Chronicle

Jerome, translating and continuing Eusebius of Caesareac. AD 380

Jerome’s Latin version of the chronological tables of Eusebius, which set the rulers and events of all nations side by side year by year, with his own continuation to AD 378. For the fourth century it records what a contemporary knew.

Eusebius compiled his chronological tables early in the fourth century; the Greek is lost. Jerome translated them into Latin about 380 and added his own continuation for the years 326 to 378. The work places each event against the regnal year of the reigning emperor, from which the year of the Christian era can be read off.

Its value differs by period. For the first three centuries it passes on what Eusebius had gathered from older writers, such as the notice, credited to Julius Africanus, of a “holy man” Abgar who reigned at Edessa. For the middle of the fourth century Jerome is writing of his own lifetime. He puts the death of the monk Antony the Great in the nineteenth year of Constantius, AD 356. The English translation linked here misprints Antony’s age in that entry as 150; the Latin has CV, 105, which agrees with Life of Antony.

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