The Historians of Late Antiquity

by David Rohrbacher

  The scope of the seven books can be briefly summarized. Book 1 covered 1,307 years, from the reign of the Assyrian king Ninus to the founding of Rome (2060–753). Book 2 brings the story up to the Gallic invasion of 390 (363 years), with the inclusion of events in Persia and Greece. Book 3 covers 109 years up to 281 and describes, in addition to Roman affairs, the wars of Philip, Alexander, and his successors. Book 4 treats the three Punic Wars and ends in 146 (136 years). Like book 4, book 5 is entirely Roman and brings the story up to the uprising of Spartacus in AD 73 (73 years). Book 6 covers 73 years and ends with the triumph of Augustus and the coming of Christ, two events closely linked in Orosius’ view of history. The last book, book 7, treats the history of the empire from Augustus to the advent of pacific Gothic leaders such as Ataulf and Wallia in 417.

  Orosius begins with Adam in order to emphasize the importance of original sin to his concept of history. This may reflect his concerns with the issues which Pelagianism had raised. Certain preoccupations which will color the entire history are adumbrated in the first chapter of the first book. The evils enumerated throughout his history, he says, have their roots in the sin of Adam. Evils which existed in the past, and which continue to exist “to some extent” today, “are undoubtedly either obvious sins or the hidden punishments of sins” (1.1.12–13). In particular, war is always to be considered an evil, since what are wars but “evils befalling one side or the other”?

  After Orosius’ discussion of Adam demonstrates that his work will be universal in time, he provides a lengthy chapter on the geography of the world which reveals that his work will also be universal in space (Corsini 1968: 73–83; Janvier 1982). Orosius’ geography is in general accord with the state of geographical knowledge in his time and depends ultimately, through an intermediate source or sources, on the map of the world made by Agrippa for his father-in-law, the emperor Augustus. The inclusion of geographical information is quite common in classical historiography, and thus Orosius seeks to emphasize the historical element of his work over the apologetic element. But his presentation of the geography of the entire world at the beginning of the work differs from the traditional geographic digression in a more typical history, which covers only the specific portion of the world which has come into the ambit of the historical narrative. Instead, Orosius reveals the importance of the entire world to his history. “Among Romans, as I have said, I am a Roman; among Christians, a Christian; among men, a man. … I enjoy every land temporarily as my homeland, because what is truly my homeland and what I love, is not entirely on this earth” (5.2.6).

  Christians attacked by pagans after the sack of Rome sought to refute the criticism by demonstrating that Rome had endured similar hardships in the past, even before the spread of Christianity. Although Orosius may have begun his research at the behest of Augustine with this modest aim, he ended up formulating a far more radical thesis in his work, a veritable “counter-history” to the histories of the preceding centuries (Inglebert 1996: 511). Orosius’ belief that a universal Christian God acted in history demanded that the period before the coming of Christ be not only comparable in misfortunes to his own time, but substantially worse. To the pagan charge that modern times had been corrupted by neglect of the traditional gods and the embrace of Christ, Orosius rebuts that the worship of the Roman gods and the ignorance of Christ had corrupted earlier times. Orosius thus stands against the historical vision of classical historians such as Sallust and Livy, which was adopted even by Christians such as Jerome and Augustine. These thinkers had portrayed the Romans of the early republic as glorious and virtuous, and had seen the following years as marked by a drastic decline in morals and virtue which led to the disastrous civil wars of the late republic.

  Orosius portrays the period of the kings in a negative light. He judges Romulus guilty of kidnapping and rape in the affair of the Sabine Women, and he adds that Romulus was the murderer of his grandfather, his brother, and the kindly and honorable Titus Tatius, and that he populated the Roman state with criminals who were promised immunity. The other kings are described as equally ignoble; Orosius notably omits mention of the saintly Numa Pompilius, who would not fit his argument well (2.4). But Orosius’ republic does not represent progress from the earlier period. Brutus, the tyrannicide and first consul, merely rivals and surpasses Romulus in the murder of members of his family (2.5.1). The parricide of Romulus serves, in fact, as a kind of original sin of the Roman state, and the Romans “sprung from Romulus” are not surprised when Publicius Malleolus (in 101) kills his mother (5.16.23–4).

