Jerome, Chronicle (2005). Preface to the Online Edition

The Chronicle of St. Jerome

Introduction

The Chronicle of St. Jerome was composed around 380AD and became the primary available source of information on dates and events from the time of its composition until the end of the middle ages.  Jerome’s work itself was a translation into Latin of the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, brought up to date, but it was through Jerome that it came to be so influential.

It is the first text in which we see an attempt to accurately date all the events of times previous.  Every event is assigned to a date, the kings and the dates are drawn up in columns, and brief notes made against each.  The revolutionary tabular format forces the chronologist to be precise in whatever data is entered and highlights any errors involved in synchronising lists from different kingdoms of kings and the number of years they reigned.

The Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea

Eusebius of Caesarea wrote his chronicle ca. 311 AD, and is responsible for the revolutionary format which transformed the study of history. 

Prior to Eusebius, a chronography would consist of lists of kings, and how long they reigned.  An occasional note might be attached to the name of a king, stating that in the 3^rd year of his reign such-and-such event occurred.  Each kingdom would be treated separately, and its rulers or magistrates listed.  Eusebius himself compiled a chronography of this kind, which is today known as book one of his Chronicle, and has the title The Chronography.  But the problem for the reader was how to link information about rulers and events in one kingdom to events in other kingdoms.  Eusebius wanted to write a history of the church, and needed to link together information from Jewish sources with the chronographical information that he obtained from numerous Greek predecessors, such as Porphyry, Castor, and Erastothenes, and also from Christian predecessors such as Julius Africanus.

His own contribution was to draw up the existing mass of chronological information in a tabular format that enforced a perpetual synchronism between the various parallel strands of data. This innovation may rightly be described as a moment of genius. The second book of his Chronicle was drawn up in this way and entitled The Chronological Canons.  This was the portion that Jerome translated and its format can be seen below.  Jerome’s translation is the most accurate version of this book that has reached us.

To do this, Eusebius took the then new medium of the codex (the modern book format, as opposed to the roll) and exploited the concept of a page.  He divided up the page using a tabular format. 

He drew vertical columns on the page.  The lefthandmost he headed as ‘Kings of the Persians’ (or whichever other empire was current at the time).  The righthandmost he headed ‘Kings of the Egyptians’, so long as there were any.  When new kingdoms came along, he added an extra column for them; when kingdoms disappeared, the column vanished with them.

When a king came to the throne, he placed his name on a separate line by itself, for any events of that king which had no specified year.  Beneath it he then enumerated the years of his reign on succeeding lines; 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on.  Thus for each year there was a line on which information could be entered.  Also, by running along the line, it could be seen precisely who ruled where at any given time.

The new format was an act of genius, which ensured that the problems of Greek chronography would not continue to bedevil history.

Eusebius also decided to start his Chronicle, not with the date of Creation, but with the earliest date that he felt he could reasonably calculate, which was the birth of Abraham.  Since his new format placed each year on a separate line, he marked every ten years how many years it had been from the birth of Abraham.  This universal dating foreshadowed the invention of the standard Anno Domini dating by Dionysius Exiguus.  That a standard dating system would come into being was ensured by the popularity of Jerome’s version of the Chronicle, and the obvious need for it once that work existed.

Eusebius did not collect the materials himself for his work, but relied on whatever works he could find which gave brief lists of events and rulers.  Once he started work, the problems of Greek chronography must have become exceedingly evident.

The problems of Greek chronography

By the time of Eusebius, Greek chronography was a mess.  There were a number of reasons for this.

There was no agreement in the ancient world on which date the year should begin.  Each city would have its own calendar and reckoning.  There were several different systems of months in use.  There were also systems like ‘Ab Urbe Condita’ (AUC – from the founding of the City, Rome).  But there were so many of these, and they enjoyed such limited use, that these did not advance things.  The Romans, rather than using AUC, tended to date a year by the names of the annual consuls then in office.  Greek cities often did likewise.

The most common system of dating was by the regnal year of a reigning monarch, and inscriptions often record that they were erected in the nth year of king xyz.  Lists of kings and the number of years they reigned circulated, and exist still, carved on the walls of Egyptian temples.  But kings do not always come to the throne on the 1^st of January, and some rule for less than a year, and some are obliterated from the lists for political reasons.  In consequence any reckoning based upon regnal years was bound to be in error, sometimes substantially as errors in a dynasty accumulated.

