It is the mark of skilled physicians, they say, when they have seen general diseases threatening cities or regions, to provide some kind of medicine or draught, by which men, fortified beforehand, may be defended from the impending destruction. This you also, Venerable Father Chromatius, pursuing the physician's art at the time when, the barriers of Italy having been burst open by Alaric, leader of the Goths, a pestilent disease poured itself in and laid waste far and wide the fields, the herds, and men, sought some remedy of deadly destruction for the peoples committed to you by God — a remedy by which the sick minds, withdrawn from the contagion of the onrushing evil, might be held occupied with better pursuits:
you enjoin upon me that I turn into Latin the Ecclesiastical History which the most learned man Eusebius of Caesarea composed in the Greek tongue — by the reading of which the mind of the hearers, held captive while it more eagerly seeks the knowledge of past events, might in some way receive a forgetfulness of the evils that were being done. When I wished to excuse myself from this work, as being inferior and unequal to it, and as one who in so many years has lost the use of the Latin tongue, I considered that you did not enjoin these things upon us apart from some order of apostolic instruction. For when the Lord once, to the crowds of His hearers who were hungering in the desert, had said to the Apostles: 'Give them you to eat':
Philip, one of the Apostles, understanding that the tokens of divine power shine forth all the more if they are fulfilled by the ministries of lesser ones, did not bring forth loaves stored in the Apostolic wallet, but says that a little boy is present, having five loaves and two fishes. And modestly making excuse, he added: 'But what are these among so many?' (Matt. 14; Mark 6; Luke 9) — so that the divine power might become the more manifest in scant resources and desperate straits.
Knowing therefore that you too descend from those disciplines, and remembering that — perhaps after the example of Philip — when you saw the time for feeding the crowds, you substituted a little boy who should bring forward the five loaves indeed, as he had received them, doubled, yet, to fulfil the Gospel Sacrament, should add also by his own labour two little fishes that he had caught: I undertook to carry out, as I was able, what you had enjoined — certain that the authority of him who commands will excuse the faults of our unskillfulness.
It should indeed be known that the tenth book of this work in the Greek, since it had very little in the way of historical events — being throughout occupied with panegyrical treatises on the bishops, contributing nothing to the knowledge of facts — having omitted what seemed superfluous, whatever of history it contained we joined to the ninth book, and in it gave an end to Eusebius's narrative. But the tenth and eleventh books we ourselves composed, partly from the traditions of our forebears, partly from those things which our own memory had already grasped; and these we added, as it were two little fishes, to the loaves written above. If you approve or bless these, I shall trust for certain that they will suffice for the crowds.
Now the same whole work contains the things done in the Church from the Saviour's Ascension and thenceforward. But our two little books extend from the times of Constantine, after the persecution, up to the death of Theodosius Augustus. PREFACE OF THE SAME [RUFINUS] TO THE TWO FOLLOWING BOOKS OF HIS HISTORY. Thus far Eusebius has handed down to us the memory of the things done in the Church. But the rest, which down to the present time have followed in order — whether we have found them in the writings of our forebears or our own memory has reached them — we shall, in obedience to the precepts of the religious Father Chromatius and herein his obedient children, add as briefly as we are able. TWO BOOKS OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY BY RUFINUS, PRESBYTER OF AQUILEIA.