  Orosius’ case against the Roman republic is not limited to the cruelty and evil of particular Romans, but includes natural disasters as well. Plague devastated Rome in 463, killing both consuls (2.12.3), and again in 267 (4.5.8), leading Orosius to comment that plagues do not take place “without the will of all-powerful God.” Likewise the devastation of constant war was occasionally exacerbated by fires and floods (4.11.6–9) or by swarms of locusts, such as the one which Orosius claims killed almost a million people in Africa in 125 (5.11).

  Orosius’ polemic against the republic centers, however, upon the prevalence of war. Most striking is the pathos he arouses by his rhetorically excessive description of the Gallic invasion of 390, which stresses how much more a catastrophe that sack of the city was compared to the more recent sack in 410. Many other examples may be found in the first six books of the History. Orosius’ focus on the blessings of peace distinguishes him sharply from other classical thinkers. His comments on the bellicose Philip and Alexander demonstrate his ideology. About Philip, he concludes, “the fraud, savagery, and domination of a single king resulted in the burning of cities, the devastations of wars, the subjugation of provinces, the slaughter of men, the theft of property, the plundering of flocks, robbery of the dead and the enslavement of men” (3.14.10). Of Alexander, he scorns the idea that his conquests “are judged to be praiseworthy more on account of the courage by which the whole world was conquered than to be despised on account of the vision by which the whole world was overturned” (3.20.10). It is this last point, the recognition that every conquest, Roman or otherwise, is a defeat for the vanquished, that Orosius makes so effectively. In contradistinction even to other late antique Christians, he rejects the idea of just war that served to elevate the wars of the republican period over the decadent imperial era. He knows that some will look at the victorious republican period as a fortunate one, but points out that “Rome conquers happily, to the extent that whatever is outside Rome is unhappily conquered” (5.1.3). Orosius’ perspective as a Spanish provincial perhaps encouraged this critical approach. He presents two hundred years of slaughter in Spain, and equivalent disasters in Carthage and Italy, as examples of the price of Roman republican expansionism (5.1.5–9, and cf. 5.5).

  In the republican period, Orosius claims, before the coming of Christ, original sin ensured disaster for men, but in the Christian era, the possibility of Christ’s intercession allowed for gradual improvement. The key moment in Christian history, the birth of Jesus, coincided with a key moment in Roman history, the rule of the first emperor Augustus, and this coincidence served as the basis for the political theology of Eusebius and then Orosius. In the beginning of his sixth book, Orosius credits God with conferring “by his arrangement all things upon one and the same emperor who was most powerful and merciful.” This was done to provide a peaceful and free area in which the followers of Jesus, from many nations, might spread the Christian faith (6.1). God chose to come to earth in heavenly form at the very time that a census was under way, in order to be counted as a Roman citizen (6.22.6). Orosius claims that Octavian entered the city of Rome on 6 January 27 BC, to celebrate a triumph and to close the doors of the temple Janus, signifying peace throughout the world. On this day, too, the emperor was first saluted as Augustus. This very same day is also the feast of the Epiphany, the appearance of the Magi before the baby Jesus, a coincidence which reveals the divine plan. Orosius, however, makes
these claims only with the help of several chronological errors, since the gates of Janus were actually closed on the eleventh of January, and Octavian’s triumph did not take place until August (Arnaud-Lindet 1990 vol. 2: 269). Orosius adds that other signs proclaimed the connection of Augustus and Jesus, as when a spring of oil, a symbol of Christ “the anointed one,” flowed for an entire day after a victory of the emperor (6.20.6–7). Further evidence of the link between the emperor and the Savior is found in Augustus’ adamant refusal to be addressed as dominus, “lord,” a title to be reserved for Jesus alone (6.22.5).