Once the Olympic games had begun, with a group of four years between games known as an Olympiad, some of the Greeks began to refer to those four-year groups by the name of the victor in the games.  Later yet, a number was assigned to the olympiad.  Chronicles based on the four-year cycle began to come into existence, since this dating was more universal for Greek affairs than lists of annual officials in each city.

Anyone trying to write a history had to struggle with these obstacles. Frequently the best that could be done was to say that a certain man flourished in the reign of such a king.  Yet even here problems occurred, since the Greek word used for ‘flourished’ was extremely similar to that for ‘was born.’  The result of such errors can be seen in the Chronicle in the dates assigned to Lycurgus, who appears 3 times over a period of more than a century.  The first is in fact when he was born; the second his hey-day, and the third refers to someone of the same name!  But each can be traced back to impeccable sources in the Greek tradition that Eusebius used.

Eusebius’ approach to the chronological problems

Eusebius was powerless to solve most of these problems.  His innovative format however forced him to deal with some of them.  In many cases he simply recorded what he had, and left others to deal with the problem.  In others he presumed an error and adjusted the count of years assigned to a given ruler in order to make the lines tally and ‘correct’ the ‘error’.

Starting with a mess of loosely connected regnal years, he linked them together through synchronisms.  These were points at which he had information that tied together events in two different kingdoms. 

For instance he was able to determine that Darius of Persia and Alexander the Great of Macedon lived at the same time, since the latter overthrew the former.  This linked the Greek lists with the Persian ones.  The Greek lists could be linked together through the Olympiads, which were often recorded for Greek events.  He was able to link Jewish events with Persian ones because it was recorded that the second temple was built in the Second Year of Darius.  This last date is one of his crucial synchronisms.  The date of the Trojan War was present in many of his lists, and forms another such link.

Some events, particularly in Olympiad Chronicles, were not given a precise year, but merely dated to the period of the Olympiad, or of a given ruler.  He handled this by placing each Olympiad and each ruler’s name on a fresh line, separate from the normal list of years.  This gave him space to record such information.

The Chronicle is inevitably riddled with errors.  Eusebius himself records at one point that all dates prior to then are conjectural and disputed.  Responsibility for these errors must be assigned largely to his predecessors.  Even then, it is difficult to condemn inaccurate dates assigned to times when no-one had any conception of such a thing as a numerical date.  Rather the Chronicle draws a line under the period of confusion, and provides a framework in which errors can be identified and resolved.

Eusebius’ own Chronicle is no longer extant in the original Greek.  An Armenian translation exists in two manuscripts, although the end of book one and start and end of book two are lost in both.  The entries in book two have also been augmented, and the format rearranged, but numerous errors crept in during this process.

Jerome and Eusebius

St. Jerome as a young man spent time in the East and became familiar with a great deal of the scholarship of the school of Origen and Eusebius.  He came across a copy of the Chronological Canons and recognised its importance.  As with other works by Eusebius, such as the Onomasticon, he arranged to translate it.  He had a skilled scribe draw up a volume with the numerals in Latin rather than Greek – no trivial task –, and then dictated a translation of the contents.

He also added his own comments where he felt that Roman history had been neglected.  Finally he composed a continuation down to his own times, ending with the disastrous defeat and death of the emperor Valens at the hands of the Goths at Adrianople in 378 AD. 

This continuation was of the utmost importance for the future.  The esteem in which Jerome was held was great in the succeeding decades and centuries, and the monastic scribes did not hesitate to follow his example and write further continuations to the text.  This practice undoubtedly contributed to the preservation of the work and its centrality to all future historical work.

Jerome made revisions to the text as time went on. He made an error in transcribing 'Alcamenes' in one entry, mistaking the numeral theta that preceded it as part of the name.  The text 'Thalcamenes' appears in numerous manuscripts, including 'O'; but is corrected in others.  It shows clearly the manner in which the Greek practise of using letters as numerals facilitated corruption of both the numbers and the text.

Families of manuscripts

It was Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) who first worked on the chronology of antiquity and so came up against the primary witness, Jerome's version of Eusebius.  In his work De emendation temporum (1583) he split the mss into two families.

• Priores.  10 mostly late manuscripts known to him shared a format with all the numbers on the left-hand side of the page, in columns, and at the right the text of any historical event.  This could wrap around, thereby giving a long space for all the text.  Scaliger referred to this space for text as the spatium historicum and so it has been known since.  But Scaliger called it the priores -- earliest -- since he thought they were.
• Posteriores.  Three early manuscripts (B, F, P) Scaliger designated posteriores -- later -- since they did not agree with each other in format, nor with the priores group.  

