What Did Socrates Do with His Historia Ecclesiastica?

 One of the oddities in the Eusebius–Socrates–Rufinus tangle is how tidy Socrates’ own book-architecture is at precisely the point where the “Eusebius ends / others begin” boundary lives. If you stop reading for names and doctrines and just watch what he does structurally, a pattern pops out that looks a lot less accidental than people usually assume.

Start with the basics. Book 1 of Socrates’ Church History runs from Constantine’s rise through to Constantine’s death and the accession of his sons. That, by itself, is already a very classical place to stop: the emperor dies, new reign begins, you cut the roll and start a new book. Late-antique historiography loves those succession hinges.

But the really important bit is what happens next. The first order of business in Book 2 is not “let me tell you a new story under Constantius.” Instead, Socrates opens by taking a methodological swipe at Rufinus, the Latin continuator of Eusebius, and in particular at Rufinus’s handling of the chronology for this very post-Constantinian stretch.

So the formal sequence looks like this:

– Book 1: “Here, with Constantine’s death and the succession of his sons, I stop.”
– Opening of Book 2: “Before I go on, I need to talk about the man who carried on from where Eusebius stopped, and how badly he handled the timeline for precisely this next segment.”

It is an extremely clean hinge. On one side you have “Eusebius/Constantine”; on the other side “Rufinus/Constantine’s sons,” with Socrates stepping in to correct Rufinus.

Now bring Philostorgius into the room. In the epitome, he explicitly says Eusebius “brought down his history to the period when Constantine the Great was succeeded in the empire by his sons” (HE 1.2). That is, word-for-word, the transition Socrates uses to close Book 1. From a purely literary point of view, you can read Socrates’ architecture as silently endorsing Philostorgius’s “Eusebius ends at the sons” boundary—even though, verbally, Socrates repeats the standard line that his own copy of Eusebius’ History stopped earlier, at the settlement with Licinius and the peace of the Church.

That tension is where things get interesting.

Socrates insists that he is working with a “short” or “brief” Eusebius: an edition that does not carry the narrative all the way to Constantine’s death and succession, but stops earlier. No such “short version” survives. We have no independent access to the hypothetical truncated Eusebius he invokes. Nothing prevents him, in principle, from having taken an existing Eusebian dossier, massaged it into a form that ends neatly at the Constantinian succession, and then projecting the chronological blame for everything that follows onto Rufinus.

Once you allow that possibility, Socrates’ book division looks very much like it is keyed to the same turning-point Philostorgius attributes to “Eusebius’ history,” regardless of where the strict end of the ten-book HE lay. He closes his own Book 1 exactly where Philostorgius places Eusebius’ historical terminus: Constantine’s sons. He then uses the beginning of Book 2 to pick a fight with the Latin who dared to continue the “Eusebian” story from that point onward and got the dates wrong.

This dovetails nicely with how a fifth-century Constantinopolitan reader might have experienced “Eusebius” in practice. They are not obsessively separating Historia Ecclesiastica from Vita Constantini from the Chronicon the way modern editors do. What they have is an undifferentiated “Eusebius story”: apostolic times through Constantine, plus the synchronisms, plus the imperial biography. Taken together, that package runs naturally right through to Constantine’s death and the succession of his sons.

Seen from that angle, Socrates’ structure looks like the work of someone who takes for granted that the “Eusebian part” of the grand Christian narrative runs up to that hinge, and that what comes after belongs to other hands. If you start from that assumption, his formal decisions make perfect sense:

– You let your own Book 1 march alongside the Eusebian material up to Constantine’s sons.
– You then open Book 2 with a statement of method: “Now I must address the man who took over after Eusebius and fix his botched chronology.”
– You thereby align yourself with a tradition in which “Eusebius = up to Constantine’s sons; others beyond,” even while you nominally say your copy of Eusebius stopped a bit earlier.

If Philostorgius did not explicitly say that Eusebius’s “History” ended with Constantine’s death and the succession of his sons, you could easily argue that the Vita Constantini was simply being experienced as the missing material: the bit that fills out Eusebius’ narrative to that natural dynastic cutoff. In practice, HE as we have it, the Chronicon, and the Vita work as an interlocking package. The HE ends with the Constantinian settlement and victory over Licinius; the Vita carries Constantine through to his death and succession; the Chronicon supplies the synchronisms in the background.

A fifth-century compiler in Constantinople, sitting amid this combined dossier, does not need a neat modern title-page to know where the “Eusebius part” of the Christian story stops. He feels it at the narrative hinge: Constantine dies; his sons succeed; the old roll is finished. From there, other historians will take over.

Socrates positions himself exactly on that threshold. His Book 1 stops where Philostorgius says Eusebius stopped. His Book 2 opens by discrediting Rufinus’ attempt to handle the next stretch. He claims he had a “short” Eusebius, but the surviving traditions suggest he is operating inside a much looser, more integrated Eusebian universe – one where HE, VC, and the chronographic material blur into a single “Eusebius story” running from apostles to Constantine’s sons.

Read that way, his architecture is not neutral. It is a subtle endorsement of a broader tradition: “Eusebius up to Constantine’s heirs; Rufinus and the rest beyond.”