Church History

Socrates lived in Constantinople and finished his history about 439, the year at which it stops. He begins, as he says in his first chapter, where Eusebius left off. For the last decades he could draw on his own memory and on people still living. For the Council of Nicaea and the reign of Constantine he writes more than a century after the events and depends on earlier writers: Eusebius, Athanasius, and the Latin church history of Rufinus.

He is open about this. At the start of the second book he explains that he rewrote the first two books after reading Athanasius and finding that Rufinus had the order of events wrong, and that he added the letters and documents which the first version had lacked. That habit of quoting documents in full is what makes the work useful. His sympathies lie with the Nicene side, but he is more restrained than most church writers of his time and gives room to groups outside the main church, especially the Novatians.