UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation analyzes the last four books of an influential, fourth-century CE, Christian text, the Historia Ecclesiastica (History) written by church historian and bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima. Rather than approaching this Patristic text through a literary lens, my dissertation seeks to understand and re-visualize how the History produced and was a product of the geography of the ancient Mediterranean. By annotating books seven through ten of the History and visualizing the data through digital tools, I show that the universalizing rhetoric of the text was, in fact, geographically localized and masked the contingent nature of the text’s production. In order to achieve these goals, I first contextualize the city of Caesarea Maritima by locating it within Eastern Roman networks. Through this process I emphasize the non-Roman historical influences on the city and argue that Caesarea’s strategic use as an administrative city and military base must inform our understanding of the city in the fourth-century CE. As a city with logistic importance to the Roman Empire, Caesarea was not (as is often assumed) a backwater city on the Roman periphery. After developing context for Caesarea, I then analyze the geographical components in books seven through ten of the History. With the use of data sets (presented through tables and maps) I argue that Eusebius’ idea of where the Roman and Christian worlds came together was a winnowing, localized region: the Roman East. By doing so, I frame the History as a work embedded in its Eastern Mediterranean context and join the ranks of scholars who argue not only for a more nuanced understanding of Eusebius and his work in context, but also those who work to show how canonical texts have long been used to reinforce power dynamics in the modern world.