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Anne-Marie Bernardi, Emmanuele Caire

Parti
Construction and Adaptations of
Chronographic Structure
Emmanuele Caire
1.1 Eusebius' Chronicle
We know that Eusebius’ great contribution to the genre of the chronography had
been to use synoptic tables to present the rulers lists drawn up by his predecessors that
he analyzed, discussed and compared through the establishment of synchronisms in
a first introductory part {Chronographid). In the second part, known as the Chronici
canones, parallel columns, more or less numerous according to the number of people
concerned,2 juxtaposed the continuous numbering of the regnal years of each ruler (flla
regnorum) with an absolute chronology, established on the one hand in “years since
Abraham”, and on the other hand in Olympiads, beginning with the first one.3
Next to these fila regnorum, Eusebius had arranged, in a dedicated space, brief
historical notices (references to floruit, victories, wars and landmarks). However, the
layout of these notices changes in the different versions we have today of the Chronicle,
be it in the various manuscripts of Jerome’s Latin translation or in the Armenian ver-
sion. The notices are sometimes organized in two columns in the left- and right-hand
margins (in the Armenian version), sometimes in one central column, which can be
doubled when the whole synopsis is displayed across two facing pages (in Jerome’s
manuscripts). These variations have inspired extremely diverse hypotheses about what
could have been the original layout of the Canones, in particular that of the spatium
historicum devoted to the notices. Mosshammer4 came to the conclusion that the ori-
ginal layout had probably evolved from Darius’ reign, that the notices may not have
been aligned in the spatium historicum left vacant between the regnal columns, and
that most notices were not linked to a specific year but to a period covering an Olym-
piad, or even an entire reign. While such a layout obviously favored the synopsis and
offered the possibility of establishing synchronisms, it nevertheless complicated the
methodical reading and the reproduction of the layout in the copies and translations
of the Eusebian Chronicle. To integrate this complex pattern into the linear structure
2 See Burgess, Studies, p. 21.
3 The first part of Eusebius’ Chronicle is known only through quotations of later chronographs and
through an Armenian translation. The second part has been repeatedly copied and still exists in the
Armenian version. However, it has been widely spread through the Western world through the Latin
translation by Jerome. In the remainder of this paper, references to the Armenian version are those of
the German translation of Josef Karst (1911). Eusebius’-Jerome’s Tables are quoted from Helm’s edition
(Helm 1956). For a historical account of the various editions and translations of the different parts of
Eusebius’ Chronicle, see Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius·, Burgess, Studies.
4 Mooshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius, pp. 82-83. See his hypothetical reconstruction of an original
page of Eusebian Canones, p. 27.