This volume offers a counterbalance to the dismissal that Orosius’s Histories Against the Pagans has suffered in most recent criticism. Orosius is traditionally considered to be a mediocre scholar and an essentially worthless historian. This book takes his literary endeavour seriously, recognizing the unique contribution the Histories made at a crucial moment of debate and uncertainty, where the present was shaped by restructuring the past. The significance of the Histories is recognised intrinsically rather than only in comparison with other texts and authors, principally Augustine of Hippo, Orosius's mentor. The approach of the book is historiographical, exploring the form, purpose, and meaning of the Histories. The themes of divine providence, monotheism, and imperial authority are examined, and the subjects of war and the sack of Rome receive extended analysis. The book foregrounds Orosius's significant historiographical innovations that are seldom explored, such as the subversion of imperial history within a Christian spectrum in the synchronization of the emperor Augustus and Christ. Each chapter contributes to the progression of knowledge about Orosius’s Histories and the wider literary and historiographical culture of disruption that characterised the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE.

This book is a new annotated translation of Orosius's Seven Books of History against the Pagans. Orosius's History, which begins with the creation and continues to his own day, was an immensely popular and standard work of reference on antiquity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Its importance lay in the fact that Orosius was the first Christian author to write not a church history, but rather a history of the secular world interpreted from a Christian perspective. This approach gave new relevance to Roman history in the medieval period and allowed Rome's past to become a valued part of the medieval intellectual world. The structure of history and methodology deployed by Orosius formed the dominant template for the writing of history in the medieval period, being followed, for example, by such writers as Otto of Freising and Ranulph Higden. Orosius's work is therefore crucial for an understanding of early Christian approaches to history, the development of universal history, an

This book is a new annotated translation of Orosius's Seven Books of History against the Pagans. Orosius's History, which begins with the creation and continues to his own day, was an immensely popular and standard work of reference on antiquity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Its importance lay in the fact that Orosius was the first Christian author to write not a church history, but rather a history of the secular world interpreted from a Christian perspective. This approach gave new relevance to Roman history in the medieval period and allowed Rome's past to become a valued part of the medieval intellectual world. The structure of history and methodology deployed by Orosius formed the dominant template for the writing of history in the medieval period, being followed, for example, by such writers as Otto of Freising and Ranulph Higden. Orosius's work is therefore crucial for an understanding of early Christian approaches to history, the development of universal history, and the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, for which it was both an important reference work and also a defining model for the writing of history.

Only recently has the reputation of the fifth century presbyter and historian, Paulus Orosius, begun to recover from his many detractors in modem scholarship. Beginning with Gibbon, up until today, many scholars have emphasized Orosius' Christian assumptions and apologetic intentions in his historical work, and dismissed or downplayed its historical content. While a few scholars have attempted to reaffirm that Orosius was operating in the Classical historiographical tradition, Orosius' interpretation of history, which was heavily informed by his Christian beliefs, tends to mark Orosius as beginning a new Christian historiographical tradition. To better understand how Orosius saw the practice of history, and whether he represented a break from the Classical historiographical tradition, this paper examines how he viewed causation. In this thesis, the explanations from Orosius' historical work Seven Books of History against the Pagans are grouped into categories and analyzed. The result of this analysis shows that Orosius used both divine causes to explain events as well as more traditional secular ones. The examination of both his divine and secular explanations paint the picture of a historian who was attempting to write history in the Classical tradition, and whose methodology does not stray far from his pagan predecessors. This conclusion undermines the attempts of some scholars to view Orosius' work as a theological endeavor, as opposed to an historical one, as well as breaks down any binary distinction between Orosius as a new kind of Christian historian or one following in the historiographical tradition that had come before.