Also present in the manuscripts of Jerome are a set of king-lists (the Series Regum) and an Exordium.  In 1750 the Veronese scholar Girolamo Da Prato published a treatise, De Chronicis libris duo ab Eusebio scriptis et editis.  In this he established the late date of these two items.  These are published in Schoene (below).

• O, B, F, P, A and S are all old and agree in format.  B is not a child of S, unlike A and P.  O and S are independent, so must go back to two exemplars written in Jerome's lifetime.

One MS of the 5th century survives almost complete; of another, enough fragments survive to identify two apographs which enable it to be reconstructed in its entirety.  There are several MSS of the 7th and 8th centuries.  These early witnesses attest securely not only the text of Jerome's version, but equally important, its arrangement of the columns of numbers and of the entries on each page of the original (T.D.Barnes, p.112).

So old are the manuscripts, that we can see some of Jerome's working practises.  S and its descendants reflect Jerome's final version.  O was based on a somewhat earlier copy which had a few readings which Jerome corrected against his copy of Eusebius, but has the same format.  However the copyist of O has chosen to save parchment by condensing the text into 30 lines per page, rather than the original 26.  B also derives from a pre-revision copy.  Schoene referred to the revised edition as the Editio Romana of the Chronicle, on the theory that Jerome made it to present to the Roman synod of 382. (RP: I have been unable to find any actual evidence in any of the works listed below for this).

There is no uniformity in the manuscripts in the division of lines and pages in the prefaces.  All the older manuscripts have a single column format for the preface; some later ones have two columns.

Manuscripts

This is not a complete list: there are said to be a hundred or so.

About this translation

This translation is the first translation of the whole work into a modern language.  The portion written by Jerome himself, from 326-378, has been translated before.  Malcolm Drew Donalson translated it into English with a commentary in 1996; Benoît Jeanjean published an excellent French translation and commentary in 2004, to which he added a translation of the two prefaces of Jerome and Eusebius.  Most but not all of the preface of Jerome had been translated into English as part of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series in the 19^th century.

The translation came about as a result of some experiments in online collaborative translation by Roger Pearse.  Andrew Smith of attalus.org had translated portions of the text of the Chronicle covering the Hellenistic era, down to the death of Tiberius, and formatted them as text keyed on Olympiad, year, and text.  This provided a model for placing the text of the Chronicle online so that it could be translated, without the need to worry about the king-lists and numbers and the detailed format of the final product.  This was the approach taken.

After a discussion with Steven Van Impe, in September 2004, a web page was placed online which contained on the left hand side some 160 text entries in Latin from Jerome's Chronicle, one after another, and on the right a box in which anyone might enter a translation.  The text was broken down into very short sections of no more than a short sentence.  The electronic Patrologia Latina Database text was used as a basis, and corrected against the edition of J. K. Fotheringham.  The PL text contained a great many medieval additions which were mostly ignored, and the remainder placed in brackets.

The text was made available in weekly ‘chunks’ of no more than 160 sections, each being edited, uploaded and announced on a Saturday.  Each chunk took around a week.  The website then allowed anyone visiting the site to enter a translation or comments there and then, without the need for registration.  The emphasis was on each section being so short that anyone with any knowledge of Latin would be able to do something, and thereby people of all levels of Latin would be encouraged to participate.  Quality was assured by keeping the length of the chunk short, so that when a chunk was done people could then review what had been done in the remainder of the week.

The existence of each new chunk was publicised in a variety of online fora, including humanities.classics, soc.history.ancient and the LT-ANTIQ mailing list.  The process took 14 weeks from September 2004 until Christmas 2004, starting with Gaius (Caligula) and proceeding to the end, then restarting with Abraham and continuing down to Tiberius; finally doing the praefationes in the same way. 

After the bulk of the translation work was done, the translation had to be harmonised to try to ensure that the same words were translated the same way.  This was not straightforward.  The text was too large to edit in Microsoft Word or Frontpage.  In the end, each sentence was placed online in a separate text file, numbered 1-2574, and a PHP script written so that the sentences could be browsed by number range (1-10, etc) or by searching for words in the text file.  Using the latter approach, it was easier to display only those sections which contained a specific word to be harmonised.  This process took a month.

