Beneath the Christian Surface: Pagan Chronography in Christian Chronicles

Abstract In one respect at least, Scaliger shared more with his modem successors than the last chapter may have suggested. He believed as strongly as any twentieth-century scholar that the chief value of Christian chronography lay in what it could reveal about pagan chronography. In the 1590s, as we have seen, he had already begun to quarry the fragments of lost Greek historical texts from their niches in Josephus and Eusebius. He assembled many of them in the appendix to the De emendatione and tried to reconstruct both their original shapes and the transformations they had undergone. The Chronicle offered rich new information about both the late Greek scholars whom the Christians read and the still earlier writers who had provided the compilers with their basic stock of information.