Seven Books of History against the Pagans
A history of the world from the creation to the author’s own day, written by a priest at Augustine’s request after the sack of Rome in 410. It dates Claudius’s expulsion of Jews from Rome to the ninth year of his reign.
Read the text at attalus.org ↗Book 7, chapters 1–25, in English (Attalus) ↗Book 7, chapters 1–25, in Latin, from the edition of C. Zangemeister, 1889 (Attalus) ↗
Orosius was a priest and an associate of Augustine. After the Goths took Rome in 410, pagans blamed the disaster on the neglect of the old gods. Augustine answered in the City of God and asked Orosius for a companion work showing that wars and calamities had been as bad or worse before Christian times. The result is a summary of ancient history compiled from earlier writers, among them Livy and Suetonius, and arranged to make that argument. He closes it at “the present day”, in what he counts as the 1,168th year of Rome (7.43), which the index at Attalus.org equates with AD 417.
For the first century Orosius writes more than three hundred and fifty years after the events and has no knowledge of his own. His statement that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome in the ninth year of his reign (7.6.15) appeals to Josephus. Dixon Slingerland, in an article on this passage (Jewish Quarterly Review 83, 1992, pp. 127–144), finds no source for such a statement in Josephus and takes the date to be Orosius’s own construction. He then quotes Suetonius, giving the name in the sentence as “Christus” where the manuscripts of Suetonius have “Chrestus”. See Claudius Expels Jews from Rome.
Cited in
- about AD 49, estimated date
- August AD 410, firm date