Did Constantine Recognize the Authority of the Alexandrian Tradition When he Installed Alexander as Head of the New Church at New Rome (Constantinople)?

 So, in this rewritten chronology, I am treating Philostorgius’ “Alexander problem” as a case study in what happens when we forget that our only access to his Historia ecclesiastica is through Photius’ epitome, not through Philostorgius’ own prose.

The basic proposal is simple. Instead of imagining two neatly distinct bishops called Alexander—one safely parked in Alexandria, another conveniently installed in Constantinople—I start from the opposite end:

there is one Alexander at the core of Philostorgius’ narrative;
he begins as Alexander of Alexandria;
he later appears as bishop of Constantinople, “bishop of this city”;
and he dies there, opening the way for the translation of Eusebius of Nicomedia.

On this reading, the epitome’s alternation between “bishop of this city” (2.10) and “Alexander of Alexandria” (2.11) is not proof of two different men but a shift of reference frame in Photius’ own voice. When the story is anchored in Constantinople, Alexander is “the high priest of this city”; when the focus moves back to the succession crisis in Egypt, the same figure is recalled as “Alexander of Alexandria.”

If that is right, then the “two Alexanders” of the later orthodox historians begin to look like a harmonizing correction of something more compressed and inconvenient in the underlying Arian dossier—a single Alexander whose career sits at the hinge between Alexandria, Constantinople, and the rise of Eusebius of Nicomedia.

Everything here turns on remembering who is actually speaking on the page. Any attempt to use Philostorgius as a witness for “two Alexanders” has to begin with a basic but often blurred fact: the Greek text that survives is not Philostorgius’ own continuous narrative, but Photius’ ninth-century epitome in the Bibliotheca (cod. 40). The sentence frames, the connective tissue, and a good deal of the moral color are Photius’, not Philostorgius’. It is Photius who decides how to segment, label, and condemn what Philostorgius wrote.

In the crucial passage this is very clear. At 2.10 the epitome reads:

Τελευτήσαντος δὲ τοῦ ταύτης τῆς πόλεως ἀρχιερέως Ἀλεξάνδρου, τὸν Νικομηδείας φησὶν Εὐσέβιον εἰς τὸν τῆς νεοκτίστου πόλεως ἀρχιερατικὸν μεταστῆσαι θρόνον.

“After the high priest of this city, Alexander, had died, he says that Eusebius of Nicomedia was transferred to the episcopal throne of the newly founded city.”

The finite verb is φησίν. Grammatically its subject is Philostorgius: “he says that Eusebius…” But the narrative vantage point—the demonstrative “this city” and the phrase “high priest of this city” (τοῦ ταύτης τῆς πόλεως ἀρχιερεύς)—belongs to Photius sitting in Constantinople. He is the one orienting his readers: “this city” is his city. It is also worth noting the terminology: in Constantinople Alexander is called ἀρχιερεύς, “high priest.”

Immediately afterwards, at 2.11, the epitome continues:

Ὅτι τὸ δυσσεβὲς οὗτος τοῦ ψεύδους ὄργανον, Ἀλεξάνδρου τοῦ Ἀλεξανδρείας τελευτήσαντος…

“That this impious instrument of falsehood, after the death of Alexander of Alexandria…”

Here the polemical tag τὸ δυσσεβὲς… τοῦ ψεύδους ὄργανον (“this impious instrument of falsehood”) is transparently Photian. We are not overhearing Philostorgius’ voice; we are being told what Philostorgius “says,” in sentences that have been re-cast by a ninth-century patriarch who loathes him. Within that frame, the back-to-back genitive absolutes—first “Alexander, high priest of this city, having died” (2.10), then “Alexander of Alexandria having died” (2.11)—are the epitomator’s way of structuring and disambiguating the story for his audience.

Once you see the layered authorship, the tidy “two Alexanders” prosopography looks a lot less solid. On the surface, the epitome seems to set up (a) an Alexander in Constantinople whose death allows Eusebius of Nicomedia to be translated to the new capital, and (b) another Alexander, explicitly “of Alexandria,” whose death precedes the forced ordination of Athanasius. If you read the epitome naïvely, both Alexanders slide very comfortably into the later orthodox lists.

But that neatness may be a by-product of Photius’ summarizing technique, not a faithful mirror of Philostorgius’ conception. An epitomator has to compress, label, and tidy. One obvious way for Photius to keep his ninth-century readers oriented is to force the material into clear categories: one Alexander “of this city,” another Alexander “of Alexandria.” That does not prove that Philostorgius himself wrote with the same hard distinction. On the contrary, an Arian historian interested in the court politics of Constantine’s new capital might very well have handled the transition from Alexandria to Constantinople in a looser and more fluid way—assuming his readers could carry the identification of “Alexander” across settings without needing repeated city-labels.

Under that scenario Philostorgius does not have to spell everything out. He might speak simply of Alexander’s death in connection with Eusebius’ translation, and later of Alexander’s death in connection with Athanasius’ ordination, trusting the narrative context (court vs. Alexandrian succession) to do the disambiguating work. It is when Photius retells this material, standing in Constantinople and writing for a very different audience, that “the high priest of this city” on the one hand and “Alexander of Alexandria” on the other crystallize into two seemingly separate prosopographical entries.

One further wrinkle reinforces the point. In 2.10 Alexander at Constantinople is “high priest” (ἀρχιερεύς), while in 2.11 Alexander in Egypt appears under the more standard Christian title “bishop” in later discourse about him. Those terminological differences can easily be over-interpreted as proof of two figures; but given Photius’ habit of mixing his own ecclesiastical idiom with snippets from Philostorgius, they may tell us more about Photian style than about Philostorgian prosopography.

Because Philostorgius’ original text is lost, none of this can be proved. The single-Alexander hypothesis cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt, and it would be rash to insist that Philostorgius “must have” written that way. What can be said, and what is often quietly ignored, is more modest but important: the Greek of 2.10–11 does not compel a two-Alexander reading. Grammatically and narratologically it just as easily allows the career of a single Alexander to be described under two aspects—bishop of “this city” when Photius is thinking from Constantinople, and “of Alexandria” when he turns his readers’ eyes back to the Nile.

If that is right, the genuine evidential force of the epitome is quite limited. It shows us, in vivid and moralizing language, how a ninth-century patriarch wanted to present an Arian historian’s story of the fourth century. It does not, by itself, exclude the possibility that Philostorgius’ original narrative allowed or even encouraged the conflation of Alexander of Alexandria and Alexander “of this city” into a single career trajectory.

And once that possibility is on the table, the tidy Catholic distinction between “Alexander of Alexandria” and a separate “Alexander of Constantinople” starts to look a little more like a later prosopographical convenience than an unavoidable reading of the Arian source.