A Foretaste of Eusebian Panegyricism in

A Foretaste of Eusebian Panegyricism
in the Tenth ‘Festal Letter’

by St Dionysius (the Great) of Alexandria
Garry W. Trompf, FAHA
Emeritus Professor in the History of Ideas, Studies in Religion
& Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies,
University of Sydney
Visiting Lecturer, Church History,
St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College
Abstract: Apparently combining a sense of personal reprieve from

his troubles with a collective relief after the Decian persecution,
Dionysius the Great’s tenth festal epistle (pre-Easter 262) sounds
distinctly panegyrical notes over the victory and peace of the
emperor Gallienus. The author of this paper asks whether we have
signs in this letter of a publicised narration of recent imperial affairs
culminating in the successes of a worthy, even holy emperor. If so,
what does this tell us, first, about the situation of the Church at
the time (the 260s), and, second, what might it indicate about the
structuring of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, which (at least in its
later editions, and with other supplements) finishes with the defeats
of unworthy imperial contenders and the victories of Constantine as
the Church’s new protector.
Background
It was the strangest, most desperate and messiest of times. “Rome,”

it has been said, seemed now to be passing “through its darkest hour
since the battle of Cannae” or Hannibal’s victory of 216 BC.1 It was
four and three quarter centuries after the Carthaginian victory: the 260th
Olympiad approached, intriguingly in what became our Anno Domini
260. The ageing emperor Valerianus was in captivity at Ctesiphon, still
humiliated – perhaps still bowing as a human footstool whenever Shapur
1 Thus Max Cary, A History of Rome down to the Reign of Constantine (London:
Macmillan, 1954 edn) 726.
PHRONEMA, VOL. 30(2), 2015, 37-68

37
I, Persian king of kings, mounted his horse or chariot – and was soon
to be dead.2 There were more threats than ever before from barbarian
hordes breaking across imperial boundaries from the north, and to the
older Goths were added inter alia Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons, with
Vandal groups and the Carpi, the Borani and the Scythians (including the
Sarmatians and Urugundi).3 Great cities were in disarray: the impressive
strategic port of (pre-Constantinian) Byzantium had been ravaged, first
by an undisciplined imperial legion, and then by Goths, and the Persians
were always threatening Antioch (on the Orontes) since their sack of it
in 253.4 Publius Licinius Gallienus, Valerian’s son, became sole emperor
in 260, and both the great shame of his father’s demise and his own
behaviour patterns made for a very bad press. Presiding over “helpless
chaos,” he was alleged to be less concerned with the empire’s condition
than with fine clothing and coloured hair, good wine in golden goblets
(never in glass!), sexual exploits, jests, plays and poetry competitions,
and statues of himself.5
In Gallienus’ very inaugural year as sole emperor, indeed, the few

already-existing threats to imperial auctoritas began turning into a score.
Whether in Gaul (starting with Marcus Postumus), across the ‘Balkan’
region (starting with Ingenuus in Pannonia), or the east (with Septimus
Odaenathus’ initiative to take over Valerian’s lost role from his base in
2 Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 5 (Le Brun and Dufresnoy, vol. 2, 189-

90); Eutropius, Brev. Hist. Rom. 9.7 (Fabri 103).
3 Anne Wittke, Eckhardt Olshausen and Richard Szydiak (eds), Historischer Atlas
der antiken Welt (Neu Pauly – Supplements, 3) (Stuttgart: J.B. Meltzer, 2007)
218-23, 230-35.
4 ‘Trebellius Pollio,’ Gallieni duo (Scriptores Historiae Augustae = SHA) 6.8-
9; 13.6 (Magie, vol. 3, 28, 44); Geôrgios Syncellus, Eclog. Chronogr. P381B-
383A/V304 (Dindorf, vol. 1, 715-17); Res. Gest. Div. Sapor. 1.15-29 (Hurse 28-
29); Ammianus Marcellinus, Rer. Gest. 23.5.3 (Rolfe, vol. 2, 334); John Malalas,
Chron. 296-98 [=12.26-27] (Elizabeth Jeffreys et al. 162-63), etc., with critical
discussion regarding Antioch, Timothy D. Barnes, ‘The Persian Sack of Antioch
in 253’ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 169 (2009) 294-96.
5 Hist. nov. 1.37 (Ridley 12) (quotation); SHA Gall. duo. 1.[1]; 17.9 (Magie 16,
54) (general plight); 3.7-8; 5.6-7; 8.1; 9.2-3; 11.6; 16.1-6; 17.5-8; Tyr. trig. 8.9
(Magie 22, 26-28, 30-32, 34, 38, 50, 52, 80) (Gallienus’ foibles).
38
Phronema Volume 30(2), 2015
Palmyra), upstarts sprouted up in many corners, some only with regional

control in mind, others a higher prize, and almost all seeking the purple.6
The Christian Church, the biggest independent institution of the Roman
world, still felt the last stings of a serious bout of persecution and yet
was now faced with its first ‘post-Gnostic’ Christological crisis, when
the controversial bishop Paul of Samosata who taught that as Man Christ
differed only in degree from the prophets, took up the prestigious See of
Antioch in 260.7 That was expectedly a time, though, when competition
for power made ‘official paganism’ look haggard, with the keeping up of
official rituals and records of them at their lowest ebb. Political jostling
badly affected trade and economic networking started to falter.8 As if this
was not enough, a plague (or a series of them) had been ravaging the
empire, and of course the occasional earthquake. When “the great Bishop
of Alexandria” Dionysius came out of hiding in 252, stench, disease, and
street-fighting made it impossible to cross his own great city, with “its
numbers ever diminishing and consuming away,” and matters were to
get worse, his faithful flock being put to the test of patient caring when
the plague intensified, and Alexandrians becoming increasingly nervous
about serious Persian-Palmyran tensions quite close to hand.9 One of
6 For the various ‘tyrants’ or pretenders, esp. ‘Pollio,’ Tyr. trig. (SHA) (Magie
64-151); Aurelius Victor, De Caesar. lib. 32-34 (Pichlmayer 31-35); Eutropius,
Brev. 9.8 (Fabri 103); Zosimus, Hist. nov. 1.38-40 (Ridley 12-13); and on
Gallienus looking like the first usurper himself, Jordanes, De Orig. act. Get.
19-20 (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vol. 5, pt 1, s.v. Getica, Mommsen
85-86), using arripuit. For perspective (esp. on the ethnic heterogeneity of
barbarian groups), Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the
Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) chs
1-5.
7 On the Decian and Valerian persecutions, esp. Eusebius Pamphili, Hist. eccles.
6.39-42; 7.10-12 (Oulton, vol. 2, 92-112, 148-68); on Paul of Samosata, Henri de
Riedmatten, Les Actes du procès de Paul de Samosate: Étude sur la christologie
de IIIe au IVe siècle (Paradosis: Études de Littérature et de Théologie ancienne,
6) (Fribourg: Éditions Saint-Paul, 1952) 133-58.
8 Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1954 edn), vol.
1, pt 2, esp. pp. 302-3; Mikhail Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of
the Roman Empire (rev. Peter M. Fraser) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) 433-
501.
9 Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.21.2-22.11 (‘Festal Letters’ [5-6]) (Oulton 178-88); cf.
Zonaras, Epit. Hist. = Annal. 12.21 (Migne, Patrol. Graec. [=PG], vol. 134, col.
39
the few bright sides to AD 260, it would seem, was the birth of baby
Eusebius of Caesarea! – if the estimates are right10 – and it will be his
positivities that shall occupy most our attention in this article.
Dionysius the Great and the Purport of his Tenth Festal Letter
Intriguingly, as founder-figure of ecclesiastical historiography, Eusebius

relays part of a letter by Bishop Dionysius that – controversially
enough – fulsomely celebrates a key military success of Gallienus over
the usurping Fulvius Macrianus Major (dated to 261). On Dionysius’
reading Macrianus was already truculent toward Valerian in the Persian
campaign, and upon the emperor’s “enslavement” then turns against his
son, co-emperor, and rightful successor Gallienus in a military move
toward Rome.11 As the celebratory extract reads:
He [Macrianus Major], then, after inciting one of his emperors

[Valerian] and attacking the other [Gallienus], was quickly
snuffed out (exêphanisthê) [in a battle usually placed in Thrace,
defeated by imperial commander Aureolus], root and branch
[because his son Macrianus Minor, whom he had appointed
consul or emperor, was killed with him], and Gallienus was
proclaimed and acknowledged by all, being at once an old and
a new emperor (basileus), for he was before [co-ruling with
Valerian] and came after them [the usurping Macriani].12 So in
accordance with that which was spoken by the prophet Isaiah,
“Behold the former things are come to pass, and new things
1061A). There were ominous lead-up events before Egypt (and Alexandria) fell
to the fabled Zenobia, Odaenathus’ widow, in 269, and was held for almost two
years; esp. Zosimus, Hist. nov. 1.44-45, 52-56 (Ridley 14-17); Syncellus, Eclog.
Chronogr. P382A-B/V304 (Dindorf 716). Hugh J. Lawlor and John E. L. Oulton
fuss over the order and numbering of the Letters, wanting to put all three long
passages about the plague back to 252, but that a second and worse round hit
Alexandria in 259-60 is more likely; cf. their trans. and comm. of Eusebius, The
Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine (London: SPCK, 1927-28),
vol. 1, 232-35; vol. 2, 252-53; and see Zosmus, Hist. nov. 1.36 (Ridley 12).
10 David S. Wallace-Hadrill, Eusebius of Caesarea (London: A. R. Mowbray,
1960) 12.
11 Apud Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.10.5-6, cf. 7.13 (douleia) (Oulton 152, 168).
12 For Macrianus’ tyranny or usurpation, esp. Tyr. trig. (SHA), 11.2-3; 12.1-14.2
(Magie 90, 94-103); Zonaras, Annal. 24 (PG 134, 1067A-70C).
40
which will now spring forth! [Isa 42:9; 43:19 conflated].” For
even though a cloud speeds underneath the rays of the sun, and
for a short time screens and darkens it, and appears instead of it,
the cloud passes by or is dissolved and the sun that shone before
again shines forth and once more appears; and so Macrianus,
after coming forward and gaining access to the imperial power
(basileia) belonging to Gallienus, is no more, indeed never was,
while Gallienus is as he was before, and the basileia has, as it
were, set aside old age (τὸ γῆρας) and cleansed itself from its
former wickedness, and now blossoms better after a former plant
has gone (πορρώτερον ὁρᾶται), to be seen and heard more widely
everywhere.13
What worrying phenomenon do we have here? An extolled proto-

