a Spanish
presbyter, a man most eloquent and learned in history, wrote eight
books against those enemies of the Christians who say that the decay of
the Roman State was caused by the Christian religion. In these
rehearsing the calamities and miseries and disturbances of wars, of
pretty much the whole world from the creation
he shows that the Roman Empire owed to the Christian religion its
undeserved continuance and the state of peace which it enjoyed for the
worship of God.
In the first book he described
the world situated within the ever flowing stream of Oceanus and
intersected by the Tanais, giving the situations of places, the names, number and customs of nations, the characteristics of various regions, the wars begun and the formation of empires sealed with the blood of kinsmen.
This is the Orosius who, sent by
Augustine to Hieronymus to teach the nature of the soul, returning, was
the first to bring to the West relics of the blessed Stephen the first
martyr then recently found. He flourished almost at the end of the reign of the emperor Honorius.