On Illustrious Men
A catalogue of 135 Christian writers from Peter to Jerome himself, with a short notice of each one’s life and books. For the second century it mostly repeats Eusebius, and adds some details found nowhere else.
Jerome wrote De viris illustribus at Bethlehem. In the last chapter he lists his own works “up to the present year, that is, the fourteenth of the Emperor Theodosius”, which is AD 392–393. His aim was to show that the church had its own men of letters.
For the writers of the first three centuries Jerome depends largely on the Church History of Eusebius, and his notices have no independent weight where they simply repeat it. He adds a few statements of his own: that Ignatius died in the eleventh year of Trajan (16), and that Tertullian was a presbyter of Carthage, the son of a centurion, who went over to the teaching of Montanus in middle life (53). These come from a writer working two or three centuries after the people he describes, and he does not say where he found them.
Cited in
- c. AD 64–68, traditional date
- about AD 110, traditional date
- about AD 197 to AD 220, estimated date
- AD 303 to AD 311, firm date
- AD 314, firm date
- c. 382–405, estimated date