  Even if Augustus did not take the title of lord from Jesus, the two figures are nevertheless presented as parallel, with Augustus the temporal ruler of the universe just as Jesus is its ultimate ruler. Orosius then naturally prefers monarchy to other forms of government, not only because he sees the rule of a single man as necessary to impose peace on the world, but because this form of terrestrial government parallels monotheistic spiritual rule (3.8.5–8). Orosius’ thought may be distinguished from that of Eusebius by his emphasis on a different messianic sign. While Eusebius portrayed the military victory of Octavian at Actium over his rivals as comparable to the victory of God over demons, Orosius saw the peace prompting the closing of the gates of the temple of Janus as a sign of Christ’s arrival (Inglebert 1996: 574). Orosius, as always, stresses the peacefulness of the victory of Christianity.

  Orosius’ insistence on the supremacy of Christian times over ancient times sometimes reaches absurd heights (Corsini 1968: 115). He mentions, for example, a serious earthquake in Greece in 376 BC which destroyed two cities, and adds that, although earthquakes continue to threaten the world, the prayers of the emperor Arcadius and his Christian subjects prevented a recent earthquake from causing serious harm (3.3.2–3). Similarly, the devastation of the plague of locusts which ravaged Africa in 125 BC has never been repeated in the locust swarms of the Christian era, thanks to God (5.11.6). The success of the emperor Claudius in conquering Britain without bloodshed is contrasted with the failure of Julius Caesar, and the success of Claudius is attributed to the divine favor of Christian times (7.6.9–10).

  While evil acts continue to be perpetrated in Christian times, Orosius says that they are now to be interpreted as just punishment for wrongs committed. His unusual interpretation of the reign of Tiberius exemplifies this view. Tiberius began as a peaceful and popular emperor, who, Orosius claims, proposed to the senate after Christ’s crucifixion that Jesus be officially recognized as a god. This breach of senatorial protocol poisoned relations between emperor and legislature, and Tiberius’ ensuing desire to punish the senators gradually corrupted him. In his new and wicked mode, he killed numerous senators and relatives. In the twelfth year of his reign, the collapse of an amphitheater which killed twenty thousand people revealed divine displeasure with his rule. Though chronologically, in fact, the collapse preceded the crucifixion, Orosius placed it after a recounting of Tiberius’ sins to forge a link between crime and divine punishment (7.4). Orosius likewise places the civil war in which Septimius Severus defeated Pescennius Niger out of place chronologically to characterize it as punishment for Severus’ persecution of Christians (7.17). Consider as well Orosius’ interpretation of the reign of the next emperor, Gaius Caligula (7.5). On the one hand, Caligula’s depravity served well the need of God to punish sinful Romans and Jews. On the other hand, Caligula’s instincts toward evil were suppressed thanks to the mercy of God. Evidence of just how much worse he might have been arose after his death, when a large supply of poison and a long list of senators marked for murder were found in his private quarters.

  Orosius judges Constantine favorably, but not blindly (7.28). The emperor successfully conquered his rivals, who were persecutors of Christians, and restored peace to the church. He was militarily successful in his defeat of the Sarmatians, and he peacefully suppressed pagan worship. He is also praised for his creation of Constantinople, a city without idols. Orosius is more positive toward the emperor than is Jerome, who in his Chronicle accused Constantine of Arian sympathies and condemned his creation of Constantinople. On the other hand, Orosius does mention and condemn the emperor’s execution of his son, Crispus, and he refrains from the kind of panegyric found in Eusebius and Rufinus. Orosius portrays Theodosius I very favorably. While Rufinus had been content to portray Theodosius as a replica or reflection of Constantine, Orosius’ historical theology requires ever-increasing virtue in Christian times, and thus his Constantine must be inferior to his Theodosius (Inglebert 1996: 560–1). Theodosius and his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, are depicted as perfect and orthodox Christians, militarily successful through faith in God (7.34, 36, 42).