patriarchal figure, a saint of the Church, putting in such a good word
for a ruler so venal, indeed so brutal a tyrant (tyranni crudelis) that, in
one well known assessment, Gallienus would burn alive those jokingly
looking for his father among Persian captives at Rome, and would send
a letter to the Moesian front that not only armed combatants should be
slain, but old men and boys, and anyone found to speak ill of him, “the
son Valerian”?14 Even by Dionysius’ own implication, in an earlier ‘in-
house’ epistle to a fellow bishop in 258, would not the “abomination […]
and sins” of persecution under Valerian also involve his son as co-ruler?15
Indeed, was this not a very serious misjudgement of an emperor against
whom most pretenders not unjustifiably strove, rising one after another,
to dislodge his iron sway?
Fortunately, as many of this journal’s readers will be interested

to learn, some solid Australian scholarship comes to our aid to begin
13 Apud Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.23 (Oulton 188-90; annotating and slightly
retranslating Outlon and Lawlor, vol. 1, 234-35).
14 SHA, Gall. duo. 9.6-8; 18.1; Tyr. trig. 9.4-8 (Magie 34, 54, 84).
15 Dionysius to Hermammon, apud Hist. eccles. 7.10.7, and again 7.11.6 where he
quotes the deputy-prefect Aemilianus’ reference to “our lords,” thus referring
to Valerian and Gallienus together (Oulton 152, 156). Valerian’s persecution
was to be given its own number as the eighth persecution, see Jacques Moreau,
‘Observations sur l’ΥΠΟΜΝΣΤΙΚΟΝ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ ’ΙΩΣΗΠΤΟΥ’ Byzantion 25-
27 (1955-57) 263-67.
41
helping us with an explanation. Gallienus, so his South Australian

biographer, Chief Justice and University of Adelaide Chancellor the late
John Bray, carefully persuades, was better able to control imperial affairs
than his detractors allege. A clever manoeuvrer of various powerbrokers
in the field, he regained a good measure of supremacy in his later years
(266-68),16 and in a sense his victory over the Macriani was one early
sign of his tactical cleverness, because he used his Illyrian commander
Aureolus to manage the job. Aureolus had already helped Gallienus
dispose of Ingenuus, and did not pretend to emperorship until 267,
when his revolt at Milan was quelled, just before Gallienus himself was
assassinated.17 The use of Aureolus reflects the shift of imperial policy
to rely on already trusted (usually equestrian) commanders, forbidding
senators from military leadership and now relying primarily on horsemen
in battle (after cavalry successes against the Goths).18 Bray also believes,
developing others’ suspicions and probing numismatic evidence, that
Gallienus’ theatrics – his depreciated personal antics and ‘effeminacy’
– actually had to do with “sexual politics,” or the emperor’s “reformist”
attempts to foster the cult of Magna Mater or goddess worship as well
as Neoplatonism.19 Be this last point as it may, Gallienus brought the
Decian and Valerian persecutions (250-60) to an end, and it is another
very able Australian scholar, the late Robert Pretty, Lecturer in Church
History at the University of Sydney, who explains what Dionysius the
16 Bray, Gallienus: A Study in Reformist and Sexual Politics (Adelaide: Wakefield

Press, 1997) chs 5, 12, 19-20.
17 On the timing of the pretendership, see, e.g., Zosimus, Hist. nov. 1.40 (Ridley
13), yet cf. SHA, Gall. duo 2.6-7; Tyr. trig. 11.1-2 (Magie 20, 90); and on the
defeat of Aureolus and the death of Gallienius, Zosmus, Hist nov. 1.40 (Ridley
13); Zonaras, Annal. 12.25 (PG 134, 1071AD); cf. SMH, Gall. duo. 14.1-15.1
(Magie 46-48).
18 Aurelius Victor, De Caesar. 33-34 (Pichlmayr 33-36); and see F. Andreas
Alföldi ‘Der Ursurpator Aureolus und die Kavallariereform’ in his Studien zur
Geschichte der Weltkrise des dritten Jahrhunderts n[ach] Chr[istus] (Darmstadt:
Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967) 1-16.
19 Bray, Gallienus 215-24, and ch. 17, with the sources on 368-69, 371-73. On
the emperor’s Neoplatonic interests, rebuilding Campania as Platonopolis and
celebration of the Feast of Plato, Porphyry, Vit. Plot. 3-4 [prefacing Plotinus,
Enneads] (Armstrong 10-12), and see below n. 46.
42
Great’s feelings would be like when he officially received the imperial

reprieve in Alexandria.20 While lasting to experience the first three years
of Gallienus’ sole reign Dionysius was already a somewhat battered old
man (born in the 190s), who had survived almost a decade of persecution
in hiding (starting from an anti-Christian uprising in Alexandria in 248 to
Decius’ death in 251), and was then banished by Valerian to Libya in 257,
even while still carrying out many of his episcopal duties. If Gallienus
had allowed him back, hardships in Alexandria wracked him further. The
context of Dionysius’ response to the imperial victory of the Macriani in
262, then, was one of a nervous if venerable Pappas, who did not want the
previous year’s friendly imperial rescript for his flock to be jeopardised.
For very soon after Valerian’s capture, as an immediate threat, Fulvius
Macrianus and his sons had all too quickly assumed complete control of
Egypt and its grain supplies.21
Now we obviously need to ponder the general nature and genre of
20 Rescript of 261, Gallienius to Dionysius and other bishops, quoted in Eusebius.

Hist. eccles. 7.13 (Oulton 168), implying all (non-regular) places of worship
(topoi tôn thrêskeusimôn), not just the Christian churches, would now be
unmolested.
21 On the Dionysian struggles, Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 6.39-7.11; 13; 21-22 (Oulton
92-166, 168, 178-88); Jerome, De viris illustr. [= Catalog. Script. Eccles.] 69
(Richardson, 376b, referring to the work De Exil.); with Dionysius Epist. 12
(in the ordering and ed. of Salmond, 108, with n. 2), and noting other letters,
e.g., Syncellus, Eclog. Chronogr., P373D-375B/V297-8; P379D-380D/V302-
3 (Dindorf 702-4, 712-14), some found much later, Frederick C. Conybeare,
‘Newly Discovered Letters of Dionysius of Alexandria to the Popes Stephen
and Xystus’ English Historical Review 25 (1910) 111-14; and then see Robert
A. Pretty, ‘Dionysius the Great of Alexandria’ (Masters of Theology dissert.,
Melbourne College of Divinity) (Melbourne, 1959) [copy: Camden Theological
Library, Sturt University, United Theological College campus, North Parramatta,
NSW, Australia]. Pretty’s was the first major biographical and assessment study
of Dionysius since Franz Dittrich’s Dionysios der Grosse von Alexandrien
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1867). Since Pretty, see for Wolfgang A. Bienert
(below n. 41). On material evidence of the Macriani controlling Egypt, esp.
Arthur Stein [et al.], Prosopographia Imperii Romani saec[uli] I. II. III (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1943 edn) vol. 3, 215-16 (ns 546, 549); Hans-Georg Pflaum,
Les carrières procuratoriennes équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain (Paris: P.
Geuthner, 1960-61) vol. 2, 93-3 (n. 350).
43
the Dionysian letter about the Gallenian “Peace,” written “to [bishop]22
Hermammon and the Egyptian brethren.” Certainly its contents are
celebratory and about important affairs in the Roman world, so one
would expect it to be read aloud as a public document, probably only in
Greek. That it is in the form of a letter with particular addressees does
not make it any the less open to a wider readership. As is commonly
accepted, Dionysius sets the tone, if he is not the very initiator, of the
Alexandrian bishops’ annual Festal Letters made so very familiar for us
from fourth and fifth century exemplars.23 Whether or not it was one
in a set of annual epistles and whether one among a series setting the
date of Easter for the year, as became customary, the Dionysian Festal
Letter conventionally numbered Ten carries very special properties:
it appears panegyrical. The emperor and the empire under his aegis
are being especially honoured, when there is not much in the rest of
Dionysius’ written output that spills beyond ecclesial affairs. We would
be right to suspect it as a very unusual document, and an important public
engagement of the church with a friendly reign. But it seems doubly
unusual when, among emperors, Gallienus was ostentatiously supportive
of non-Christian deities. If Severus Alexander and Philip the Arab held
sympathies toward Christianity (222-35, 244-49), even in their case we
still have no Christian, but only pagan encomiums to laud their paces.24
22 For long rightly or wrongly assumed, from Louis-Sébastian le N. Tillemont,

Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles (Paris:
Charles Robustel, 1693-1738) vol. 4, 276-77.
23 On the basis of Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.20 (Oulton 176-78), thus Johannes
Quasten, Patrology, vol. 2: The Ante-Nicene Literature after Irenaeus (Utrecht:
Spectrum, 1962) 108-9; even if the Festal Letters of such greats as Athanasius,
Theophilus and Cyril are not known for their attention to imperial achievements;
see Pauline Allen, ‘The Festal Letters of the Patriarchs of Alexandria: Evidence
for Social History in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’ Phronema 29:1 (2014) 1-19.
Eusebius acquired Gallienus’ rescript for the cessation of persecution only in
Latin; Hist. eccles. 7.13 (Oulton 168).
24 On Severus Alexander, see SHA, ‘Aelius Lampridius,’ Alex. Sev. 13-68, noting
29.2 (Magie, vol. 2, 200-312, with 234); cf. Lucien Jerphagnon, ‘La culture
philosophique des empereurs de Rome et leur action politique’ in Reason,
Action, and Experience: Essays in Honor of Raymond Klibansky (ed. Helmut
Kohlenberger) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1979) 149; on Philip, Eusebius, Hist.
eccles. 6.34, 36.3, 39.1 Oulton 88, 90, 92); Eusebius(-Jerome), Chron. s.v.
44
The Roman panegyric has not quite settled into the vogue famously
presented in the fourth century, at the hands of Libanius, Themistius,
Pacatus and others.25 All sorts of intriguing expressions occur as the genre
developed. One with the longest lineage, best known to run between
Virgil and Lactantius, associates a new emperor with the re-arrival of the
Golden Age, while other popular tropes have emperors as embodiments
of restoratio, Roma renascens, iuvenescens, or as some previous great
ruler redivivus.26 In the context of Gallienus’ turbulent time, some were
unctuous: the reign of “the divine” Claudius II “Gothicus,” who made
res publicae secure after Gallienus was killed – tracking down his worst
of the Pretender-tyrants, achieving great victories against the Goths and
containing Zenobia’s Palmyran Empire – was allegedly welcomed with
an oracular poem, that he “would surpass men of old (veteres) in his
descendants (novellis),” who “would rule as monarchs (reges).” Taking
the Scriptores Historiae Augustae in which this was reported to be from
Diocletianic times (ca 300), much was being made here that Claudius
was the uncle of Constantius (I) Chlorus, appointed Caesar by Diocletian
Olymp. 256-7 (Migne, Patrol. Lat. [=PL], vol. 27, cols. 645-46), and see Yasmine
Zahran, Philip the Arab: A Study in Prejudice (London: Stacey International,
2001); yet cf. Louis J. Swift (with trans.), ‘The Anonymous Encomium of Philip
the Arab’ Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 7 (1966) 274 (sect. 4); Lukas de
Blois, ‘The Εἱς Βασιλέα of Ps.-Aelius Aristides’ Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
Studies 27:3 (1986) 279-88. The Origen who wrote the (Neoplatonic) treatise
Ὁτι μόνος πολίτης ὁ βασιλεύς, with its implications for social unity, did so
under Gallienus, not Severus Alexander, and could not be the Church Father;
see Frederic Schroeder, ‘Ammonius Saccas’ in Aufstieg und Niedergang der
römischen Welt (eds Wolfgang Haase amd Hildegard Temporini) (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 1987) pt 2, vol. 36.1, 497. The great Origen, however, temporarily
tutored in Severus Alexander’s family; Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 6, 21.3-4 (Oulton
66-68).
25 Start with C. Edward V. Nixon and Barbara S. Rodgers (trans. and eds), In
Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994).
26 For cases, e.g., Bodo Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte
Vorstellungen (Spudasmata, 16) (Hildersheim: G. Olms, 1967), esp. ch. 6; Garry
W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, vol. 1: From
Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)
191, 198, 245, with ns 322-25. [Note: iuvenescens often carries the meaning of
rejuvensecence].
45
– a prelude to Constantine the Great’s claim to legitimacy that Claudius,

“restorer of Roman unity,” was his grandfather.27 But some panegyrics
could be deliberately sardonic, so that one Julius Atherianus was said to
praise the Pretender Victorinus, successor to Posthumus in Gaul, as equal
in courage to Trajan, in kindness to Antoninus, in nobility to Nerva, yet
outdoing everyone in lust for women and thus deserving removal (thus
iudicio meruisse puniri).28
What kind of panegyric was Dionysius the Great’s? Surely

fairly indirect as far as particular praise for Gallienus is concerned,
and negative toward “a former wickedness” (προῦσα κακία) of those
wanting to disturb rightfully held power, who have dissipated like clouds
before the sun – the helios, though, being more of a rightness rather than
Gallienus as such, who perhaps by 261 was known abroad to have had an
enormous image made of himself as the sun, at Rome.29 The Dionysian
focus was also not so much on the person of the emperor but on the re-
securing of stability, on the divinely sanctioned social order for which the
title of the emperorship, or the imperium, stood (cf. Rom 13:1-7; 1 Tim
2:2), with an undisturbing ruler being the object of liturgical prayers.30
At the same time the bishop was fully engaged with quite popular
rhetoric of the empire’s corporate life, with the typos that Rome’s career
ran like a human life cycle, and that, once the rule of Caesars applied,
she had passed beyond the stage of maturity or ordinary manhood. The
27 SHA, ‘Pollonius,’ Div. Claud. 10.3, with 9.9; 13.2, etc. (Magie, vol. 3, 168-70).
Sir Ronald Syme notoriously denied the descent-line Claudius-to-Constantine
as a “fraud,” in his Emperors and Biography: Studies in the ‘Historia Augusta’
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 209; yet for further discussion, Nixon and
Rodgers, Panegyrici Latini, pp. 219-20, n. 6; and see Michael Grant, The
Emperor Constantine (London: Phoenix Giant, 1993) 27 (quotation).
28 SHA, Tyr. trig. 6.6-8 (Magie 76) (the panegyricist’s name may be sheer
invention).
29 Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7, 23.2-3 (Oulton 188-90), yet cf. SHA, Gall. duo 18.2
(Magie 54).
30 Dionysius to Hermammon, apud Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 10.1.1 finis (Oulton
136); cf. Paul F. Ford, ‘Oratorio universalis: The Universal Prayer or Prayer
of the Faithful’ in The Liturgy Documents (by Mark E. Wedig et al.) (Chicago:
Archdiocese of Chicago, 2013) 189.
46
question was then how to express her condition – a matter for care!
Those rhetors most ambiguous seemed to talk positively of a “second
childhood” but with the unavoidability of senility implied (thus first-
century Stoic philosopher Seneca, readjusted later by Lactantius); those
most enthusiastic about overcoming senescence wrote of a “renewed
manhood” (iuventus) (so second-century historian Florus on Trajan and
Hadrian, after debilitation between Tiberius and Nerva). In his mid-third-
century context Dionysius seems cautiously in-between: the empire has
“put aside gêros,” brought on by a wickedness needing to be “cleansed,”
and is now once more in “full bloom” – but of course no flowers any
more than clouds last forever. Dionysius’ imagery is perhaps closest to
that of late pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus from the next century
on, who (under Constantius II and Julian) thought Rome had entered a
quieter time in her old age, one of venerableness and stability despite
signs of declining and slackness.31 So the churchman saw the point of the
body-state analogy and skilfully deployed it, yet of course he was bound
to read its workings in terms of the true religion and the vulnerability of
the pagan state to waywardness; and, like Cyprian of Carthage, he was
not without a sense of the whole world ageing away.32
Nevertheless, his pontifical care admitted, Dionysius

enthusiastically indulged in panegyrical-style verbiage, as affected
by Biblical conceits. The Macriani are removed “root and branch”
(prorrizos) (cf. LXX Mal. 4:1βb), with evocations of Isaianic language
made as if a new divinely ordained order (Isa. 42.9; 43: 19; cf. 2 Cor
31 Esp. Seneca, apud Lactantius, Div. Inst. 7.15 (Le Brun and Dufresnoy, vol. 1,
561-63); Florus, Epit. 1, proem. 8 finis; cf. 34.19; 2.14 (Forster 8, 156, 300);
Dionysius, apud Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.23.3 (Oulton 186-88); Ammianus,
Rer. gest., 14.6.3-6 (Rolfe 36-38); and for wider discussion, Trompf, Recurrence
188-92.
32 Apud Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.21.10, pace his anti-chiliasm, as reflected in
7.24-25 (Oulton 182, 190-208 respectively); and cf. Cyprian, Ad Demetr.
2-4 (PL 4, 545A-47B). For Ammianus on ‘religion,’ Edwin A. Judge, ‘The
Absence of Religion: Even in Ammianus?’ in Making History for God: Essays
on Evangelicalism, Revival and Mission (eds. Geoffrey R. Treloar and Robert
D. Linder) (Stuart Piggin Festschrift) (Sydney: Robert Menzies College, 2004)
295-308.
47
5:17), certainly a blessed social efflorescence (thus porrôteron, cf. Isa

27:6; 35:2), was unfolding. Dionysius looks sensitive to what we learn
from late pagan imperial rescripts and ideology, which reminded minions
of the provinces that “true security” (sôtêria) came only through worship
“according to nature” (κατὰ φύσιν) or the correct first-fruits, “sacrifices
of conciliation,” and that “the earth will refuse the seeds committed to
it” – or in other words no blossoming occur – if the gods are neglected,
or that the sun which “can keep us safe” is still always there even if he
can freely “take his rays to himself.”33 He was thus perfectly well aware
of the do ut des principle prevalent in public religio, that when the correct
thing is done by the gods, they will give back blessings, and he openly
appealed to the necessary preservation of sympathy between earthly and
planetary orders.34 If ever there was any serious attempt to unify paganism
in the late pagan empire it was done through so-called “solar theology,”
the sun becoming key among the planets that governed the seven days of
the week in the Julian calendar, as the Alexandrine astrologists famously
taught.35 Having the sun back to shine on him, Gallienus was definitely
made to be on the right side with the divine, and, as we shall see, with
more favourable indications beyond the main passage presented above.
The bishop was thus very much politically engaged, calling the lie to
33 Thus quoting Deputy-prefect Aelianus in court to Dionysius, apud Eusebius,

