Westar Institute

In this paper I will return to one of the theses of my 2019monograph, Eusebius and Empire, that in his Ecclesiastical History,the first thoroughgoing work of Christian historiography, Eusebius of Caesarea worked to celebrate the Christian family. I argued there that the fourth-century Eusebius sought to affirm the continuing value for Christians of the family unit – as a locus for paideia in particular –against the separatist, antagonistic attitudes towards the family of much second- and third-century Christian literature, and in line with the traditional sympathetic ideal of the Roman family. He did so both to provide a historically-evidenced response to the recurrent critics of Christianity who had highlighted familial immorality and impiety in their critiques of Christianity, and also as a means to present Christian actors as those best placed to wield authority in the Graeco-Roman mold. In this paper, I address some further case studies not treated in my monograph, in particular turning myattention to the Ecclesiastical History's epilogue, the Life of Constantine, which in addition can be productively read against tetrarchic familial imagery.

James Corke-Webster is a Reader in Classics, History and Liberal Arts, and Co-Director of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, at King's College London. He is a classicist and historian with particular interests in early Christian and late antique history and literature. He studied Classics and Theology at Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester, before taking up a Fulbright Scholarship at Berkeley. He held lectureships at Edinburgh and Durham before moving to Kings in 2017.

‍