Some Aspects of Hellenism in the Early Greek Church Historians

Abstract

Studies dealing with the attitudes of various writers of the patristic period towards Hellenism, including the aspect ofpaideia, have tended to concentrate, up to the present, on a specific writer or time-span. It is no accident that fourth-century writers have loomed large in recent investigations in this area, since the fourth century was pivotal in determining Christian attitudes to pagan literary traditions. Here it is my aim to draw attention not to a single writer or period but rather to the representatives of a Christian literary genre, and to discuss their stance with regard to Hellenism, in particularpaideia. My choice falls on the Greek ecclesiastical historians; although they have been scrutinised increasingly in the past twenty years, their collective attitude to Hellenic culture or Greek letters has not yet received a separate study. Those early Greek historical works that have survived to us more or less intact — the histories of Eusebius of Caesarea, Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Evagrius Scholasticus — provide us with a more reliable overall picture of the Hellenism of their composers than, for example, the fragmentaryChurch Historiesof Philostorgius and Theodore Lector; taken together, they give us at the same time a useful chronological spread from the early fourth to the late sixth century. The crucial questions to be posed are to what extent these writers deemed Hellenism to be compatible with ecclesiastical historiography, and how typical their perspective on Hellenism was of their own times. Where appropriate, we shall also try to ascertain how these church historians stand with regard to using classical citations and references in their narratives, how they view the classical past, and what their attitude is towards non-Greek culture.

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