Hist. eccles. 7.11.6 (Oulton 156) (first two quotations); Sibylline Oracle apud
Zosmus, Hist. nov. 2.6 (Ridley 27-28); Maximin Daia, Rescript [May] 312, apud
Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 9.7.3, 8 (seen by Eusebius at Tyre in Latin, Oulton 344) =
in Greek at Lycia, see Orientalis Graeci Inscript. Select. 569 (Dittenberger, vol.
2, 252); and Julian, Gest. Heroic. Constant. 80b-d (Wright, vol. 1, 214).
34 On reciprocity, e.g., Epig. Lat. [Limentani] 10-11; Inscrip. Urb. Rom. Lat. [Bang]
38425, and see Trompf. ‘Do ut des’ in Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (eds
Robert Segal and Kocku von Stuckrad) (Leiden: Brill, 2015), vol. 1, s.v.; on
cosmic sympathy, Franz Boll and Carl Bezold, Sternglaube und Sterndeutung
(rev. Wilhelm Gundel) (Leipzig: Teubner, 1931 edn) esp. 158; cf. also E. R.
Dodds, Christian and Pagan in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 190 edn).
35 Using here Robert J. Forbes and Eduard J. Dijksterhuis, A History of Science and
Technology, vol. 1: Ancient Times to the Seventeenth Century (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963) 87-89; cf. Gaston H. Halsberghe, The Cult of Sol Invictus (Études
préliminaire aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain, 23) (Leiden: Brill,
1972).
48
those who see Christian leadership naïve and as little involved as possible
in worldly issues; and he was ready to concern himself with imperial
affairs at a crucial point, for the Decian persecution and its follow-up by
Valerian was “a real testing-point between the church and the empire.”
As William Frend intelligently gauged it,
[H]ad the church collapsed, it could scarcely have recovered. As

it was, the combination of military and economic disasters took
a heavier toll on traditional and pagan society than they did the
church. The latter proved triumphantly resilient.36
There is a combined note of triumphalism and of divine justice in the

Dionysian Festal Letter, but it is wisely kept subdued.37 For, back in
257, Dionysius blames Macrianus Senior, who, still not yet a pretender
but in charge of “imperial accounts,” and evidently once Christian
or a supporter, turns to persuade Valerian to persecute the Church
(when Gallienus was an inexperienced co-ruler). In pastoral letters (to
Hermammon), Dionysius explains how Valerian’s court was graced with
various Christian persons, yet as if in an apocalyptic moment and like
a master of Egyptian “magicians” (magoi), Macrianus alters Valerian’s
religious outlook and encourages his anti-Christian moves. Through
such a betrayal Macrianus “banishes himself from his own salvation,”
and Biblical texts are quoted in condemnation – a woe from Ezekiel, a
promise of recompense (cf. antapodôsô) from Isaiah, and a warning of
36 William H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984)

328 within ch. 9, and see Allen Brent, A Political History of Early Christianity
(London: Continuum, 2009) ch. 7; while also noting Eusebius’ phraseology
in Hist. eccles. 7.32.23 (Oulton 328-40). Yet cf. Robert L. Fox, Pagans and
Christians (London: Penguin, 1988 edn) esp. ch. 10; Ramsay McMullan,
Christianizing the Roman Empire (AD 100-400) (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1984) chs 3-4. See also Moreau, ‘Krise und Verfall: Das Dritte Jahrhundert
n[ach] Chr[istus] als historische Problem’ Heidelberger Jahrbücher 5 (1961)
128-42; cf. Stanley A Cook et al. (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 26:
The Crisis of Empire (eds Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and Averil Cameron)
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 edn).
37 Unless it comes out in another part of the epistle that Eusebius only quotes in
part, but this is unlikely.
49
sins visiting one’s children from Exodus.38 No wonder, then, that when
Dionysius indulges in panegyric, the just removal of Macrianus (and at
least one of his sons) is heavily on his mind. And he could probably
rest assured, given the sensitive fact of persecution occurring under the
emperor’s father Valerian, that he had always put the hostility down to a
Judas-like betrayer and malevolent sychophant.
More than anything else, though, Dionysius’ exaltant words were

an expression of relief that persecution had ceased. It is not easy for us
to imagine what it would be like to bear the responsibility of Christian
leadership knowing that true commitment encouraged in one’s flock
would put whole families in harm’s way. Eusebius, as recorder of many
troubles for the Church, was obviously highly sensitive about this matter,
because the deepest vein of his history has to do with martyrdom, and,
given the fierceness of the Diocletianic persecution in his own time, his
work was in danger of being top-heavy at its end with details of deaths
from Caesarea and the Palestinian region (esp. 303-306).39 Eusebius
went so far as to say that, compared to his father, Gallienus was “more
prudent” (sôphronesteron), which was hardly the case generally, but
specifically so because he stopped the “molesting” of the churches.40 It is
time, then, to consider the Eusebian perspective on Dionysius, and from
now on gauge what effects the Dionysian material has on the composition
of history, his views about the nature and course of church history, and
his attitudes to changes and outcomes in Roman and other socio-political
affairs.
38 Quoting LXX Ezek. 13:3; Isa. 66:3, 4; Exod. 20:5, and also Rev 13:3, 5;
Dionysius apud Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.10.2-9 (Oulton 150-54); cf. also
Zonaras, Annal. 12.24 (PG 134, 1067A-70D).
39 On the question of whether The Martyrs of Palestine formed part of the ending
of his Historia ecclesiastica in an earlier edition, Trompf, Early Christian
Historiography: Narratives of Retributive Justice (London: Continuum, 2000)
135.
40 Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.13 (Oulton 168).
50
The Question of Dionysius’ Impact on Eusebian Panegyricism
Certainly access to Dionysius’ episcopal records and theological writings

offered riches to the great pioneer of ‘classic’ ecclesiastical history: no
other body of documents are quoted so extensively in his masterwork up
until the time of Constantine, passages by Dionysius making up around
ten percent of the whole text on pre-Constantinian events, straddling
his Books 6 and 7 (from 6.40.1 to 7.30.17). Access to these records
probably came through the library networking that linked Caesarea with
Alexandria, the former being a virtual outpost of the Alexandrian School
consolidated by the great Origen. Dionysius was a pupil of Origen’s in
the 230s; Pamphilus, Eusebius’ own teacher, was a later product of the
School who amassed a great library at Caesarea containing many of
Origen’s commentarial works (used with glee by young Bible researcher
Jerome), and who wrote an Apology for Origen, with Eusebius’ support.41
Origen was Eusebius’ own scholastic hero, so one might expect time
spent on crucial pastoral and theological issues handled by a great
Alexandrian churchman, a keen show of interest later reciprocated by
efforts to translate Eusebius into Coptic.42 These connections and the
very availability of the sources thus help explain the stresses and balance
of things in what should be rated as the first thoroughly documentary
history ever – a history-work consistently revealing the text’s sources
which are quoted in extenso.43 But the precise selection of the politically
41 On Dionysius, Jerome, Vir. illustr. 69 (Richardson 376); Eusebius, Hist

eccles. esp. 6.29, 46 (Oulton 80-82, 128); Photius, Biblioth. cod. 232 (PG 53,
1011CD); cf. Wolfgang A. Bienert, Dionysius von Alexandrien: Zur Frage der
Origenismus im dritten Jahrhundert (Patristische Texte und Studien, 21) (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 1978); on Pamphilus, esp. Jerome, Vir. illustr. 3; 75 (Richardson);
Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 6.32-33.4; 7.32.24-25 (Oulton 84-86, 240); Vit. Pamph.
apud Jerome, Vir. Illustr. 81; and Jerome himself, ibid., 3, 75, 113; Interpret.
Homil. Duar. Origenis in Cant. (PL 23, 1118A-44D); Origen, Lexici (ibid. 1253-
70); Photius, Biblioth. cod. 118 (PG 53, 692-93AB).
42 Cf. Hist. eccles. esp. 6.23-6.39.4 (Oulton 70-94); cf. Walter E. Crum, ‘Eusebius
and Coptic Histories’ Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 26
(1902) 69.
43 William Adler, ‘Early Christian Historians and Historiography’ in The Oxford
Handbook of Early Christian Studies (ed. Susan A. Harvey and David G.
Hunter) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 592. If generally an unpopular
51
charged and panegyrical-looking material is another issue, and relates

to a matter at the very heart of Eusebian studies. For, as is well known,
Eusebius becomes a triumphalist panegyricist for Constantine, extolling
the Pax Constantiniana as if the sun was permanently there to shine.44
The intriguing question arises, then, whether the Dionysian

approach to church-state relations conditioned Eusebius’ own responses
to the empire after the so-called Edict of Milan gave respite to Christians
(from 313). Prima facie, the presence of Dionysius’ tenth ‘Festal Letter’
in the Eusebian history would not seem to carry much significance.
Although other lengthy documents quoted (about Macrianus Senior)
connect to it, it seems tucked away within a variety of the bishop’s
offerings and does not seem to bear proleptic significance. At least we
can say, admittedly, that the celebratory passage we ourselves re-quoted
above was placed last in a series to do with difficult practical matters for
the Alexandrian church, presented as the last of the Festal Letters (before
Eusebius goes on to tell us of Dionysius’ arguments against the chiliasm
of Nepos and errors committed by Paul of Samosata), and the passage
is even put after Dionysius’ very despairing descriptions of the plague.
Its note of hope is at least strategically positioned. And wait: almost
unnoticed is a skilfully detached continuation of the long panegyrical-
looking piece, where enthusiasm for the imperial bearer of reprieve
becomes fulsome.
And it occurs to me once more to observe (skopein) the days of

the imperial years. For I perceive that those most wicked persons
(asebastatoi), though they were named with honour, after a short
time have become nameless; while he, who is more religious
approach, Eusebius nonetheless openly takes his cue from Diodorus Siculus,
showing he wittingly develops much further a pre-existing method: Praep.
Evang., 1.2. (PG 22, 19BC); cf. Raoul Mortley, The Idea of Universal History
from Hellenistic Philosophy to Early Christian Historiography (Texts and
Studies in Religion 67) (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996) 287.
44 Hist. eccles. 10.4 (Oulton 398-444); [Orat.] Laud. Const., and Vit. Const.,
and esp. Laud. 1.5-6 (Richardson 582). Cf. Barnes, ‘Panegyric, History and
Hagiography in Eusebius’ Life of Constantine’ in The Making of Orthodoxy (ed.
Rowan Williams) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 94-123.
52
(hosiôteros) and more devout (philotheôteros), has surpassed the

