Paulus Orosius

Orosius was born about 375 in Roman Spain, probably at Braga in the northwest, and became a priest there. Around 414 he fled, his own account speaks of barbarian invasion, and the Vandals, Sueves, and Alans had just poured across Spain, and took ship for North Africa to find Augustine of Hippo.

He arrived as a young man with a question about heresy. Augustine put him to work at once, and the collaboration produced three books in about four years.

The first was a memorandum on the errors of the Priscillianists and Origenists in Spain, which Augustine answered with a treatise of his own. The second came out of a journey: Augustine sent Orosius to Palestine in 415 to consult Jerome and to deal with Pelagius, who was living there. At a synod at Jerusalem that summer Orosius stated the case against Pelagius and got nowhere, partly because he was arguing in Greek he did not command; Bishop John of Jerusalem let Pelagius go. Orosius wrote his Liber apologeticus in his own defence afterward. On the way home he carried relics of the martyr Stephen, newly discovered near Jerusalem, to the West.

The third book is the one that lasted. Rome had been sacked by Alaric in 410, and pagans across the empire were saying the obvious thing: the city stood for a thousand years under the old gods and fell within a century of abandoning them. Augustine was answering that charge in The City of God, and he asked Orosius to supply the historical half of the case.

The result was the Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, finished about 417 or 418, the first attempt at a universal Christian history of the world, running from Adam to Orosius's own day. Its method is blunt: he goes through the wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes, and massacres of the pre-Christian centuries in relentless detail, and asks the reader whether the good old days were in fact good. Troy, the Persian wars, Carthage, the Roman civil wars, the proscriptions, all catalogued as evidence that the world was worse before Christ, not better.

As history it is uneven; he compresses, exaggerates, and bends chronology to his argument. As a book it was one of the most influential ever written in Latin. For roughly a thousand years it was the standard textbook of world history in Western Europe, over two hundred manuscripts survive, more than for almost any other Latin prose work. King Alfred the Great had it translated into Old English. Dante puts Orosius in Paradise.

He went back toward Spain, found the way blocked, and stopped in Africa or Minorca. Nothing is recorded after about 418, and the date of his death is unknown.

Sources: Orosius, Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (English translation by A. T. Fear, Translated Texts for Historians) and Liber apologeticus; Augustine, The City of God and Letters; Gennadius, De viris illustribus.