Jerome as a Historian of His Period: His Outlook on Crisis Phenomena and on the Decline of the Roman Empire

Abstract

Historiography occupies merely a modest position in Jerome’s extraordinarily extensive and diverse literary oeuvre, whereby his letters provide many historical data and contemplations highlighting his outlook on the contemporary period. Jerome concluded the Chronicle, his only historical work in the narrow sense of the word (or the continuation of Eusebius’ Chronicon), with the Battle of Adrianople (378), as did the greatest historian of his time the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus. In this event, which was of key importance for the Roman Empire, with its immediate catastrophic consequences in the empire’s entire Balkan-Danubian area, a generation later also in Italy and the West, he saw the beginning of the end of Rome. Subsequently, Jerome (Ep. 123, 15) used the metaphor of a sinking ship or a wreckage of the empire. He could not keep his promise that he would pen a comprehensive history of Gratianus’ and, in particular, Theodosius’ period. Watershed events and processes, which he in some places briefly assessed and elsewhere highlighted their traumatic nature, include the campaign of barbarian groups from the Central Danubian area and their incursion into Gaul in 406, which sealed the fate of the Roman West, as well as the Visigoths’ campaign in Italy in 408, and particularly the Gothic conquest of Rome in 410, which affected him deeply. In the last period of his lifetime (up to 419/420?) his observations and contemplations of history became rare, which is probably a reflection of a more stable situation in the Roman Empire.