period of seven years, and is now completing a ninth year, in
which let us keep the feast.45
And who, though left discreetly unnamed, are those most wicked ones?
The Macriani. And who by implication reckoned more righteous?
Gallienus! The Macriani were honoured with the purple, but they were
really tyrants. The redeemed (if here virtually anonymous) Gallienus has
Greek epithets put on him just as easily translated “holier” and “more
God-loving” when read in Christian terms. Here at one point only,
before Constantine’s fiat, an emperor is potentially hallowed by a high
ecclesiastical figure, and if we search for some possible philosophical
rationale, perhaps Dionysius may have heard – along with the high
news of Gallienus building a huge palace in Antioch – that the emperor
cherished Plato, the philosopher most useful to the bishop himself
in a treatise he launched against the godless Epicureans.46 Ever so
subtly Eusebius lets the covert paeon be recorded, allowing rhetorical
expression to an idealised rapprochement between episcopacy and
Basileus, and of course a paradigmatic judgement of tyrants. In this
light, Eusebius himself was ready to allow much more for Gallienus than
we might have expected. The point is made that Dionysius died in the
twelfth year of his reign, that he held sway for an “entire (holois) fifteen
years,” implicitly a sign of blessing. Nothing is made of Claudius (or his
alleged kin linkage to Constantine’s father), and in Aurelian’s day there
is only a “final synod” condemning Paul of Samosata, as if the hard work
to counter him had been done by Dionysius under Gallienus’ rule. In
the Eusebian perspective Aurelian was to disturb the Gallienan peace,
and was becoming a persecutor before Divine Justice “pinioned him” by
death.47
45 Hist. eccles. 7.23.4 (mainly using, but correcting Oulton 190); cf. 7.21.1-22.10;
24-30 (178-88, 190-224).
46 Dionysius, De Natura, apud Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 14.23 (PG 21, 421B-422A);
Malalas, Chron. 306 [=12.38] (Jeffreys 167).
47 Hist. eccles., 7.28, 3-4; 29 [my italics]; 30.20-21 (Oulton 210-12, 224) (noting
also the first stress on Eirênê under Gallienus at 7.21.1 (178); yet cf. ‘Flavius
Vopiscus,’ Vit. Car. (SHA) 3.5 (Magie, vol. 3, 420) on “fifteen years sadly
53
It is natural to suspect, then, that the Tenth ‘Festal Letter’

of Dionysius the Great came to be a small prefigurement of great
opportunities presenting in the rise of Constantine, who dispensed with
the baleful “tyrants,” from Maxentius to Licinius, and who was very
much more worthy in the triumphalist expressions of Eusebian ideology
to be the “holiest” and “most God-loving” of rulers.48 But we must
proceed cautiously; because there is the matter of the various editions
of Eusebius’ Church History. On one important line of assessment,
Eusebius did not finish this great work on a note of triumph at all, but
with a certain disconsolateness (ca 304) that, during the former nineteen
years of Diocletian’s emperorship (i.e., 284-303), the Church had fallen
into pride, factionalism, and hypocrisy, and so she herself deserved “the
divine judgement” of a fresh persecution (starting from 303) that might
otherwise befall enemies of God. If this was the end of the first edition,
he admitted in what apparently figures as his second edition (ca 310)
that he had not wanted to finish the first either “mentioning those who
have been tried by the persecution or those who made utter shipwreck of
their own salvation,” and even now only wanted “to add to the general
history only such things as may be profitable,” which turned out to be
his appended report on the Martyrs of Palestine.49 The first and second
endured.” We find, also, nothing is said of Palmyra’s Zenobia and who did more
to curtail her, for at the end of Gallienus’ reign she was ruling a separate empire
‘from Cappadocia to Alexandria and back again’ (see above and n. 9) and may
have had enough influence earlier on (ruling beside Odaenathus) to champion
Paul’s appointment to the bishopric of Antioch; see Fergus Millar, ‘Paul of
Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian: The Church, Local Culture and Political
Allegiance in Third-Century Syria’ The Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971)
1-17.
48 Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 8.13.10-9.11.6; 10.8.1-9.6; Vit. Const. 2.4 (tyrants);
4.1-40, etc. (Richardson 501, 541-50) (Constantine’s qualities); cf. Cameron
and Stuart Hall (trans. and comm.), Eusebius’ Life of Constantine (Clarendon
Ancient History Series) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) 204-11 and sect. 3.
49 Hist. eccles. 8.1.7-8; 2.2-3 (Oulton 252-56); cf. Mart. Pales. Seminal work on the
first edition was done by Rudolf Helm, Eusebius’ Chronik und ihre Tabellform
(Abhandlungen der preussischen Akademie philosophische=historische Klasse
1923, 4) (Berlin: Preussischen Akademie, 1924) esp. 42; and for discussion of
all the likely editions, Barnes, ‘The Editions of Eusebius’ Eccesiastical History’
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 21:2 (1980) 191-201 and Trompf, Early
54
attempts to round off his history, then, were far from panegyrical in
the classical sense, and the documents of Dionysius extolling imperial
reprieve would appear to lose relevance (even though they actually sit
less than half of his seventh book away from its original ending (placed
at Book 8, sect. 1).50
What do we make of these tonal clashes? And what use would

the Dionysian panegyric have possibly served under such straitened
circumstances? We can be sure enough that Eusebius realised Gallienus
had all sorts of problems with holding the empire together, particularly
from barbarians, and also knew of his moral laxities, if Jerome is
translating his phraseology in the Chronicle (for 263): Gallieno in omnem
lasciviam dissoluto (“[when] Gallienus comes apart with every kind of
wantonness”).51 But the conundrum can be solved if we understand that
Eusebius first finishes his history under a rule that began only fifteen
years after Gallienus’ rule had finished. So much happened after 284:
the Christians were granted many “favours” by the imperial authorities,
the requirement of believers to sacrifice to the emperor was removed,
members in the highest echelons of society openly practised their faith,
churches were allowed to be built everywhere, especially “spacious in
the cities,” where “assemblies (episunagôgai) thronged with countless
people.” But of course such astounding “increase” caught the Church in
“blindness” – and Eusebius first puts the greater weight of responsibility
on changes in the Christians’ own attitudes – so that God consequently
“exalted the right hand of his adversaries” (Ps 89:42), quietly letting his
followers be tested under a new (and greater) persecution.52 Significantly,
Eusebius never goes into specifics about the glories of the good days
under Diocletian, neither does he give details about the awful “destruction
of church buildings.” As is his wont, first in his second edition with the
Christian Historiography 134, 154, n. 143.

50 The reigns from Probus to the Carii are merely transitional for Eusebius: Hist.
eccles. 7.30.22 (Oulton 224).
51 Eusebius(-Jerome), Chron. Olymp. 260 (PG 19, 575 = PL 27, 649-50)
(quotation), and see also cols 651-52.
52 Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 8.1.1-9 (Oulton 250-56).
55
appended Martyrs of Palestine, and then in his last editions (ca 315 and
324), he patiently relays the terrible yet inspiring stories of those martyred,
“who sent up hymns and thanksgivings to the God of the universe even
to the very last breath.”53 The real point about the Diocletianic period for
Eusebius, of course, is that it ended in treachery, in a drastic turn against
God’s people, quite apart from whether they brought it on themselves.
Like Mao Zedong, Diocletian “let a hundred flowers bloom,” and then
struck – now knowing only too well who his dangerous contestants were.
For Eusebius the point about Gallienus, who “gave us back

the peace” (pacem nostris reddidit) was that, quite apart from his
evident weaknesses (and really, Dionysius’ Alexandria was falling to
Zenobia’s Palmyran empire at the emperor’s death), he did not relent
from his toleration of Christianity as a “new nation.”54 He made his pax
and stuck with it to the end. In contrast, we now recall, and just like
Diocletian, Valerian (as Gallienus’ father and senior partner) did relent,
under Macrianus’ influence, and Aurelian also changed his mind, and
they were all requited by the divine justice in return.55 As it turns out,
this key indictment of emperors who shifted ground midstream had
already been applied to both Decius and Gallus in an early letter by
Dionysius, the bishop’s orientation thereby affecting positions taken
53 On the many details, Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) ch. 10; Frend, ‘Prelude to
the Great Persecution: The Propaganda War’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History
38 (1987) 1-18; and see Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.30.22 (first quotation) and
Theodoret, Hist. eccles. 5.38 finis very generally on churches destroyed; cf.
Walter Ameling et al. (eds), Corpus Inscriptorum Iudaea/Palaestinae, vol. 2:
Caesarea and the Middle Coast (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011) 75-106 (ns
1151-84). The second quotation is from Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 8.9.5 within 8.7-
13.
54 Eusebius(-Jerome), Chron. s.v. Olymp. 260 (PL 27, 649-50) (first quotation);
Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 1.4.2, 4-10 (Oulton, vol. 1, 38-42) (second); cf. Arthur J.
Droge, ‘The Apologetic Dimensions of the Ecclesiastical History’ in Eusebius,
Christianity, and Judaism (eds Harold W. Attridge and Gohei Hata) (Tokyo:
Yamamato Shoten, 1992) 500-501.
55 See above on Valerian and Aurelian, with Hist. eccles. 7.13 and 7.30.21 (Oulton,
vol. 2, 168, 224), and for Diocletian’s punishment, 8.13.11 (Oulton 298) and 8
(Append) (Lawlor and Oulton, vol. 1, 401).
56
in The Ecclesiastical History.56 For in Eusebius we see Gallienus’

