Chronicle

Jerome's Chronicon is a Latin translation, expansion, and continuation of the chronological tables that Eusebius of Caesarea had compiled in Greek as the second part of his Chronicle. Jerome produced it around 380 while living in Constantinople, dedicating it to his friends Vincentius and Gallienus. Eusebius's tables had laid out the histories of the Hebrews, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans in parallel columns so that a reader could see at a glance what was happening in each kingdom in any given year, counted from the birth of Abraham. The Greek original of those tables is lost; Jerome's Latin version is the principal form in which they survive, and it is also the document through which the whole method of synchronized world chronology entered the Latin West.

Jerome did three things with Eusebius's material. He translated the tables, preserving their columnar structure and the running counts of Olympiads and years of Abraham. He added, for the stretch from the fall of Troy to the twentieth year of Constantine, a large number of entries drawn from Roman sources, above all Suetonius, so that Latin literary and political history would be represented alongside the sacred and Greek material Eusebius had favored. And he carried the whole work forward on his own authority from 325 to 378, ending with the death of the emperor Valens at Adrianople, an event he had lived through and plainly regarded as a hinge. The preface is as notable as the tables themselves. In it Jerome reflects on the difficulty of rendering Greek into Latin, on the near impossibility of reproducing another language's cadence and word order, and on the practical arrangement of the manuscript, explaining how he used red and black ink to keep the strands of different kingdoms distinct. It is one of the earliest sustained discussions by a Latin writer of what a translator is actually doing, and it anticipates the arguments he would later make at greater length in defense of his biblical translations.

The Chronicon became the backbone of medieval Latin historiography. Prosper of Aquitaine, Hydatius, and a long line of later chroniclers wrote their own works as continuations of it, so that for centuries the shape of the Western sense of time, with Scripture, pagan antiquity, and the Roman empire aligned on a single ruler, descended from this book. For the history of the late fourth century, Jerome's own entries remain a primary witness, terse and sometimes partisan, especially where the Arian controversy and the fortunes of his teachers and enemies are concerned. The work also shows the author of the Vulgate at the start of his career, learning to handle sources and to think about translation as a discipline.

Who should read this: readers interested in how early Christians organized history and placed the church within the span of the nations, students of Jerome who want to see his scholarly method before the great biblical projects, and anyone curious about the origins of Western chronology. It is a reference table with a preface, not a devotional or theological treatise, and readers seeking spiritual formation in the usual sense should go to Jerome's letters instead.