needed advocacy in the world. Alaric entered Rome in 410; and it was to meet the cry of those who would lay that catastrophe at the Church's doors that Augustine began the Civitas Dei. Soon after, an ardent young Spaniard named Orosius came on pilgrimage to the great doctor at Hippo, and finding favour in his eyes, was asked to write a profane history proving the abundance of calamities which had afflicted mankind before the time of Christ. So Orosius devoted some years (417–418) to the compilation of a universal chronicle, using Latin sources, and calling his work Seven Books of Histories "adversum paganos."[1] Addressing Augustine in his prologue, he says:
"Thou hast commanded me that as against the vain rhetoric of those who, aliens to God's Commonwealth, coming from country cross-roads and villages are called pagans, because they know earthly things, who seek not unto the future and ignore the past, yet cry down the present time as filled with evil, just because Christ is believed and God is worshipped;—thou hast commanded that I should gather from histories and annals whatever mighty ills and miseries and terrors there have been from wars and pestilence, from famine, earthquake, and floods, from volcanic eruptions, from lightning or from hail, and also from monstrous crimes in the past centuries; and that I should arrange and set forth the matter briefly in a book."
Orosius's story of the four great Empires—Babylonian, Macedonian, African, and Roman—makes a red tale of carnage. He deemed "that such things should be commemorated, in order that with the secret of God's ineffable judgments partly laid open, those stupid murmurers at our Christian times should understand that the one God ordained the fortunes of Babylon in the beginning, and at the end those of Rome; understand also that it is through His clemency that we live, although wretchedly because of
- ↑ The best edition is Zangemeister's in the Vienna Corpus scriptorum eccles. (1882). Orosius ignores the classic Greek historians, of whom he knew little or nothing. Cf. Taylor, Classical Heritage, pp. 219–221.
truth of Christianity. If just then Christianity seemed no longer to demand an advocate, there was place for a eulogist, and such was Eusebius in his Church History and fulsome Life of Constantine. His Church History is translated by A. C. McGiffert, Library of Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. i. (New York, 1890). It was translated into Latin by Rufinus, friend and then enemy of St. Jerome.
