides, Paean, fragment .; cf. Clement,
Stromata ... Later in the treatise Cyril cites Clement’s Stromata and Protrepticus

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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’.
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’), 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. These passages had been included by Eusebius in book I
of his Chronicle, which no doubt served as Cyril’s source. 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.
He began with Abraham, as had Eusebius, dating him to the reigns of Ninus
over the Assyrians and Europs over the Sicyonians, thereby mentioning

(Contra Iulianum III.; VI.; VII.; X.), so it may be that already here in book I he
turned to Bacchylides under the influence of the earlier Alexandrian.
  
Cyril, Contra Iulianum I.. Ibid. I.. Ibid. I.–.

The two passages from Alexander Polyhistor (FGrHist  F) occur at Eusebius,
Chronicle I, pp. , – (Aucher edn); pp. ,  (Karst edn), while the two passages
from Abydenos (FGrHist  F; F) are at Eusebius, Chronicle I, pp. –, –
(Aucher edn); pp. ,  (Karst edn).

What Cyril added to the Eusebian material is a brief report about the origin of the
name Serapis at Contra Iulianum I., which he probably drew from Clement of
Alexandria, Protrepticus IV..–; cf. Hiller, ‘Eusebius und Cyrillus’, .

Cyril, Contra Iulianum I.; cf. Jerome, Chronicon, p. a–b (Helm edn). The
Armenian version of Eusebius’ second book is missing for the first  years after
Abraham’s birth, so one has to rely solely on Jerome’s Latin translation for this section.

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
three of the four columns present at the start of Eusebius’ chronological
tables. 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 , and counted forward from
there to Moses’s birth  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’.
He then carried onwards from Moses’s first year to the fall of Troy 
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.
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’.
This smattering of names and events were all drawn from Eusebius’
Chronicle, with Cyril presumably flipping the pages of his codex and select-
ing a random assortment of historical notices to include in his brief
survey. 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


The fourth column represented the Egyptians, who Eusebius said were being

ruled at this time by the Thebans. Cyril, Contra Iulianum I..

Hiller suggested that Cyril’s reason for using this method was that he simply did
not like working with large numbers: ‘Eusebius und Cyrillus’, .

Cyril, Contra Iulianum I..

For the information in the above cited paragraph see Eusebius, Chronicle II, p. 
(Aucher edn); p.  (Karst edn) (= Jerome, Chronicon b [Helm edn]); p. 
(Aucher edn); p.  (Karst edn) (= Jerome, Chronicon a–b [Helm edn]); p. 

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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’. 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. Finally,  years after the fall of Troy
the first Olympiad occurred, and the counting of Olympiads then
became Cyril’s fourth and final system of reckoning, which he followed
until he came to the th Olympiad, ‘when Augustus Caesar was ruling
over the Romans, [and when] our Lord Jesus Christ was begotten accord-
ing to the flesh’.
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.
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 argu-
ment 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  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. On at least one occasion
Cyril preserves a minor historical detail that appears in Syncellus’

(Aucher edn); p.  (Karst edn) (= Jerome, Chronicon b [Helm edn]); pp. –
(Aucher edn); p.  (Karst edn) (= Jerome, Chronicon b [Helm edn]).
   
Cyril, Contra Iulianum I.. Ibid. Ibid. I.. Ibid. I..

Ibid. I..

On Panodorus and Annianus see Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius, –;
William Adler, Time immemorial: archaic history and its sources in Christian chronography
from Julius Africanus to George Syncellus, Washington, DC , –; William Adler
and Paul Tuffin, The chronography of George Synkellos: a Byzantine chronicle of universal

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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,
Cyril and Syncellus both point out that Zeus was Dionysius’ father, using
very similar phrasing. 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’, 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 plur-
alistic intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria around the turn of the fifth
century.

history from the creation, Oxford , pp. lxiii–lxix; and Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter
computus and the origins of the Christian era, Oxford , –.

Eusebius, Chronicle II, p.  (Aucher edn); p. ( Karst edn); Jerome, Chronicon
p. b (Helm edn).

Κάδμος Θηβῶν ἐβασίλευσεν, οὗ θυγάτηρ Σεμέλη, ἐξ ἧς ὁ Διόνυσος, ὡς αὐτοί φασιν
ἐκ Διός: Cyril, Contra Iulianum I. (p.  Riedweg edn); Κάδμος Θηβαίων ἐβασίλευσεν,
οὗ τῆς θυγατρὸς Σεμέλης υἱὸς ὁ Διόνυσος ἐκ μοιχείας, ὃν Ἕλληνες Διός φασι μυθικῶς:
Syncellus, Ecloga chronographica, p.  (A. A. Mosshammer, Georgius Syncellus: ecloga
chronographica, Leipzig ). Hiller provided a detailed list of the agreements of
Cyril’s notices with Schoene’s edition of the Armenian version of the Chronicle, a list of
the agreements with the Latin tradition and a list of instances in which Cyril stands

alone: ‘Eusebius und Cyrillus’, –. Adler, Time immemorial, –.

