Introduction to the Chronicle

Notes

Interspersed among the father-son chains that are its principal feature, the Great Stemma contains several other classes of data which are not genealogical and where the purpose may not at first glance be clear:

All of this material is familiar from a quite different kind of literary genre, the Christian chronology of the world, as researched by several authors in the Patristic period.

Late Antique chronography was a science which almost entirely ignored physical evidence and instead relied on literary evidence, constructing a history of the world by harmonizing various ethnic histories.

The Christian variant of this science was based on an assumption that there was no such thing as pre-history and that the world's beginning was already a matter of historical record in the Old Testament of the Bible. It attempted to synthesize a timeline by integrating Roman, Greek and Egyptian chronicles with the biblical story.

The chronology integrated into the Great Stemma is less complete than in some Late Antique works that have come down to us, but there is enough there for us to infer the overall structure and to understand the intentions of its anonymous author.

Since it seems safe to assume that both a compact chronicle and the stemmatic material were integral parts of the same document from its beginning, dating evidence about the chronology might also be adduced as evidence about the stemma's date of creation.

This would serve our ultimate purpose, which is to discover how long ago stemmatic diagrams were in use as an accepted part of writing and reading in western civilization.

The science of Christian chronography had a path of development that is traceable through the writings of Theophilus of Antioch, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus of Rome, Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesarea.[*]The Italian scholar Osvalda Andrei contends that the chronography attributed to Hippolytus is the work of some other person, but this position is not shared by others.

The position I intend to argue in this article and its annexes is that the Great Stemma was originally dependent on the Chronicle of Hippolytus, but was at some point heavily revised in reliance on Eusebius's Chronological Canons to attain its form as we see it today.

The connection to both of these predecessors has only been vaguely touched on by previous scholars. Williams suggested the Stemma might be "close" to a Spanish work, the Computatio of 452, which is a chronicle that arguably follows the grand lines of the chronology of Hippolytus. [*]Williams, Commentaries, 208. The Computatio is a chronological work which is not to be confused with the Gallic Chronicle, also of 452. The Computatio appears in Mommsen's Chronica Minora I directly before the Liber Genealogus. It has mostly recently been discussed by Inglebert, Romains, 623, where its Hippolytan bias is set out in detail.

Zaluska also paid passing attention to the chronological material. She considered the contenu purement chronographique as a feature that distinguished the Great Stemma from the more theological Lesser Stemma "qui insiste déjà sur le sens typologique de l'histoire sainte".[*]Zaluska, Stemmata, 151. However her view tended to be overly narrow, shying away from a closer examination of the Stemma's underlying chronographic theories:

[L]es chrétiens composèrent aussi des chroniques "universelles" dont le contenu se limite presque exclusivement au récit biblique, l'histoire extérieure à la Bible n'y étant que très rarement évoquée. Ici, l'intérêt étant centré sur l'histoire sainte, on ne se contente pas de la lignée principale, mais on l'enrichit de très nombreux lignages bibliques secondaires. Le principal témoin de ce type de chroniques est le Liber genealogus anni 427 ...[*]

We have already noted that the Great Stemma contains only short snippets of non-Jewish dynasties, but their purpose is plain: to mesh the biblical record with wider history. From the style of these glosses it is clear why they have been included: they establish synchronisms between biblical history and established secular history.

A typical example of these synchronisms is one drawn from Eusebius which states that Rome was founded in the fourth year of the reign of King Ahaz of Judah (approximately 753 BC):

fiunt autem a conditione urbis Rome (id est XI Kal. Maias) conditore Romo et Romulo, Martis et Ielie filio: regnante tunc in Iudea Achaz annos quarto regni eius

A synchronism is a statement that two events taken from different time-reckoning systems occurred at the same time. Matching names in this way allows the historian to bring the separate ancient chronicles into "sync" when other scales, such as years, are unknown.

Another such synchronism in the Great Stemma, discussed below, connects Achaemenid history into the Roman reckoning of time, stating that King Cyrus died in the 220th Roman year (529 BC):

in anno quo Cirus defunctus est: annos CCXX

Generally, the Great Stemma contains only the most cursory references to non-Jewish history. It names the last king of Rome and the first caesar, but merely treats the intervening, 482-year republican period as an otherwise uncommented-on span of time:

post Tarquinium Superbus usque ad Iulium Cesarem fiunt anni CCCC.LXXX.II

The Roman-king section preceding this is one of the two substantial textual passages with a chronological focus. An aside about Rome's origins does not seem to obviously connect with the main biblical-history focus of the Great Stemma, and one must bear in the mind the possibility that this could be a later interpolation by an editor.[*]Whoever brought in this material was clearly eager to give some place in the account to the foundation myths of the western empire. While its inclusion could perhaps suggest authorship in an earlier period that was still coming to terms with the post-Constantinian dispensation, where Christianity had only recently been adopted as the official religion of the empire, it seems to fit better with the period of Augustine, in which imperial patriotism becomes characteristic of the Christian elite.

One of the most striking of the synchronisms, as mentioned above, is the careful tracing of four Achaemenid reigns, those of Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Smerdis and Darius the Great, in a succession of roundels.

The precise synchronism between the Achaemenids and the Jews had vexed a series of chronographers. Most were certain that the Exile in Babylon lasted 70 years, since this was the duration prophesied in Jeremiah 25:9-13, but dating the beginning and the end proved to be a major challenge. The edict of liberation in the first regnal year of Cyrus, as described in chapter one of Ezra, tends to suggests that the exile was of much a shorter duration than 70 years.

