New History
A history of the Roman empire from Augustus to Alaric’s siege of Rome, by a pagan who had been an advocate of the imperial treasury. He blames Rome’s decline on the abandonment of the old gods and is hostile to Constantine.
Read the text at tertullian.org ↗Book 2: from Diocletian’s abdication to the death of Constans ↗
Zosimus wrote about the year 500, nearly two centuries after Constantine, and for this period is thought to follow the lost history of the pagan Eunapius. The Byzantine scholar Photius, who read him in the ninth century, calls him a count and former advocate of the treasury, and “an impious heathen”. His thesis is that the empire fell into ruin because it gave up the ancestral rites, and he is as hostile to Constantine as Eusebius is admiring.
That hostility is what makes him useful beside the Christian writers. His account of the war with Maxentius in book 2 has the same outline as theirs, the march into Italy, the battle outside Rome, the collapse of the bridge and the tyrant’s drowning, but says nothing of a vision or a sign. He wrote long after the events, and his very large figures for the two armies have no other support.
Cited in
- 28 October AD 312, firm date