Then the result had to be laid out in the format of the original, which took some three months until April 2004 and was very arduous.  The format is 26 line pages and follows Helm’s edition (1956).  This proved extraordinarily difficult, involving some unusual HTML.  The layout was done from the rear of the volume, and only once around 70% of the text had been formatted was a template that would work for every page successfully evolved.  This process took until the end of April 2005, and around 20% had to be done again once the modus operandi had been established. However many features of the Chronicle only become clear once you actually try to lay out a copy on a page, electronic or otherwise.

The layout was done a page at a time in Dreamweaver 6.  Attempts to edit larger files proved impractical.  It quickly became clear that the HTML tables could not be allowed to resize as normally happens.  Instead the tables were specified as fixed size and the properties of each cell specified in CSS.  This ensured compatibility across browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 6 and Firefox.

Finally a question arose about colours in the text.  Jerome’s original text had the columns of kings coloured alternately red and black, in order to avoid confusion.  This has been followed in the online text.  There are no indications in either Helm or Fotheringham of the colour system.  The Merton College manuscript is online, but since this has additional colours it could not be used without reservation.  A colour strip of 27 pictures of the Bodleian manuscript was bought and used as a guide, but this mainly contained items from the latter portion of the Chronicle.  The Assistant Librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield, kindly agreed to allow access to this treasure.  A visit during May 2005 allowed the production of a marked up print-out of the translation which indicated which portions of the text were in which colour.  In the process he found that the facsimile really was an extraordinarily accurate reproduction of the look and feel of the codex, colour aside.  However the first original page was page 69.  The colour on the pages before this point is therefore a reconstruction.  The last page of the codex was also lost in late antiquity; again a guess has been made on the correct colours.

One problem that was encountered in the translation was a portion in Jerome’s introduction.  The original text was laid out in a specific tabular format by Eusebius, and following him, by Jerome.  However at some time during the Dark Ages, a scribe chose to reformat the document by placing all of the columns of kings on the left, and all the text on the right.  The first letter of the text was colour-coded to indicate to which column of numbers – up to nine – it related.  To explain this, the scribe interpolated a short passage into Jerome’s introduction.  Unfortunately this passage is extremely terse and difficult to understand in the absence of a manuscript formatted and coded in this way.  A manuscript of this family does exist in the British Library.  Permission to view this manuscript has been granted but the opportunity to view it has not yet arrived. Until this can be checked, the translation of the interpolated passage must be considered provisional.

Translators and helpers

Around 25 people participated at various points during the 14 weeks of the experiment, and I would like to thank everyone who did so.  In no particular order, the main translators and problem-solvers were: Roger Pearse (RP), Andrew S. Jacobs (ASJ), José Miguel Blasco Ibáñez (JMB), Jacob Wainwright Love (JWL), and an anonymous contributor known as '...'; together with contributions large and small by Argyros George Argyrou (AGA), Steven Van Impe (SVI), Benôit Jeanjean (BJ: whose splendid French translation of the last portion of the Chronicle appeared as our project was drawing to a close), Frank Gay (FG), Frank Van Heden (FVH), Mark DelCogliano (MD), Andrew Smith (AS), Michael Kuettner (MK), James Hannam (JH), DSV, TV, GAC, MDM, M. Guy, Kevin O'Donnell, Ayse Tuzlak (AT), FM, RAK, JWS, tks, EL, SJJC, DH, KS, Pe, AC, RIP and others who chose to remain entirely anonymous. (If anyone for whom I only have initials would like to contact me, I'd be glad to add your names).  Many, many thanks to you all!

All errors of translation, revision and layout are solely the responsibility of Roger Pearse, of course. The translation does not pretend to be what it is not, and doubtless contains errata and corrigenda.  All such will be gratefully received.  The object of the translation was to explore the possibilities and limitations of online translation of works never before translated by a mixture of professionals and people not professionally involved in such activity, and in the process to make this fascinating work available to the general public, and thereby to encourage interest in ancient chronography.  It is hoped that this will now occur.

Thanks are due to Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, who made it possible for the manuscript 'O' -- one of the treasures of that library -- to be consulted.

Key to codes used in the translation

The double-page openings of Jerome's copy are represented on-screen by the white rectangles.  Areas in yellow indicate material not part of Jerome's text.  The spine of the book is represented by a yellow column down the middle.  Page numbers (a later addition) are indicated in square brackets at the top -- [220/221] is pages 220 and 221.  These page numbers appear in Helm and Fotheringham.