connections with Valerian are set aside, while Gallienus’ long fifteen-
year reign apparently signalises God’s approbation, and is implicitly
made to compete with Diocletian, who had to make use of his Tetrarchy
by 293.57 Most significantly, Gallienus’ eventual murder, probably
involving Aureolos, the very commander who put down the Macriani,
is never mentioned, and no sense of God’s punishment imputed.58 Even
without a panegyric at the end of the first two editions of Eusebius’
master historiographical work, therefore, the celebrations of relief by the
great Pappas of Alexandria still carry importance. And all the more so
for the first edition because, close to his work’s initial finale, they bear
the twin message of a warning to those rulers turning enemies of God and
the welcoming of good working relations between imperium and ecclesia
in difficult times.
Eusebius’ ‘Panegyric to the Building of the Churches’
If all this be the case, how much more significant for Eusebius is the
Dionysian approach to the intriguing Pax Galliensiana when he
himself comes to celebrate peace brought by the triumphant emperors
Constantine and Licinius in 313. If no good came to earlier usurper-
tyrants, specifically the Macriani as Eusebius’ very quotations of
Dionysius are meant to show, now even worse tyrants have been
providentially defeated – Maximian, Galerius, Diocletian, Maximin[us]
Daia, and Maxentius and in that order met condign deaths befitting
their persecutory roles.59 The way is now even open for Valerian,
56 Hist. eccles. 7.1.1; cf. 6.39.1 (Oulton 92, 136), Decius already being influential
under Philip the Arab (245-49) but opposed to his religious policy; David S.
Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395 (London: Routledge, 2004) esp.
240-47.
57 See above ns 47, 55. Note the difference in “Vopiscus, who puts down Gallienus,
Probus and the Carii, and has the “gods gave us Diocletian and Maximian”:
SHA, Vit. Car. 18.3 (Magie 444); cf. Trompf, Recurrence 199.
58 Cf. Zosmus, Hist. nov. 1.41 (Ridley 13); Zonaras, Annal. 12.25 (PG 134,
1072AD); cf. SHA, Tyr. trig. 11.4-6 (Magie 92), while noting how bland is
Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 7.28.4 (Oulton 212).
59 Hist. eccles. 8.13.15 (Maximian [= in the text Maximinos]), 8 (Append.)
57
Gallienus’ disgraced father to become a prototypical tyrannus of the

type Constantine has to eliminate; and Dionysius’ favourable personal
estimate of Gallienus – with the comforting final words “[l]et us keep
the [Paschal] Feast (heortasômen)” – will take on new suggestiveness,
because the pious Constantine (and the Council of Nicaea) will settle the
date of Easter, a matter of the greatest importance for Eusebius.60 Much
more to our point, though, is that already the 315 edition of the Historia
ecclesiastica (cf. ns 49 and 59) finishes with what was to become the
longest quotation in the whole work, a panegyrical sermon delivered
(perhaps September 314) for the (re-)dedicating of a church at Tyre, a
fine building recently (re-)built with a government subsidy and from the
congregation’s “large-hearted contributions” straight after the troubles
of The Great Persecution had finished. Eusebius tells us that the oration
was among a number of panêgurikoi offered by church dignitaries – with
“all the great leaders (archontes) of the Church” said to be there – and
this particular discourse was delivered to a quiet, respectful hearing by
“someone of middling status” (τις ἐν μέσῳ) and dedicated to “Paulinus,
bishop of the Tyrians.”61 The author of this ΠΑΝΗΓΥΡΙΚΟΣ ΕΠΙ ΤΗΙ
ΤΩΝ ΕΚΚΛΗΣΙΩΝ ΟΙΚΟΔΟΜΗΙ (‘Panegyric to the Building of the
Churches’) was patently Eusebius himself – not yet a bishop – and it bears
all the hallmarks of his style, interests and favoured Biblical reading.
Paulinus, to whom it pays honour, was a special friend, later to be bishop
of Antioch for a short time, and Eusebius shared his basic theological
position (which we may call ‘para-Arian’), loyally coming to Paulinus’
(Galerius, Diocletian), 9.10.14 (Maximin Daia); 9.9.7 (Maxentius) (Oulton 302,

360-62, 380; Lawlor and Oulton, vol. 1, 401); and see Trompf, Early Christian
Historiography 129-34. That Eusebius does not fill out Diocletian’s death is
intriguing, but in what probably could be called a third edition (311), he appends
a passage alluding to the fitting deaths of the first three emperors listed above,
though leaving them unnamed. This would mean the last two editions (of 315
and late 324) would be the fourth and fifth.
60 Eusebius, Vit. Const. 4.11 (PG 20, 1160D-62A) (Valerian as tyrannus); with 4.34
(PG 20, 1181B-84A) and Eusebius, De Solemn. Pasch. (PG 24, 694A-706D
(Constantine and Easter). For heortazein as keeping the Passover in particular,
see Lampe, Patrist. Dict. 504b, cf. LXX 12:14, with Matt. 26:5; 27:15, etc.
61 Hist. eccles. 10.3.1-10.4.1, 26, 414 (Oulton 396; and for dating Lawlor and
Oulton, vol. 2, 307).
58
defence later on in 337 because Marcellus of Ancyra had accused him

of believing the Logos was a “created being.” The added tenth book of
his History, most of it made up the Panegyric anyhow, was naturally
dedicated to Paulinus, too.62 Be these connections as they may, the long
and florid sermon placed as a kind of theological consummation of his
grand narrative – from Jesus to the new Peace of Constantine – now
reinforces the pastoral tradition and political engagement of the heroic
bishop of Alexandria half a century before. The Dionysian panegyric
provides a precedent and gives a foretaste of Eusebius’ own.
It is a curiosity that the great panegyrical sermon at Tyre has been

rather passed over in scholarship, because the great weight of attention has
been on the relationship between Eusebius and Constantine, on Eusebius’
panegyrical works for Constantine, and on Eusebian triumphalism
qua what German scholars called politischer Monotheismus.63 Being a
sermon, and not important for relaying historical facts, has also partly
caused its neglect, and the sermonic is often off-putting to secular minds.
The panegyric needs more careful examination, however, precisely
because it rounds off a church history, a work with its own structural unity
as conceived in intriguing editorial adjustments to its various editions
62 Hist. eccles. 10.1.2, 4-8; 10.4.1 (Oulton 390-92, 398); and see his Contr. Marcell.
1.3 (PG 24, 752A).
63 See e.g., Norman H. Baynes, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church
(Raleigh Lecture on History, 1929) (London: Milford, 1981 edn,); Barnes,
Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981)
esp. ch. 15; Cameron and Hall (trans. and comm.), Eusebius’ Life of Constantine,
Introd.; Harold A. Drake, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and
New Translation of Eusebius Tricennial Orations (University of California
Publications: Classical Studies 15) (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976); Peter Kawerau, Das Christeum des Ostens (Die Religionen der
Menschheit 30) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972) 98-104 (political monotheism).
Yet for a welcome recent foray into the sermon, see Jeremy M. Schott,
‘Eusebius’ Panegyric on the Building of Churches (HE 10.4.2-72): Aesthetics
and the Politics of Christian Architecture’ in Reconsidering Eusebius: Collected
Papers on Literary, Historical, and Theological Issues (eds Sabrina Inowlocki
and Claudio Zamagni) (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 107) (Leiden: Brill,
2013) ch. 9 on architectural issues and textual space (also broached in my own
way below).
59
by a highly skilled, energetic composer. Eusebius probably wanted to

round off his whole first account on a positive note under Diocletian,
but was caught ‘on the hop.’ At this point one wants to know what level
of enthusiasm there is for the recent imperial change of policy in this
long eulogy and whether it is consistent with some of the constraints and
wariness we have detected from earlier parts of his magnum opus.
It is worth imagining what the occasion was like. The new church
was obviously magnificent and it was packed. The singing was doubtless
glorious in elation; and through the many orations we could expect a
remarkably patient silence to have prevailed, a collective awe over a great
transformation. This was Tyre. In Aramaic it was Sor or Sur, the rock, the
startling city set on a great rocky peninsula, and Eusebius prefers this
name in his Onomasticon.64 And Tyre had for centuries been the most
important trading centre of the Levant and the key economic gateway
into Palestine, keeping up active connections with Rome even during
the Palmyran episode.65 Sur was displaying its prestige and its general
wealth, and Eusebius was in his most evocative and flighty mode, at
this decisive moment confirming his worthiness of a bishopric. When
you read through the sermon, and it repays rereading, you can imagine
its effect was nothing short of extraordinary. Indeed, with respect to
“golden-tongued” John (Chrysostom), and despite any sensitivity that
Eusebius might not have been quite as orthodox a mind as many would
like, I suspect this is probably the most important sermon delivered in a
church in the history of Christianity.
But to whom is this panegyric really directed? The addressee was

Paulinus, and in the company of “friends of God [an apparent reference
64 Eusebius, Onomast. s.v. Sor (Larsow and Parthey, 345), cf. Tyrus (e.g., 143, 355),
referring to Biblical names. Note: of interest in the wider history of religions,
this is the derivation of California’s Big Sur, site of the Esalen Institute.
65 See esp. Richard S. Hanson, Tyrian Influence in Upper Galilee (Meiron
Excavation Project 2) (Cambridge, Mass: American Schools of Oriental
Research, 1980); cf. Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, ‘Syrie Romaine, de Pompée à
Dioclétien’ Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978) esp. 57 (Tyre and the purple
trade).
60
to bishops present] and priests who are [all] clothed with the holy robe
and the celestial crown of glory,” but the former is an episcopal guardian
rightly granted only allusions (perhaps with a nod, as to his presbyters
also) and as the sermon reaches a high pitch we find the clerics, even
the whole congregation, are expected to imagine themselves among the
faithful gone before, with “thrones and countless benches and seats, as
many as are the souls on which the gifts of the divine Spirit find their
resting place.”66 The two triumphant, “most exalted emperors” deserve
references, for of course at this stage Constantine and Licinius rule
together, but they are only twice mentioned and Eusebius restrains
himself from naming them. In Dionysian vein they are “most beloved of
God” (theophilestatoi), and now, passing beyond his mentor’s panegyric,
not just the sun, but “all the powers of the heaven, the sun and moon and
stars, and the whole heaven and earth” show their splendour in accord
with what has happened – for the two Basileis are agents in “something
quite unprecedented,” and (rhetorically speaking) now “spit upon the
faces of dead idols, trample on the unholy rites of demons (the old gods),
and laugh at the old deceits.”67 There is prescient caution here, though
of course little did Eusebius know that weeks, possibly days away, the
two rulers would enter serious conflict, and that by 320, after he had
published his second last edition of the Ecclesiastical History, Licinius
would be another one of those emperors – and thus a tyrant – who turned
midstream against the Christians.68
66 Hist. eccles. 10.4.2 (first quotation), cf. 4.25 (“this one”), 61, 67 (archôn),
with 66 (second) (Oulton 399, 412, 436, 440), following Lawlor and Oulton,
Ecclesiastical History, for commentary, vol. 2, pp. 308-9. On clerical ordination
and robing, start with Richard F. Littledale, The Holy Eastern Church: A Popular
Outline of its History, Doctrines, Liturgies, and Vestments (London: J.T. Hayes,
1873) chs [6-8].
67 Hist. eccles. 10.4.15-16.60 (Oulton 406 [altered trans.], 436).
68 See Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society from Galilee to Gregory the
Great (Oxford History of the Christian Church [1]) (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2001) 316, 324; so that in Eusebius’ last edn Constantine becomes “the mighty
victor” under God the “Champion of souls,” with “the rising sun shining from
both north and south,” and “all things filled with light”; Hist. eccles. 10.8.19 and
9.6-7, within 10.8.1-9.9; and see Vit. Const. 2.19-70 (Richardson 505-17).
61
But in context at Tyre, the great panegyric was clearly not for any
earthly ruler at all. It was so obviously for Christ, who was portrayed
as “the Great High Priest” in the midst of his congregation (see Heb.
2-10), and the place of worship – Eusebius apparently being the first to
describe the details of an early Christian church building – is meant to be
envisioned as a living body of the faithful and patterned on a heavenly
temple, a “divine icon” (theoeikelon) of the resurrected, “glorious
body” of Christ that will not be destroyed like the Jewish temple under
Babylon.69 Christ was of course also King (basileus) and Lord (kurios),
let alone cosmic Ruler (cf. panêrgomenos), who is the “slayer of tyrants;”
but his role in the sermon is above all as a great healer raising his people
from the dead, indeed saving them from “despair” and from persecution
as the equivalent of plague, with its sores and putrefaction. It is His “rays
of light” rather than the sun putting out the “darkness” of the tyrants,
and He is “the great Shepherd […] breaking the teeth of lions” – of “the
impious men fighting against God.”70
There is clearly a high note of victory in this discourse: both in

