by Scott McGill
A related development is the almost total ignorance of the history of the Latin West revealed by the histories of both Vandalic and Gothic wars. While Procopius is modestly reliable on western events of Justin’s and Justinian’s reigns, the fifth century is a virtual blank. This goes well beyond the sort of mythologizing of Constantine, for good and ill, that had already afflicted the fourth century (Lieu and Monserrat 1998a, 1998b). It is, rather, a fundamental unfamiliarity with the sequence of events or even the main players in them. Procopius, that is, reveals the disjuncture between East and West that the fifth‐century crisis had produced: Even a man who had traveled in Italy and put considerable effort into understanding the course of events that led to the Gothic war simply could not muster the evidence in an accurate way. A combination of both trends – the folkloric and the ignorant – is best illustrated in Procopius’s tale (Bella 3.7) of the fifth‐century emperor Majorian’s wandering incognito in the Vandal camp in order to spy on Gaiseric and learn his plans.
Procopius looms large over the last two generations of Greek classicizing history. Writing under Justin II and Tiberius, the rhetor Agathias picked up the history of Justinian’s reign where Procopius broke off in 550 and continued the narrative – almost exclusively a military narrative – down to 558, though he had clearly intended to cover the whole of Justin II’s reign and must have died before completing his work (Cameron 1970). This is implied by his successor Menander (a courtier under Maurice whose honorific military title of Protector is usually treated as part of his name). Menander carried Agathias’s narrative down to 582 and, like him, imitated as best he could the stylistic affectations of Procopius (Blockley 1985). Finally, Theophylact Simocatta, writing under Heraclius, continued the story through to the death of Maurice in 602 (Whitby 1988).
The classicizing tradition comes to an end with Theophylact, and, indeed, the entire tradition of narrative history writing in Greek effectively ended at the start of the seventh century. By that time, classical traditions in the Latin world had completely disappeared. The Middle Ages, in both East and West, would reinvent many of antiquity’s historical genres – but they would be doing so in imitation of the past, not as the direct inheritors of it.
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CHAPTER TEN
Ecclesiastical History
Peter Van Nuffelen
The history of ecclesiastical historiography in late antiquity seems, at first sight, straightforward. It was created by Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) at the beginning of the fourth century, flourished in Greek, never really caught on in Latin, transferred into Syriac in the sixth century, and died out at the end of late antiquity, with Evagrius Scholasticus as the last major representative of the genre at the end of the sixth century. The genre seems to have a strong internal cohesion. Individual works carry the Greek title ekklesiastike historia or any of its derivatives in Latin and Syriac. They generally espouse the form chosen by Eusebius: Ecclesiastical affairs are narrated in nonclassicizing language with regular citation of documents and other texts. To some scholars, formal similarity seems backed up by a shared theological outlook: Church histories are supposed to trace the plan of God in history. On this view, ecclesiastical history might well be the late antique literary genre par excellence: the expression of the rise of the church and its self‐affirmation as a historical actor in late antiquity. Logically, the demise of the genre by the seventh century is then to be explained by the dawn of a new period, in which church and state became indistinguishable (e.g. Markus 1975; Momigliano 1977; Chesnut 1986; Cameron 1998). The traditional view certainly has truth in it. Its weakness lies in the fact that it is constructed on the basis of the six preserved Greek and Latin orthodox church historians (I give their dates of publication): Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 325), Rufinus (ca. 402–403; the only one writing in Latin), Socrates (439–440), Sozomen (ca. 445), Theodoret of Cyrrhus (ca. 448–451), and Evagrius (ca. 594–600). This chapter argues that considerable nuance is added to the picture if we take the fragmentary material into account, look at other languages, and shed some long‐held presuppositions.
10.1 Origins
If Eusebius created ecclesiastical history, it certainly was not ex nihilo. Self‐conscious as any ancient author, he claims in his preface that he is “now the first to enter upon this subject, as if I am trying to walk a deserted and untrodden path” (Church History 1.1.3). This claim to originality has had two effects on scholarship. One is to distance Eusebius from classical historiography. Indeed, the statement strikes a chord with the modern scholar, who notices that the Ecclesiastical History has features absent in classical historiography, such as the quotations of other texts in extenso. This has led to the suggestion that Eusebius was more inspired by “parahistoriographical” genres, such as lives of philosophers and antiquarian historiography, than by mainstream classical historiography (Momigliano 1990, p. 138; Winkelmann 1991). The idea needs to be nuanced. Eusebius consciously seeks to insert himself into the grand tradition of classical historiography by indicating warfare, albeit against the powers of evil, as his subject (Church History 1.1.4, 5.pr.3–4). Documents were also cited within the classical tradition from historians such as Thucydides (5.23–24, 5.47) and Polybius (3.22–25, 3.27.2‐10, with Marincola 1997, pp. 101–103), although we should avoid reducing classical historiography to these canonized luminaries; the genre was varied, including national and local histories. One can best understand Eusebius as intending to write the history of the distinct people that the Christians claimed to be (see Johnson 2014).
