Athanasius Takes Refuge in Rome Again

At this time the Arians cooked up another accusation against Athanasius, and this was the pretext they invented. The emperors’ father had long before granted an allowance of grain to the church of the Alexandrians for the relief of the poor. This, they claimed, Athanasius had regularly sold, turning the money to his own profit. The emperor believed this slander and threatened Athanasius with death as the penalty. Alarmed at the threat, Athanasius fled and kept himself hidden. When Julius, bishop of Rome, learned of these fresh plots of the Arians against Athanasius, and had also received the letter of Eusebius, who had since died, he invited the persecuted Athanasius to come to him, having found out where he was hiding. [a]

Just then the letter of the bishops who had met some time before at Antioch also reached him, and at the same time others from the bishops in Egypt, assuring him that the whole charge against Athanasius was a fabrication. On receiving these conflicting letters, Julius first replied to the bishops who had written to him from Antioch. He complained of the bitter feeling they had shown in their letter and charged them with breaking the canons, because they had not asked him to attend the council, seeing that the law of the church required that the churches pass no decisions contrary to the views of the bishop of Rome. Then he censured them very severely for secretly trying to corrupt the faith. He added that their earlier proceedings at Tyre were fraudulent, because the inquiry into what had happened at Mareotis had heard only one side, and that the charge about Arsenius had plainly been proved false.

Such were the sentiments, and others like them, that Julius wrote in his answer to the bishops gathered at Antioch. We would have inserted his letters here in full, as well as those addressed to Julius, if their length did not interfere with our purpose. But Sabinus, the advocate of the Macedonian heresy, whom we spoke of before, has not included Julius’s letters in his Collection of the Acts of Synods, although he has not left out the one the bishops at Antioch sent to Julius. This, however, is his habit. He carefully includes the letters that make no mention of the term homoousion, or that reject it outright, and deliberately passes over in silence those that point the other way. That is enough on this subject. Not long after this Paul, pretending to travel from Thessalonica to Corinth, arrived in Italy. Then both the bishops appealed to the emperor of those parts, laying their cases before him.