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24037 results in Ancient history

Page 331 of 1202

  • Chapter 8 - The Church and Rome

  • from Part III
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 249-279

  • Summary

    Chapter 8 treats Eusebius’ picture of the dynamics between church and Rome. It argues that Eusebius not only suggested that Christianity had been of importance in the Roman world from its birth, but also that its interests had always been aligned with those of Rome. By appropriating the traditional binary model of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors from earlier Greek and Roman imperial historiography, Eusebius suggested that only those emperors traditionally seen to be tyrants had persecuted Christianity, and that those emperors most respected by posterity had actually gone out of their way to protect it. Periods of persecution were thus anomalous; toleration was the norm. Most challenging was the most recent such anomaly, the ‘Great Persecution’, fresh in his audience’s memory. By affiliating the recent tetrarchs with famous despots of the Roman past such as Nero and Domitian, Eusebius explained away their abuse of Christians as part of wider tyrannical abuse of Roman elites. This ingenious historical schema was the capstone to Eusebius’ accommodationist picture of Christian history, both as an essential part of his reassurance to his audience about the pedigree of Christianity and to further his argument that Christians were among the best of Roman society.

  • Chapter 5 - Christian Families

  • from Part II
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 149-174

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 argues that Eusebius, despite his reputation as a champion of asceticism, in fact presents Christian families as the last bastion of traditional Roman family values. He thus rewrote the rejection of family inherent in much Christian literature of the second and third centuries, where Christian protagonists fight with pagan parents who resist their conversions, and aligned himself instead with more pro-familial factions in early Christianity. Non-Christian critics of Christianity had also presented Christianity as a religious minority that seduced innocent children away from their parents, and Christians as rebels who rejected the stable family unit in favour of sedition, immorality, and isolation. Eusebius instead sought to construct a picture of the Christian family aligned with traditional Graeco-Roman family values. He presents Christian families as exemplifying precisely the reciprocal obedience, affection and solidarity that characterised idealised Roman conceptions of the family, and hails them as the key locus for education. Moreover, at times of crisis in the History, Christians exemplify ideal Roman family values while non-Christians (Jews and ‘pagans’) fail to do so. As in the previous two chapters, Eusebius thus both responded to traditional elite criticisms of Christianity and affirmed the traditional nature of Christian piety.

  • Chapter 6 - Christian Martyrs

  • from Part II
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 175-212

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 argues that Eusebius, far from sharing the unproblematic celebration of martyrdom of much second- and third-century Christian literature, in fact re-appropriates Christianity’s past martyrs to make them vehicles for intellectual and pastoral qualities. In so doing he de-escalates the connotations of resistance towards Rome that martyrs had acquired in earlier Christian literature. Though Eusebius is often treated as celebrating martyrdom, he in fact values future contribution to the Christian community more highly than violent death. Eusebius therefore celebrated Christian martyrs, but he emphasised passive endurance under torture rather than active oppositional dialogue with state officials. His interest was not simply in the act of martyrdom itself but equally – if not more – in teaching and pastoral care, and he praised flight from persecution, especially when it facilitated care of the Christian community. He thus turned martyrs from symbols of violent resistance to Rome into models of those aspects of authority elevated in the preceding chapters, and he aligned Christianity’s past martyrs with Graeco-Roman philosophical views of self-killing. Again, this was done both in response to elite conservative criticism of Christianity’s martyr mentality and as part of Eusebius’ wider re-imagination of Christianity for his fourth century moment.

  • Chapter 2 - The Ecclesiastical History

  • from Part I
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 54-86

  • Summary

    The second chapter considers the place of the History within the picture of Eusebius, his world, and his work drawn in the first chapter. First, it pays detailed attention to the dating and audience of the History. While the History was undoubtedly the subject of authorial revision, this chapter argues that Eusebius’ priorities and aims remained the same throughout its composition. It also argues that Eusebius must also be envisaged as writing for both clerics and a wider Christian audience, many of whom shared the education, values, and prejudices of elite, Hellenised Roman citizens. These conclusions, in turn, suggest answers to why Eusebius wrote this text and how he wrote it to achieve those aims. It was the historical moment in which and the audience for whom he wrote, this chapter suggests, that dictated Eusebius’ historical project – to use the history of Christianity to construct a vision of the Christian community and its relationship with Rome. This was intended both to respond to conservative criticisms of Christianity – and to do so better than had previous Christian attempts – and, more importantly, to argue that it was the Christians who best represented traditional Roman values and who were thus best placed to inherit Rome.

  • Conclusion

  • from Part III
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 280-301

  • Summary

    The Conclusion considers the consequences of Eusebius’ rewriting of Christian history. He worked to construct a new and thoroughgoing vision of Christian authority in line with a traditional rhetoric of intellectual, temperate authority, rooted in Graeco-Roman and Christian paideia, learned in Christian households and schools and witnessed in life and death. In this, Eusebius was proposing a model by which Christian leaders should be judged. This meant, first of all, that Eusebius’ own position was strengthened, since he fared well against the criteria of legitimate authority he himself had established. Second, by erasing those elements of the Christian past that might make an elite Graeco-Roman Christian audience uncomfortable, the History sought to tear down the barriers to seeing ‘Christian’ and ‘Roman’ as aligned for an audience in which many would have thought of themselves as both. Third, Eusebius was making a statement about Christian authority and about authority in the Empire more generally, namely that Christians were best suited to wield authority not only in the church but also in the state. In closing, the Conclusion considers the final proof of this: Eusebius’s presentation of Constantine as the best of emperors by traditional standards precisely because of his Christianity.

Page 331 of 1202