Eusebius’s claim to originality also has the purpose of lifting him above his predecessors, who are silenced or at least downgraded. Scholarship has tended to follow Eusebius and to dismiss earlier attempts at writing history of the church as not really history. Yet, this was not the view of late ancient Christians, who could point to Clement of Alexandria, Hegesippus, and Julius Africanus as predecessors of Eusebius, as well as describe the evangelists and Moses, the author of the Pentateuch, as historians (Jerome, De viris illustribus 22; Macarius Magnes, Apocriticus 11.17; Philostorgius, Church History 1.1; Sozomen, Church History 1.1.12; Evagrius Scholasticus, Church History 5.24). There is undoubtedly a difference between Eusebius and his predecessors: He combines a theological conception of the church with a social one, which allows him to clearly define his subject matter with reference to its specific representatives, such as bishops, famous writers, heresies, and martyrs (Church History 1.1.1–2). Indeed, a more advanced institutionalization may well have been a social precondition for writing a history of the church, for which a more or less clear identification of the church within society was necessary. If, then, there is indeed a qualitative difference between Eusebius and his predecessors, his claim to be the first to write history has led to a lack of recognition of the other forms of writing about the past that preceded him. Indeed, Eusebius should also be seen as incorporating impulses toward historical writing from martyrology, heresiology, and apologetics (Morgan 2005; Morlet 2006; DeVore 2013).
It is, ultimately, more fruitful to ask in what context Eusebius situated his history, rather than what the origins of his historiography were. Indeed, there are many ways in which one can narrate the past of one’s religious community. An interest in the development of the community and its doctrine can be found in other late antique faiths as well. A life of Mani has been preserved in the Mani Codex from Cologne (ca. 300), and fragments from two Coptic codices with “church historical” content await edition (Sundermann 1986). Within Christianity, a series of apocryphal gospels exists, texts that were usually shaped by theological rather than by historiographical concerns but, nevertheless, added to the traditions about the origins of the Christian faith. What sets Eusebius apart from such forms of writings is a clear choice to insert ecclesiastical history within the tradition of Greco‐Roman historiography by depicting Christianity as a people with its own history. Besides illustrating the degree of cultural integration of Christianity in ancient civilization, it also hints at the fact that Eusebius was probably writing not just for a clerical or even Christian audience; he espoused the cultural forms of the ancient elite in order to address it and demonstrate to it the true nature of Christianity (Verdoner 2010; Corke‐Webster 2013).
10.2 Genre
Later church historians would readjust the Eusebian program to their own needs but would never abandon the view of ecclesiastical historiography as part of general historiography. Greek church historians have a clear awareness of a division of labor: Events dealing with the empire were the preserve of what we would call classicizing history, whereas ecclesiastical history dealt
with everything that related to the church. This can be observed in the case of Procopius, who, besides his history of Justinian’s wars, in which the church is by and large absent, planned an ecclesiastical history (Procopius, Wars 8.25.13; Anecdota 11.33.). There was, obviously, plenty of overlap between ecclesiastical and secular events, and historians reflected about this: Socrates affirms that one cannot assign a strict priority to either sphere, whereas Sozomen sees ecclesiastical events as having causal priority: Peace in the church assures peace in the empire (Socrates, Church History 5.pr; Sozomen, Church History 6.2.13–16, 8.25.1 with Wallraff 1997, 99–109 and Van Nuffelen 2004, pp. 117–124, 156–158). There were other differences between the two genres, too. Ecclesiastical historians felt less bound by the strict imitation of classical models, and they would, therefore, have less classicizing elements, without them being entirely absent. For the same reason they were more open to the quotation of entire documents in the original, as Eusebius had already been. Yet the quotation of documents was not an automatism: Sozomen, for example, clearly had reservations because their inclusion risked distorting the narrative balance (Church History 1.1.14), while Rufinus has virtually no documents at all and the Eunomian historian Philostorgius (ca. 424–438) very few if the extant fragments are anything to go by (Bidez et al. 2013; Bleckmann and Stein 2015).
