Preface of Rufinus To The History Of Eusebius

Abstract It is the business of skillful physicians, they say, to provide some sort of medicine or potion when they see that cities or regions are threatened by epidemics, so that people may be protected by it from the death that threatens them. This is the sort of medical art which you have practiced, my reverend father Chromatius,* at this time when the Goths have burst through the harriers into Italy with Alaric at their head, and a lethal plague is spreading far and wide, to the ruin of fields, herds, and men: you have sought some remedy to protect from cruel death the people God has entrusted to you, a remedy by which ailing spirits may be diverted from the thought of impending evil and give their attention to something better. Thus you have charged me to translate into Latin the church history which that most learned man Eusebius of Caesarea composed in Greek, that the attention of those who hear it may be occupied and they may for a while come to forget present evils while their interest is directed to the affairs of the past. At first I wanted to beg off the work as being unequal to it and as having lost fluency in Latin after so many years, but then it occurred to me that *Bishop of Aquileia ca. 388-407 and Rufinus’s patron.