Hippolytus, in the estimate of Rudolf Helm (Hippolytus, 178-183), came seriously adrift in his attempt to establish a sound alignment between the Achaemenid rulers and the Jewish Exile. Helm concluded that Hippolytus never found how to mesh the Achaemenids with the scriptural record.[*]Helm rejects the only apparent synchronism, between the end of the Exile and the 2nd year of Cyrus, as merely a construct of later editors of the Liber Generationis II text.

Eusebius offered a bold solution. He proposed that the Exile did not end in 1 Cyrus (AM 4639 by his calculation), as might be assumed from a reading of Ezra 1 and its account of the Edict of Liberation. According to Eusebius, the Exile continued until 2 Darius (AM 4679), so that the 70 years had begun in AM 4609. For Eusebius the Exile was measured up to the completion of the New Temple in 2 Darius.[*]Helm, Eusebius, 182: The whole period of the captivity of the Jews is reckoned as 70 years, which according to some are counted from the third year of Joachim to the 20th year of Cyrus king of the Persians. Further, according to others, (this number of years is counted) from year 13 of Josiah king of the Judaeans, in whose reign Jeremiah began to prophesy, until the first year of the aforementioned king Cyrus. In fact the 70 years of the desolation of the temple are completed in the time of Darius the king (Pearse translation).

The schematic drawing below shows how this Eusebian solution can be expounded using the graphic conventions of the Great Stemma. The chronographer's baseline is the Roman era, which extends backwards 1,000 years or more from the chronographer's present in the fourth or fifth century. The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which describe Achaemenid conflicts with the Greeks, including the conquest of Lydia under Cyrus the Great and the later rule of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, during the reign of Cambyses, enable us to mesh Roman to Greek to Achaemenid time.

Using this data, it is therefore possible to estimate the date in Roman terms when Cyrus died in battle fighting the Massagetae: 220 years after the foundation of Rome. From this, one can solve the chronographer's problem of correctly synchronizing Jewish with Roman time, since we know about Jewish interaction with both Cyrus and Darius from scripture. From the Cyrus synchronism we can now count forwards to the rule of Darius and fix here the end-point of the Exile at the reconstruction of the Temple, as described by Ezra 5 (Eusebius argues that Cyrus's Edict of Release occurred halfway through the Exile period). Finally, the chronographer can use this end-point to count backwards again by 70 years and attach a Roman date to the last Judaean king.

This drawing is of course schematic: it is not found in this form in our manuscripts of the Great Stemma, not is it claimed to be a reconstruction of anything that really did exist.

Indeed there is no firm evidence in the Great Stemma of how its author (or the editor of the version we now see) conceived this synchronism. The drawing is simply a plausible proposal to explain why the four Achaemenid reigns have been placed on the chart: to represent the final 40-year span of the Exile. It was perhaps important during exposition of the chronological issues to be able show an audience visually which of these events coincided. It would also have led the lecturer to point out that Zerubbabel in the Matthew fila is the Jewish leader in Ezra 5 who was a contemporary of Darius. Once again, this synchronism is not explicitly stated, but flows as the self-evident implication from the fact that the four Achaemenid reigns are laid out as a mini-timeline.

Unfortunately, we have no evidence from the Great Stemma itself, or even from the G recension of the Liber Genealogus, which usually offers a reliable record of what was displayed in the ur-form of the Great Stemma, to prove that such exposition took place.

One of the four Achaemenid roundels, that referring to the two gemini, has already been dicussed in some detail by Zaluska. The information it is based on can be traced back to the 5th-century BC histories of Herodotus. A notable episode in the histories (confirmed by other historical evidence) involves the short reign between Cambyses and Darius. This is a reign of about seven months of one Bardiya, whose name was rendered into Greek as Smerdis. Bardiya, who ruled for part of 522 BCE, was either a younger son of the late Achaemenid ruler Cyrus (this is proposed by Albert Olmstead) or an imposter claiming to be the son (as stated by Herodotus).[*]Quoted by the Iranica article from A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, Chicago, 1948, pp. 107-10.

The next Achaemenid ruler, Darius I, seized power in a coup. Herodotus, in 3:61-87 of his History, portrays the Smerdis period in fanciful style, saying it was a plot by two brothers belonging to the Magi priestly caste, one of whom was the imposter and the other of whom, held the reins. The imposter had supposedly been mutilated for some previous offence by having his ears cut off. Herodotus says the double was unmasked by pulling off his turban. An article in the Encyclopedia Iranica gives more detail on the episode and a brief scholarly review of the evidence.

The Great Stemma labels this strange reign as the rule of "two twins for eight months". Zaluska considers the Latin term gemini or twins to refer to the two Magi usurpers, since they were brothers. However other Late Antique chronicles actually do use the words Fratres Magi, and it is more likely that the Great Stemma author intended gemini to denote the real Smerdis and the pseudo-Smerdis (the usurper) being alike in appearance.[*]cf. Gelzer, Heinrich. Sextus Julius Africanus und die Byzantinische Chronographie, II.13 (1885).

An unsolved mystery clinging to this entry is the fact that it is spread across two roundels. In some manuscripts, the word menses (months) is transferred to the second roundel. In others, the second roundel is left blank. Why the second roundel is there cannot be satisfactorily explained. There is no gap in the reigns, as Darius clearly succeeded Bardiya/Smerdis. It may perhaps be that the roundels are conceived as heads or "polls" and that two are here to represent the duo gemini, but that does not seem to be a convention anywhere else in the Great Stemma document.

The remainder of the chronological evidence in the Great Stemma will be discussed on three separate pages:

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