There are still other sources that attest to a Christian interest in chronology in
Alexandria during late antiquity. The oldest portion of the Latin chronicle known as
the Excerpta Latina Barbari hails from Alexandria in the third century, though it contin-
ued to be updated with new material through the reign of Justinian: R. W. Burgess, ‘The
date, purpose, and historical context of the original Greek and the Latin translation of
the so-called Excerpta Latina Barbari’, Traditio lxviii (), –. The translation of this
text can be found in Benjamin Garstad, Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius an Alexandrian
world chronicle, Cambridge, MA . Mention should also be made of the sixth-
century fragments of the so-called Alexandrian world chronicle, which proceeds up to
the year  and includes a famous image of Theophilus standing atop a statue of
Serapis: Adolf Bauer and Josef Strzygowski, Eine alexandrinische Weltchronik: Text und
Miniaturen eines griechischen Papyrus der Sammlung W. Goleniščev, Vienna ;
R. W. Burgess and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, ‘The “Alexandrian world chronicle”, its consularia
and the date of the destruction of the Serapeum (with an appendix on the list of praefecti
augustales)’, Millennium Jahrbuch x (), –. In addition, there survives a single

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 

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, it is known that in  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. Augustine evidently quickly found Eusebius’ Chronicle to be a
valuable source book ‘indispensable for any work on exegesis’, referring
to it already sometime in  or shortly thereafter in book II of his De doc-
trina Christiana. 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, occa-
sionally supplemented by Varro. According to Frick, thirty-three of the fifty-
four paragraphs of this book contain information derived from Eusebius.
At the outset of book XVIII, Augustine helpfully gave a summary of his argu-
ment 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 pro-
gressed 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.

parchment sheet dated to the end of the fifth century which contains a chronicle that is
related to the two previously mentioned sources: R. W. Burgess and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra,
‘The Berlin “Chronicle” (P.Berol. Inv. ): a new edition of the earliest extant late
antique consularia’, Archiv für Papyrusforschung und verwandte Gebiete lviii (), –

 at p.  for the dating. Augustine, ep. xxiv.

See B. Altaner, ‘Augustinus und Eusebios von Kaisareia: eine quellenkritische
Untersuchung’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift xxxxiv (), –; Pierre Courcelle, Late
Latin writers and their Greek sources, trans. Harry E. Wedeck, Cambridge, MA ,
–; Brian Croke, ‘The originality of Eusebius’ chronicle’, American Journal of
Philology ciii (), ; Gerard Bartelink, ‘Die Beeinflussung Augustinus durch die
griechischen Patres’, in J. den Boeft and J. van Oort (eds), Augustiniana Traiectina: com-
munications présentées au colloque international d’Utrecht, – novembre , Paris ,
; and Mark Vessey, ‘Augustine among the writers of the Church’, in Mark Vessey and
Shelley Reid (eds), A companion to Augustine, Chichester , –.

So Courcelle, Late Latin writers and their Greek sources, .

Augustine, De doctrina christiana II...

Frick, ‘Die Quellen Augustins’, –, cited approvingly in Altaner, ‘Augustinus

und Eusebios’, . Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII..

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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 mater-
ial 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. On one occa-
sion 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.
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. 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), what fables the Greeks
composed during the period of the judges (for example, Triptolemus,
the Minotaur, Bellerophon), and who was in power when Aeneas
arrived in Italy (Latinus in Italy, Menestheus over the Athenians, Labdon
over the Hebrews). Not surprisingly, Augustine gave much greater atten-
tion 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. Again, like Cyril, Augustine highlighted the translation of
the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, an event that they both read in
Eusebius. In keeping with his more transparent use of his sources,
Augustine even on occasion acknowledged that certain historical informa-
tion that he had hoped to find in Eusebius was absent, such as a date for the
Hebrew prophets Obadiah, Nahum and Habakkuk.

 
Ibid. XVIII.. Ibid. XVIII.; cf. Jerome, Chronicon b (Helm edn).

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII.; cf. Jerome, Chronicon b (Helm edn).

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII.; cf. Jerome, Chronicon a (Helm edn).

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII.; cf. Jerome, Chronicon b, b, b (Helm edn).

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII.; cf. Jerome, Chronicon a–b (Helm edn).

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII.–.

Ibid. XVIII.–; cf. Jerome, Chronicon  (Helm edn); Cyril, Contra Iulianum I..

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII..

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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.
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  and left his twin sons, who were then 
years old.

 
Cyril, Contra Iulianum I.. Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII..

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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.
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 dis-
tilled their arguments to the proposition that Moses, for example, was
older than Homer, or that Jesus was born in the th 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. 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 cul-
tural 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 lin-
guistically 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 sole-
cisms of the fishermen have destroyed the Attic syllogisms.
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


‘The central achievement of the Canon lay in its vivid display of synchronisms’:
Grafton and Williams, Christianity, .

Theodoret, Graecarum affectionum curatio II.–.

Ibid. V.–. Text from Pierre Canivet, Théodoret de Cyr: Thérapeutique des maladies
helléniques, I: (Livres I–VI), SC lviii., Paris , –. Translation (modified) taken
from Thomas Halton, Theodoret of Cyrus: a cure for pagan maladies, New York , .

