Anti-Eusebian

In a contribution to Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire on Eusebius’s “construction” of Constantine in his Vita Constantini , Averil Cameron draws an illuminating comparison between Eusebius’ intentions and those of Athanasius in his Vita Antonii . Both “biographies” are interventions into the religious and political debates of the last years of Constantine’s reign and the first years of his sons’ reign.

Though the intentions are similar, the contents are radically different. Athanasius “glorifies a monk who is shown as expressing independence from emperors, and it exemplifies a very different view of Church and State from that of Eusebius, a view consonant indeed with the experience of someone who had suffered imperial censure and condemnation, bitterly denounces the emperor he had once tried to conciliate and now looked back to the last years of Constantine and the early years of Constantius with heightened animosity” (171).

Thus doth persecution make anti-Constantinians of us all.