Some events, particularly in Olympiad Chronicles, were not given a precise year, but merely dated to the period of the Olympiad, or of a given ruler. He handled this by placing each Olympiad and each ruler's name on a fresh line, separate from the normal list of years. This gave him space to record such information.
The Chronicle is inevitably riddled with errors. Eusebius himself records at one point that all dates prior to then are conjectural and disputed. Responsibility for these errors must be assigned largely to his predecessors. Even then, it is difficult to condemn inaccurate dates assigned to times when no-one had any conception of such a thing as a numerical date. Rather the Chronicle draws a line under the period of confusion, and provides a framework in which errors can be identified and resolved.
Eusebius' own Chronicle is no longer extant in the original Greek. An Armenian translation exists in two manuscripts, although the end of book one and start and end of book two are lost in both. The entries in book two have also been augmented, and the format rearranged, but numerous errors crept in during this process.
Jerome and Eusebius
St. Jerome as a young man spent time in the East and became familiar with a great deal of the scholarship of the school of Origen and Eusebius. He came across a copy of the Chronological Canons and recognised its importance. As with other works by Eusebius, such as the Onomasticon, he arranged to translate it. He had a skilled scribe draw up a volume with the numerals in Latin rather than Greek - no trivial task -, and then dictated a translation of the contents.
He also added his own comments where he felt that Roman history had been neglected. Finally he composed a continuation down to his own times, ending with the disastrous defeat and death of the emperor Valens at the hands of the Goths at Adrianople in 378 AD.
This continuation was of the utmost importance for the future. The esteem in which Jerome was held was great in the succeeding decades and centuries, and the monastic scribes did not hesitate to follow his example and write further continuations to the text. This practice undoubtedly contributed to the preservation of the work and its centrality to all future historical work.
Jerome made revisions to the text as time went on. He made an error in transcribing 'Alcamenes' in one entry, mistaking the numeral theta that preceded it as part of the name. The text 'Thalcamenes' appears in numerous manuscripts, including 'O'; but is corrected in others. It shows clearly the manner in which the Greek practise of using letters as numerals facilitated corruption of both the numbers and the text.
Families of manuscripts
It was Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) who first worked on the chronology of antiquity and so came up against the primary witness, Jerome's version of Eusebius. In his work De emendation temporum (1583) he split the mss into two families.
Priores . 10 mostly late manuscripts known to him shared a format with all the numbers on the left-hand side of the page, in columns, and at the right the text of any historical event. This could wrap around, thereby giving a long space for all the text. Scaliger referred to this space for text as the spatium historicum and so it has been known since. But Scaliger called it the priores -- earliest -- since he thought they were.
Posteriores . Three early manuscripts (B, F, P) Scaliger designated posteriores -- later -- since they did not agree with each other in format, nor with the priores group.
Also present in the manuscripts of Jerome are a set of king-lists (the Series Regum ) and an Exordium . In 1750 the Veronese scholar Girolamo Da Prato published a treatise, De Chronicis libris duo ab Eusebio scriptis et editis . In this he established the late date of these two items. These are published in Schoene (below).
O, B, F, P, A and S are all old and agree in format. B is not a child of S, unlike A and P. O and S are independent, so must go back to two exemplars written in Jerome's lifetime.
One MS of the 5th century survives almost complete; of another, enough fragments survive to identify two apographs which enable it to be reconstructed in its entirety. There are several MSS of the 7th and 8th centuries. These early witnesses attest securely not only the text of Jerome's version, but equally important, its arrangement of the columns of numbers and of the entries on each page of the original (T.D.Barnes, p.112).
So old are the manuscripts, that we can see some of Jerome's working practises. S and its descendants reflect Jerome's final version. O was based on a somewhat earlier copy which had a few readings which Jerome corrected against his copy of Eusebius, but has the same format. However the copyist of O has chosen to save parchment by condensing the text into 30 lines per page, rather than the original 26. B also derives from a pre-revision copy. Schoene referred to the revised edition as the Editio Romana of the Chronicle, on the theory that Jerome made it to present to the Roman synod of 382. (RP: I have been unable to find any actual evidence in any of the works listed below for this).
There is no uniformity in the manuscripts in the division of lines and pages in the prefaces. All the older manuscripts have a single column format for the preface; some later ones have two columns.
Manuscripts
Siglum
Location
Shelfmark & Notes
Date /
Century
O Oxford, Bodleian Library Codex Oxoniensis Bodleianus Lat. auct. T II 26. Uncial. 30 lines a page. It contains the Chronicle of Jerome (to f. 144), followed by a chronological summary on 1 leaf, followed by the Chronicle of Marcellinus. A posteriores Ms. ( Online here )
Ff. 1-32 years, are in a late (s.XV?) hand in the priores (long-lines) format. The remainder (A. Abr. 555-2394) is in a fifth century hand, the last leaf is missing, and the one-leaf summary replacing it is either by the same or a contemporary hand. There are marginalia dating from around 1400.