the sense that enemies have been defeated and rightly punished for their
impiety. But I will stand by my original estimate that this is an exaltation,
like that of his hero Dionysius, that comes above all out of a sheer sense
of relief. It is far from the politically-charged triumphalism we find in the
Eusebius of the 330s.71 The radical alteration of things, or this dramatic
end of a process whereby “the whole human race sunk in gloomy night
[…] through baleful demons […] has its many-fettered chains broken
asunder,” is here no human achievement but the clear proofs (deigmata)
of the work of the universal Logos.72 We ought not to forget that,
independent of the Constantine phenomenon, Eusebius was an apologist
of divine Providence that worked for the benefit of the entire human
69 Hist. eccles. 10.4.21-23, 25-26, 46; cf. 36 (on Zerubbabel after the first temple’s
destruction, cf. Ezr. 2-5; Zech 4).
70 Hist. eccles. 10.4.10-13, 28 (Oulton 402-4, 416).
71 Trompf, Early Christian Historiography 134; cf. Trompf, ‘The Logic of
Retribution in Eusebius of Caesarea’ in History and Historians in Late Antiquity
(eds Brian Croke and Alanna Emmet-Nobbs) (Oxford: Pergamon, 1983) 141.
72 Eusebius, Hist. eccles. 10.4.13, 20 (Oulton 404, 410).
62
genos, and he was perhaps the earliest thinker to argue systematically

that Christianismos enables a general human progress.73 It is hardly
insignificant, moreover, that while Eusebius added the great panegyric
to his History to round it off for what became his second last edition,
he was seriously starting work on his great Praeparatio Evangelica, an
apologetic treatise about providential conceptual anticipations in cultures
for receiving the Gospel and the preparation for Greek philosophy already
found in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures. The whole of the great sermon
in Book 10 of the Church History is permeated with Eusebius’ lively
concern with forms of cultural re-education.74 Neither the congregation
nor certainly the wider readership of it in his history’s dissemination was
assumed without need of guidance from one way of life to another. Even
the very evocations of Biblical language and the quotation of lengthy
passages serve more than the scripturally literate: they create a whole
atmosphere of long-term preparations for the Christian faith from the
major source of ancient Truth – the Old Testament – to electrify the vast
many in the “quadrangular courtyard” outside who have only a “first
acquaintance” with the faith.75
Eusebius was not writing as if he (or Christians) alone had

privileged access to the kind of ploys he adopted. As a competing
ideology came claims of providence working for the pagans (divine
Pronoia already being an important Platonic and Aristotelian insight).76
73 Start with Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung:

Gegenwartsbestimmung in Geschichtsdenken des Mittelalters (Munich:
Nymphenburger, 1965) ch. 1, with pt 3; cf., e.g., Praep. Evang. 8.13-14 (PG 21,
971A-86B) (general view of Providence) and for Christianity as abstract noun,
e.g., Eusebius, Dem. Evang. e.g., 1,2 (PG 22, 19BC).
74 Aaron P. Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 11.
75 Thus Hist. eccles. 10.4.63 (Oulton 438).
76 See Jean Sirinelli, Les vues historiques d’Eusèbe de Césarée durant la période
prénicéenne (Université de Dakar: Publications de la Section de Langues
et Littératures, 10) (Dakar, Sen.: Université de Darkar,: 1961) ch. 9; and see
Lellia C. Ruggini, ‘The Ecclesiastical Histories and the Pagan Historiography:
Providence and Miracles’ Athenaeum 55 (1975) 107-26; José M. C. Candau
Morón, ‘Providencia y politica en los historiadores paganos de la baja antigüedad’
63
The religious arena was full of appeals to oracular utterances from the
past to legitimise powers of the present. To unify Greek and Roman,
Chaldaean, Persian, Jewish and Egyptian mystery elements as an answer
to the Christian challenge, the Chaldaean Oracles (connected to Zoroaster)
had strength. The Roman Sibylline Oracles may have been destroyed
long before Christ, but versions of them were being used once again to
shore up languishing pagan festivities. Late pagan Zosimus, for one, not
only linked the keeping of the ritualised ludi saeculares with imperial
preservation, but put Rome’s survival down to some divine providence
(pronoia) and “more than human strength” that determined “future events”
– whether through “the necessity of Fate, or revolution of the stars, or the
will of the gods which favours our actions if they are just.” New convert
Lactantius quotes oracles of the Sibyls as if they point to Christ like the
Old Testament prophets, and there was even a Jewish precedent for going
in this direction. The Delphic Oracle was also still alive, if with less
influence, before its demise under Theodosius the Great in 395.77 Into
this motley of ideological rearguard actions, Eusebius enunciated the
poetic majesty of the Psalms and Isaiah – the latter’s power of redress and
regeneration already used, we recall, by Dionysius, and the two texts were
in La conversión de Roma: Christianismo y paganismo (eds Candau [Moreón],

Fernando Gascó and Antonio R. de Verger) (Madrid: Ediciones Classicas, 1990)
191-210; cf. Abraham P. Bos, Providentia divina: The Theme of Divine Pronoia
in Plato and Aristotle (Inaugural Lecture, Free University, Amsterdam) (Assen:
Van Gorcum, 1976); and note Plotinus, Enn. 3.2-3 (MacKenna 82-97).
77 Ruth D. Majercik (trans. and ed.), The Chaldaean Oracles: Text, Translation,
and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1989); Jane L. Lightfoot (trans. and ed.), The
Sibylline Oracles: with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary of the First
and Second Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); cf. Zosimus, Hist.
nov. 1.1; 2.6-7 (Ridley 1, 27-28); Lactantius, Div. Inst. Esp. 4.12-20; 7.52 (Le
Brun and Dufresnoy, vol. 1, 305-31, 562); and see John J. Collins, The Sibylline
Books of Eygyptian Judaism (SBL Dissertation Series, 13) (Mundelein, Ill:
Society of Biblical Literature, 1972); with Paul Ciholas, The Omphalos and the
Cross: Pagans and Christians in Search of a Divine Center (Macon, Ga: Mercer
University Press, 2003) 120-21 (on the decline of the Delphic Oracle). See also
Samuel Angus, The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World: A Study in
the Historical Background of Early Christianity (London: John Murray, 1929)
esp. chs 18-22 (eclectic unifying tendencies).
64
those most favoured by Eusebius for both apologetics and commentary.78
A thorough exposition is not possible here, but I note elements

in the discourse that bring a kind of educative unity to the History,
connecting it to Eusebian apologetics. For, his work is not without an
oracular atmosphere at the beginning (the Psalms and Isaiah again being
quoted) to establish that Christianity is really no “new nation” after all,
and to probe back beyond the “most primitive and ancient religion” of
Abraham to Creation itself.79 In the History, what is more, is the grandest
statement of Eusebius’ “anthropology,” ready to compete against any
Dicaearchus or Polybius: because, after the Fall, nomadic, wild humans
fell further into their own “self-chosen wickedness,” mainly marked by
war. Through divine chastising – “floods and conflagrations” (not just
one Deluge), “continuous famines […] wars, and thunder-bolts from on
high” – humans eventually “spread like a wild forest over the face of the
whole earth.” But God, in his abundant love for humanity, slowly brings
“glimmers of light” and “implants seeds of godliness,” through visions,
even his direct action, until one nation (Israel) is ready for “initiation.”
The long night of “fierce brutality” is softened by “law-giving, philosophy
and growing mutual friendships” that secure “profound peace,” and
under the Augustan Peace the Christ appears on earth for the teaching
of true piety for “all the nations.”80 In the context of continuing military
conflict, fittingly, Eusebius takes pains in his great sermon at Tyre to hail
a new kind of warriorhood. Under the old imperial regime, military dress
was an “ideological marker” of security as well as loyalty and ‘Roman
identity,’ but now is announced the “great Captain of the Host of God,” a
78 Eusebius Hist. eccles. 10.4, esp. 32, 49-52, 62, but see through 12-63 as a whole.
79 Hist. eccles. I.3.14-17; 4.2-3, 10 (Oulton, vol. 1, 34-36, 38-40, 42).
80 Hist. eccles. 1.2.17-23; 5.1-7.11 (Oulton 20-26, 46-60, adapted trans.); cf. Praep.
Evang. and Dem. Evang. (PG vols 21-22); and see Sirinelli, Vues historiques
ch. 4; cf. Trompf, Recurrence esp. 15-25 on various ancient Graeco-Roman
anthropologies. Note how optimistic Eusebius was about pre-Incarnational
developments, compared, e.g., with Orosius on the misery of things before
Christ; see Trompf, ‘Retributive Logic in Orosius as Early Christian Social
Theory’ in The World of Religions: Essays on Historical and Contemporary
Issues (Noel Q. King Festscjrift) (eds Trompf and Gildas Hamel) (Religion,
Politics and Society 1) (Delhi: ISPCK, 2002) 68-108.
65
new ‘army’ for peace, “the greatest soldiers in his Kingdom (the martyrs)
having given sufficient proof of their full training by their endurance
and steadfastness in all things.”81 This is why “the whole human race” is
involved in the momentous transition of the time.
The Historia ecclesiastica contains select examples of divine

