Church History

Rufinus was a priest of Aquileia in northern Italy who had spent many years in the East. He says in his preface that Chromatius, bishop of Aquileia, asked him for the work at the time when Alaric and his Goths had broken into Italy, as something to turn people’s minds from the disaster. He put Eusebius into Latin and then added two further books of his own.

For the events of the 320s to 340s these books stand sixty to eighty years after the facts. Rufinus sometimes names his informant: the story of Frumentius, he says, he had from Aedesius of Tyre, who had been there (10.9). Elsewhere, as with the finding of the cross by Helena (10.7–8), he tells a story current in his day without saying where he learned it. Socrates says that he used Rufinus, and the other Greek church historians of the fifth century tell these stories in much the same form, so their agreement with him is not independent confirmation.