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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, bar-
barian 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 inter-
national world history.
This was not the first time that history had been used in this way. In his
Sather Classical Lectures, published in  under the title Caesar’s calen-
dar, 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 histor-
ical 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’. 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


‘The new history could not suppress the old. Adam and Eve and what follows had
in some way to be presented in a world populated by Deucalion, Cadmus, Romulus and
Alexander the Great. This created all sorts of new problems. First, the pagans had to be
introduced to the Jewish version of history. Secondly, the Christian historians were
expected to silence the objection that Christianity was new, and therefore not respect-
able … It soon became imperative for the Christians to produce a chronology which
would satisfy both the needs of elementary teaching and the purposes of higher histor-
ical interpretation. The Christian chronographers had to summarise the history which
the converts were now supposed to consider their own … The convert, in abandoning
paganism, was compelled to enlarge his historical horizon: he was likely to think for the
first time in terms of universal history’: Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien wisdom: the limits of
Hellenization, Cambridge , .

Denis Feeney, Caesar’s calendar: ancient time and the beginnings of history, Berkeley, CA
, .

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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’. 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 import-
ant 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 point-
ing out that their history predated that of the Greeks in light of their con-
nection to Moses and, even further back, to Abraham. 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.
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 
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. 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. In their influential 


Ibid. .

On the Jewish and Christian use of the argument from antiquity see especially
Peter Pilhofer, Presbyteron kreitton: der Altersbeweis der jüdischen und christlichen Apologeten
und seine Vorgeschichte, Tübingen . For the role it played in the development of
Middle Platonism see G. R. Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic philosophy: a study of its development
from the Stoics to Origen, Oxford .

On the use made of synchronisms by another contemporary Christian author see
Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the rhetoric of history, Oxford , –.

Glenn Chesnut, The first Christian histories, nd edn, Macon, GA , , .
Chesnut claimed that Eusebius’ Chronicle reduced to only two columns after the time
of Christ, one for Rome and one for the Church. In fact, however, after the disappear-
ance of the Jewish column in  AD, there is only one column, that for Rome. This is true
for both the Latin and Armenian versions of the work.

For a reading of Eusebius that pushes against the common view of him as merely a
‘court theologian’ see Aaron P. Johnson, Ethnicity and argument in Eusebius’ ‘Praeparatio
evangelica’, Oxford , –. Johnson concluded (p. ) that ‘Christ, not

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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. 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 polit-
ical, 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’. 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.’ Moses too, Cyril
said, ‘proclaims One who is truly God by nature’. 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.’ 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’. 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,

Augustus – the Church, not Rome – are the pivotal players and determining forces in
Eusebius’ political theology’.

Grafton and Williams, Christianity, ; Feeney, Caesar’s calendar, –. See also
Richard W. Burgess and Witold Witakowski, Studies in Eusebian and post-Eusebian chrono-
graphy, Stuttgart , , and Burgess and Kulikowski, Mosaics of time, –.
   
Cyril, Contra Iulianum I.. Ibid. I.. Ibid. I.. Ibid. I..

Ibid. I..

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
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 contempor-
ary. 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 pro-
claimed the one true God’. 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. 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 diver-
sarum gentium falso crediti dii’). 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.
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 pre-
sented 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 argu-
ment, 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 doctri-
nal positions on a theological or philosophical level, but the formulation of a viable

 
Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII.. Ibid. XVIII., , , , , .

Jerome, Chronicon, Eusebii interpretata praefatio, p.  (Helm edn).

Augustine, De civitate Dei XVIII..

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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 posi-
tively … 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.
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 histor-
ical 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 bib-
lical history along the way. This is where Eusebius had done his most ori-
ginal, ground-breaking research, to the point that he serves as a valuable


Johnson, Ethnicity and argument, –.

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  MATTHEW R. CRAWFORD
historical source even today. 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 deter-
mined 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 iden-
tified parallels between Plato and Moses and claimed that the former must
have learned from the latter. His student Tatian set forth a more schol-
arly form of this argument by using Greek chronological works to count
backwards and prove that Moses must have lived centuries earlier than
Homer. 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 termin-
ology, presenting himself as an adherent of an ancient ‘barbarian’ philoso-
phy. 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. The increasing sophistication with which
Christian authors made these claims becomes evident when one sets along-
side the chronological sections of these fifth-century treatises the conclud-
ing chapters of Tatian’s Oration. In the course of proving the anteriority of


See Grafton and Williams, Christianity, , and Burgess and Kulikowski, Mosaics of
time, –.

See Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses? Early Christian interpretations of the history of

culture, Tübingen , –. Ibid. –.

On Tatian as a ‘barbarian’ philosopher see Matthew R. Crawford, ‘Tatian, Celsus,
and Christianity as “barbarian wisdom” in the late second century’, in Lewis Ayres and
H. Clifton Ward (eds), The emergence of the Christian intellectual in the second century, Berlin
, –.

‘The foundations of Christian historiography had been laid long before the time
of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge’: Momigliano, Alien wisdom, .

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 CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 
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. 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 ante-
dated 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.


Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos –.

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