  Orosius’ vision of history is more complex than the simple distinction between bad, pre-Christian times and good, Christian times. The historian attempted to form an explanation for the succession of empires throughout all of world history through the identification of parallels between biblical passages and historical events. Although discovering such patterns in the historical record sometimes led to distortions in his account of the past, Orosius’ innovative attempt to place all of history into a coherent framework was immensely appealing to later ages.

  Orosius’ attention to chronology results from his desire to explain world history through a particular understanding of the succession of empires (Arnaud-Lindet 1990: xlv–lviii; Fabbrini 1979: 348–65; Corsini 1968: 158–68). The idea of a succession of empires is found in pagan works, notably in Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus, which Orosius drew upon (41; and cf. Vell. Pat. 1.6), but the biblical book of Daniel provides a more immediate influence upon our author (2: 31–45). Daniel gives an allegorical interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of four beasts, which are to be associated with the four successive kingdoms which ruled over the Jews: the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian, and the Macedonian. Interpretations of this vision several centuries later, in apocalyptic Jewish texts and in the New Testament book of Revelation (Rev. 13), saw the last beast as symbolizing not the Macedonian empire, but the Roman empire. Closer to the time of Orosius, the identity of the four empires had been given by Eusebius (dem. evang. 15.fr. 1) as the Assyrians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans, and in Jerome’s commentary on the book of Daniel (at 2:38–40), which Orosius may have read in Palestine, as the Babylonians, the Medo-Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans. In book 20 of the City of God, published in 425 or 426, Augustine had directed readers curious about the identity of the kingdoms to Jerome’s work, overlooking or deliberately avoiding the solution offered by Orosius in the meantime.

  Orosius identifies the four empires as the Babylonian, the Carthaginian, the Macedonian, and the Roman (2.1.4–6). The introduction of the Carthaginian empire is perhaps the most noticeable change in Orosius’ schema. Orosius identifies the four empires with the four cardinal directions, with Carthage serving as the “southern” empire. Its inclusion demonstrates Orosius’ western orientation and focus on the Mediterranean, as opposed to the near eastern orientation of other exegetes. The system also entails the neglect of Persia and of the Jews, neither of which occupies a prominent place in his historical philosophy. Orosius also innovates in portraying Babylon and Rome as the predominant empires, “father and son,” and stating that the intervening empires of Carthage and Macedonia are not linked by “inheritance” but served as “guardians” during the transition between the two more important empires.

  In the beginning of his second and his seventh book Orosius describes the extensive numerical correspondences he has discovered between the empires, sometimes at the expense of accurate chronology (2.3.1–4, 7.2.8–15). Orosius claims that “all ancient histories” begin with the reign of Ninus, and “all” histories of Rome with the reign of Procas. Each of these rulers served as “seeds” of their future kingdoms, for sixty-four years after each came the rule of Semiramis, the restorer of Babylon, and Romulus, the founder of Rome. The reign of Procas and the rise of Rome occurred s
imultaneously with the fall of Babylon, and the overthrow of Babylon by King Cyrus occurred simultaneously with the ejection of the Tarquins by the Romans and the establishment of the republic. Thus “the power of the East fell, and that of the West rose.” The numerology is linked to Christianity by Orosius’ observation that Abraham was born in the forty-third year of the reign of Ninus, and Christ was born forty-two years after the accession of Augustus. The transitional empires of Carthage and Macedon each lasted approximately seven hundred years, and Rome, although destined to last in order to provide a platform for the coming of Christ, suffered a serious fire in its seven hundredth year. Babylon existed for 1,164 years before it was conquered by the Medes, and it was likewise around 1,164 years after the founding of Rome that the city was sacked by Alaric and the Goths. More apocalyptically minded thinkers might have taken this last correspondence as evidence of the imminent destruction of the fourth kingdom and the end of the world, but Orosius draws the opposite conclusion. While irreligious Babylon was destroyed, Rome survived the fateful year through the mercy of God. Orosius has therefore removed the apocalyptic purpose from the biblical passage. While Daniel’s four kingdoms progressively declined and were then followed by a messianic fifth kingdom, Orosius’ kingdoms culminate in the divinely inspired fourth kingdom, the Roman empire.