Historia ecclesiastica

history · c. 402–403 · translation and adaptation in nine books of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical history, with two additional books on the fourth century. For the (unlikely) proposal that Rufinus merely translated Gelasius of Caesarea, see that entry

Rufinus put Eusebius into Latin at Chromatius of Aquileia’s asking, while Alaric was in Italy, and then did not stop where Eusebius had. His nine books abridge the Greek; his tenth and eleventh are his own, and they are the first telling the West had of a great deal — Helena and the Cross, the two boys from Tyre who founded the Ethiopian church, the captive woman who won Iberia, and the day the Serapeum came down. Socrates, who used him and then found better material, wrote partly to correct him.

Printed at GCS 9/2 (Schwartz & Mommsen, Leipzig 1908), books X–XI — Tyrannius Rufinus, Historia ecclesiastica (the Latin Eusebius, and Rufinus’s own continuation in books X–XI).