Preface to the Church History

Addressed to Chromatius, bishop of Aquileia, in the year 401. [a] (The occasion and date of this writing are discussed in the English editors’ introduction to this volume.)

They say it is the custom of skillful physicians, when they see that some epidemic is about to break out in one of our cities, to provide some kind of medicine, solid or liquid, which people can take as a preventive to protect themselves from the destruction hanging over them. You have imitated this practice of the doctors, my venerable Father Chromatius. The gates of Italy had been broken through by Alaric, the commander of the Goths, and a disease and a plague had poured in on us that laid waste the fields, the cattle and the people throughout the land. At that moment you looked for a remedy against the cruelty and destruction, so that people’s minds, languishing as they were, might be drawn away from the contagion of the sickness all around them and keep their balance through an interest in better things. This you did by charging me with the task of translating into Latin the church history written in the Greek language by that most learned man, Eusebius of Caesarea. You thought that the minds of those who heard it read to them might be so held by it that, in their eager desire to know the events of the past, they might to some extent forget their present sufferings. I tried to excuse myself from the task, as too weak for it, and as having lost the use of the Latin language over the years. But I reflected that your commands could not be separated from the place you hold in the apostolic order. For when the crowd in the desert was hungry, and the Lord said to his apostles, “You give them something to eat,” Philip, who was one of them, did not bring out the loaves hidden in the apostles’ bag. Instead he said that there was a little boy there who had five loaves and two fish. He knew that the display of divine power would be no less brilliant if the service of some of the little ones were used to accomplish it. He modestly excused what he did by adding, “But what are these among so many?” so that the divine power might stand out all the more through the hard and desperate circumstances in which it worked. I felt that, since you are a branch of the apostolic order, you may have acted in memory of Philip’s example. When you saw that the time had come for the crowds to be fed, you engaged the services of a little boy who could bring the five loaves he had received, counted twice over, and who could also, to fulfill the pattern of the Gospel, add two small fish he had caught by his own efforts. So I have attempted to carry out what you ordered, confident that the shortcomings of my inexperience will be excused because of the authority of the one who gave the command. [b]

I must explain the course I have taken with the tenth book of this work. As it stands in the Greek, it has little to do with the course of events. All but a small part of it is taken up with discussions in praise of particular bishops, and it adds nothing to our knowledge of the facts. So I have left out all this superfluous matter, and whatever in it belonged to real history I have added to the ninth book, with which I have made his history close. The tenth and eleventh books I have compiled myself, partly from the traditions of the generation before us and partly from facts within my own memory, and I have added them to the earlier books like the two fish to the loaves. If you give them your approval and your blessing, I will be fully confident that they will be enough for the crowd. The work as now completed covers the events from the Ascension of the Savior to the present time; my own two books cover the time from the days of Constantine, when the persecution came to an end, to the death of the emperor Theodosius. [e]

The following note appears at the end of the ninth book of Rufinus’s Latin version of Eusebius. Here Eusebius ends his record of the history. As for the events that followed, up to the present time, I will add them as I have found them recorded in the writings of the last generation, or as far as my own knowledge reaches, obeying as best I can, in this point too, the commands of our father in God. [f]