A few things in the text may be obscure.  These have been transcribed from the edition of Helm (1956).

g An entry -- The italic letter is not present in Jerome's text, but is a code devised by Rudolf Helm.  All the text entries can be referenced by page number and letter, e.g. 303a.

* -- When an entry is marked with an asterisk in Helm's edition, it is supposedly not present in the Armenian translation of the original work by Eusebius.  This means that it must be an entry added by Jerome.  However Burgess states (p.24) that these are not very accurate.  After some hesitation, I have transcribed them.
(*) -- Helm's code for an entry which is present in the Armenian, but in a somewhat shorter or different form.
*? -- Helm's code for another possible modification; I am unclear in what way.

The first column of years, underlined, is the years from Abraham, shown every 10 years.  The reckoning of years AD and BC is shown for guidance, but did not form part of the original text.

Note that the text has been formatted for display under Internet Explorer 6.  I have been unable to discover why it behaves erratically under Firefox.  The task of converting the Chronicle to HTML for the first time has not been a trivial one, and the only way to find out how to do it was to learn by doing.  There are certain irregularities of page width in the second portion of the Chronicle.  I hope I may be forgiven for not redoing this portion entirely, using the page size and format of the pages in the first part. Such an enterprise would be useful, but it would take months, for purely cosmetic gain.  At the moment I do not have the resources to redo it.  If it causes deep pain, let me know.

It is possible to print off the tabular portion of the Chronicle, in landscape mode, resizing to paper width.  An inkjet can give quite satisfactory results.

Latin text

After this was all done, there was very little energy left for anything else, and certainly not to create an online Latin text.  The text used for the translation project consisted of the 'lemmas' of text only.  But during the summer of 2005, JMB very heroically volunteered to incorporate this into the format of the translation, so that a Latin text would be available.  This he did, and it now appears here with the English.  The numerals have not been converted back to Roman numbers.  If someone would care to volunteer for that task, it would be nice to complete the job.

Bibliography

The materials available to the editor were limited to whatever could be bought or photocopied by someone living in a rural town.  These were:

Richard W. BURGESS, Studies in Eusebian and post-Eusebian Chronography, Stuttgart (1999). (Photocopy of portions).
Malcolm Drew DONALSON, A Translation of Jerome's Chronicon With Historical Commentary, Mellen University Press (1996). ISBN: 0773422587 (Photocopy of translation).
J. K. FOTHERINGHAM, The Bodleian Manuscript of Jerome's Version of the Chronicle of Eusebius Reproduced in Collotype.  Oxford: Clarendon (1905) (Photocopy)
J. K. FOTHERINGHAM, Eusebii Pamphili Chronici canones. London: Humphrey Milford (1923).  (Photocopy)
R. HELM, Eusebius Werke 7: Die Chronik des Hieronymus, Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller 47 (1956). (Photocopy of text only) 
Benoît JEANJEAN & Bertrand LANÇON, Saint-Jérôme, Chronique : Continuation de la Chronique d'Eusèbe, années 326-378 suivie de quatre études sur les Chroniques et chronographies dans l'An ... e ronde du GESTIAT, Brest, 22 et 23 mars 2002, PU Rennes (1 octobre 2004), ISBN : 2753500185. (Purchased copy).
Josef KARST, Eusebius Werke, 5te Band : Die Chronik aus dem Armenischen übersetzt.  Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteeler der Ersten Jahrhunderte 20.  (1911). (Photocopy of portions).
Alden A. MOSSHAMMER, The Chronicle of Eusebius and the Greek Chronographic Tradition, Lewisburg/London (1979), ISBN 0-8387-1939-2. (Photocopy)
Alfred SCHOENE, Eusebi Chronicorum Libri.  2 vols. Berlin: Weidmann (1875) (Purchased copy, but not extensively used after reading Mosshammer's comments).

The other item available to the editor and translators, and used with wonder and delight for every chunk of translation, was the 9^th century Merton College Oxford manuscript 315, available online from the Bodleian Library website.  The Bodleian's own access was somewhat clunky, so some PHP scripts were wrapped around their site to facilitate study.  The manuscript can be browsed using these scripts.

Roger PEARSE
Ipswich, 2005.

This text was written by Roger Pearse, Ipswich, UK, 2005.  All material on this page is in the public domain - copy freely.

Greek text is rendered using the Scholars Press SPIonic font, free from here.