chastisings (kolastêriai) throughout its pages, more particularly from the
fate befalling the Jews under the Romans to the individual punishments
of the Tyrants threatening Constantine.82 With this device Eusebius
played in tune with the widely applied, long-inured historiographical
principle that the divine rewarded the good and punished the wicked, a
principle, as we have already intimated, accepted by Hellenistic pagans,
not just Jews and Christians, and Eusebius was eager in the climactic
context of his panegyric to acknowledge before the faithful that the
Church had received the “just penalty for her own sins” (lamented at the
end of his first edition) through the Great Persecution, and to persuade
his wider, still wavering audience that the recent outcome, with “the
whole world […] cleansed of the cruel, God-hating tyrants,” fulfilled
and was in keeping with the impositions of divine justice (ἡ ἀξία δίκη)
over the centuries.83 Just as Dionysius rightly reckoned the hand of
God dealt against the Macriani, we can see now divine actions more
consummately. As Eusebius had not long before also shown, if Maximin
Daia believed only worship of the gods could bring Roman fecundity
and victory, how come plague and famine followed his insolence and
the previously friendly Armenians turned into Rome’s enemies because
of his demands for sacrifice? And as in Dionysius’ day, was it not the
81 Hist. eccles. 10.4.15 (Oulton, vol. 2, 406, last two quotations); cf. Guy D.
Stiebel, ‘Military Dress as an Ideological Marker in Roman Palestine’ in Dress
and Ideology: Fashioning Identity from Antiquity to the Present (eds Shoshana-
Rose Marzel ands Stiebel) (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) 153-70 (first).
82 Esp. Trompf, Early Christian Historiography 22-34.
83 Hist. eccles. 10.4.59-60 (Oulton 434-6); cf. Glenn F. Chesnut, The First
Christian Histories: Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius
(Macon, Ga: Mercer University Press, 1986 edn) 48-49; Trompf, Early Christian
Historiography 126-30, 136, 151, n. 93.
66
Christians who were once again most diligent in the care of the sick?84
But Maximin (among the others) is no more, with the Eusebian panegyric
now celebrating the wondrous resolution. As Isaiah foretold of the
persecutions’ end, “for a little time I forsook thee,” but “awake, awake
[…] thou shall no more drink again of the cup of staggering.” What the
Church eventually and “necessarily” learnt for its own good to be “the
truthfulness” of these “sacred oracles” (ἱερoί χρήσμοι) becomes also a
“mystic prophecy” (μυστική προφητεία) of a “great peace” imparted for
all. And how pertinent to announce this in Tyre, the city of the famed
philosopher Porphyry, pagan “arbiter of oracles” in those times, who had
neglected the truest sources of Wisdom!85
Concluding Remarks
On our reckoning, Eusebius was caught despondent by the Diocletianic

‘default’; and then in relief and surprise by the Constantinian ‘conversion.’
Whether we hold that his Ecclesiastical History went through a number
of editions or was just built up over the years to its ‘final state,’86 in both
moods of worry and comfort concerning the Church in this great work
there are all the signs that he found helpful resources in Dionysius, the
wise Pappas of Alexandria, who left so much useful information and
careful counsel before him. Of course an historian of ideas cannot always
clinch matters by pinpointing the direct take-over of thoughts, but a
sufficiency lies in providing circumstantial evidence of a ‘general effect’
84 Dionysius, apud Eusebius Hist. eccles. 7.22.7-10, with Eusebius himself 9.8.1-
14 (Oulton 184-88, 350-58).
85 Hist. eccles. 10.6.49-50, 53, 61-62 (Oulton 430-32, 436); cf. LXX Isa. 51:22;
54:7, 13 (evocations freely selected). Cf. also, for the developing paeonic
applications of Isaiah, Jeremy Schott, ‘Textuality and Territorialization:
Eusebius’ Exegesis of Isaiah and Empire’ in Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition
and Innovations (eds Johnson and Schott) (Hellenic Studies, 60) (Washington
DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013) ch. 8; and see Johnson, ‘Arbiter of the
Oracular: Reading Religion in Porphyry of Tyre’ in The Power of Religion in
Late Antiquity (eds. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski) (Burlington, Verm: Ashgate,
2009) 103-115.
86 For a one edition view, Johnson, Eusebius (Understanding Classics) (London: I.
B. Taurus, 2014) ch. 4.
67
on a writer’s orientation. Exultant rhetoric in the bishop’s tenth ‘Festal

Letter’ warrants that we do indeed find there a foretaste of Eusebian
excitement. A precedent had been struck, and we ought not neglect
it. If Dionysius offered a somewhat tentative beginning, or perhaps in
his panegyric leant too far in Gallienus’ favour, Eusebius entered the
panegyrical mode more wisely, truer to an ‘ideal’ Dionysian style, one
might say, but was then to lose some of his clerical acumen and become
a founder-figure in the process of sacralising the Byzantine Basileia.87 By
hindsight, I believe we can learn from these explorations the preferable
role of the church leader, yet understand how in context, when history
alters dramatically in the favour of an utterly harassed institution, leaders
can seize the best opportunities, and Christians, as the Lukan Christ
ironically allows, will readily “make friends by means of unrighteous
mammon [or worldly prosperity], so that when it fails [as it does again
and again] they may receive you into the eternal habitations” (Lk. 16:9).
87 For a relevant study of continuities and differences, see Sarolta A. Takácz,

The Construction of Authority in Ancient Rome and Byzantium (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
68

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A Foretaste of Eusebian Panegyricism

in the Tenth ‘Festal Letter’

Abstract: Apparently combining a sense of personal reprieve from

It was the strangest, most desperate and messiest of times. “Rome,”

PHRONEMA, VOL. 30(2), 2015, 37-68

In Gallienus’ very inaugural year as sole emperor, indeed, the few

2 Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 5 (Le Brun and Dufresnoy, vol. 2, 189-

Palmyra), upstarts sprouted up in many corners, some only with regional

Intriguingly, as founder-figure of ecclesiastical historiography, Eusebius

He [Macrianus Major], then, after inciting one of his emperors

What worrying phenomenon do we have here? An extolled proto-

Fortunately, as many of this journal’s readers will be interested

helping us with an explanation. Gallienus, so his South Australian

16 Bray, Gallienus: A Study in Reformist and Sexual Politics (Adelaide: Wakefield

Great’s feelings would be like when he officially received the imperial

Now we obviously need to ponder the general nature and genre of

20 Rescript of 261, Gallienius to Dionysius and other bishops, quoted in Eusebius.

22 For long rightly or wrongly assumed, from Louis-Sébastian le N. Tillemont,

– a prelude to Constantine the Great’s claim to legitimacy that Claudius,

What kind of panegyric was Dionysius the Great’s? Surely

Nevertheless, his pontifical care admitted, Dionysius

5:17), certainly a blessed social efflorescence (thus porrôteron, cf. Isa

33 Thus quoting Deputy-prefect Aelianus in court to Dionysius, apud Eusebius,

[H]ad the church collapsed, it could scarcely have recovered. As

There is a combined note of triumphalism and of divine justice in the

36 William H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984)

More than anything else, though, Dionysius’ exaltant words were

The Question of Dionysius’ Impact on Eusebian Panegyricism

Certainly access to Dionysius’ episcopal records and theological writings

41 On Dionysius, Jerome, Vir. illustr. 69 (Richardson 376); Eusebius, Hist

charged and panegyrical-looking material is another issue, and relates

The intriguing question arises, then, whether the Dionysian

And it occurs to me once more to observe (skopein) the days of

(hosiôteros) and more devout (philotheôteros), has surpassed the

It is natural to suspect, then, that the Tenth ‘Festal Letter’

What do we make of these tonal clashes? And what use would

Christian Historiography 134, 154, n. 143.

For Eusebius the point about Gallienus, who “gave us back

in The Ecclesiastical History.56 For in Eusebius we see Gallienus’

Eusebius’ ‘Panegyric to the Building of the Churches’

Gallienus’ disgraced father to become a prototypical tyrannus of the

(Galerius, Diocletian), 9.10.14 (Maximin Daia); 9.9.7 (Maxentius) (Oulton 302,

defence later on in 337 because Marcellus of Ancyra had accused him

It is a curiosity that the great panegyrical sermon at Tyre has been

by a highly skilled, energetic composer. Eusebius probably wanted to

But to whom is this panegyric really directed? The addressee was

There is clearly a high note of victory in this discourse: both in

genos, and he was perhaps the earliest thinker to argue systematically

Eusebius was not writing as if he (or Christians) alone had

73 Start with Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung:

in La conversión de Roma: Christianismo y paganismo (eds Candau [Moreón],

those most favoured by Eusebius for both apologetics and commentary.78

A thorough exposition is not possible here, but I note elements

The Historia ecclesiastica contains select examples of divine

On our reckoning, Eusebius was caught despondent by the Diocletianic

on a writer’s orientation. Exultant rhetoric in the bishop’s tenth ‘Festal

87 For a relevant study of continuities and differences, see Sarolta A. Takácz,

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