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HISTORY
of Nicaea, consul in 223/4 and again in 229, devoted his retirement to writing
a vast history of Rome from Aeneas to Severus Alexander in eighty books,
much of which now survives only in excerpts or in an eleventh-century
epitome. Derivative for the most part and displaying all the shortcomings of
the rhetorical culture of the age, it is nevertheless a major work of synthesis,
upon "which the author has imposed the impress of his own personality and
the political outlook of the senatorial class of his time. It is the first major
history of Rome since Livy, and significantly it is written in Greek. In the
same period Herodian, possibly a Syrian, wrote his history of the Roman
world from the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 to the accession of Gordian III
in 238, a work much inferior in insight to that of Cassius Dio. Later in the
century P. Herennius Dexippus of Athens wrote four books on Greece under
the successors of Alexander, largely dependent on the work of Arrian, a
universal chronicle from mythical times to the reign of Claudius Gothicus,
and a history of Gothic wars up to at least 270. At the beginning of the fifth
century Eunapius of Sardis wrote a continuation of the chronicle of Dexippus
up to 404. As well as these major figures we hear of many other historians
writing in Greek, some dealing with local or regional history, others with larger
themes, like the apparently Roman Asinius Quadratus, who wrote a history
of Rome from the foundation of the city to the reign of Severus Alexander
in Ionic dialect in imitation of Herodotus.
In the same period Christians were beginning to write in Greek either on the
history of the church or on universal history seen from the Christian point
of view. Sextus Julius Africanus, an African philosopher turned Christian,
wrote a history of the world from the creation to the reign of Macrinus (217—18)
as well as a treatise on chronology in which Old Testament and Greek history
were brought together. This in itself was a departure from the rhetorical
tradition of classical historiography, which concerned itself only spasmodically
and unsystematically with such matters. But the man who set a
new stamp on Christian history-writing was Eusebius of Caesarea. Like
Julius Africanus he was interested in tying together biblical history and the
political history of the Graeco-Roman world, and to this end engaged in
chronological researches, and published a world chronicle accompanied by
comparative tables of dates, which does not survive in the Greek original.
•When he came to write the history of the Christian church from its beginnings
to his own times in ten books he faced a new problem. The point of view which
he expressed would be disputed not only by traditional pagans, but also by
sectarian fellow-Christians. Neither would be likely to be convinced by
rhetorical set-pieces, fictitious speeches, descriptive passages, general arguments,
and the like, of which so much use had been made by the historians of the
Roman empire, themselves the products of a rhetorical education and addressing
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