Preface TO THE TWENTY-ONE HOMILIES TO THE PEOPLE OF ANTIOCH CONCERNING THE STATUES.
A Among the events that occurred in the time of John Chrysostom, nothing is more noteworthy than that sedition of the Antiochians, in which, having cast down the statues of the Emperor Theodosius and his wife Flacilla, and dragged them through the city, they so exacerbated Theodosius that the destruction of the city was contemplated. This provided our Chrysostom with ample material for exercising his faculty for preaching. For as the Antiochians fluctuated between hope and fear, while sudden events offered him a new and unexpected cause for either hope or fear each day, Chrysostom, almost always unprepared and forced to turn his style according to the way events unfolded, spoke those homilies, which are certainly worthy of admiration: sometimes to console a people living in calamity; sometimes to strengthen spirits broken by the magnitude of the danger; and then, especially, to lead the Antiochians, on the occasion of impending evils, to correct their vices and wash away the crimes that had kindled such great wrath of God—an effort which, as he himself confesses somewhere, turned out exactly as Chrysostom had hoped.
The cause of so great a sedition, according to Zosimus, was the excessive exaction of tributes, which were devised anew each day, whether for the celebration of the fifth year since Arcadius had been proclaimed Augustus, and of the tenth year of the Emperor Theodosius, which was beginning in the year 388, or for the preparation of war against the tyrant Maximus, or for both these and other public necessities. Struck by the burden of tribute, the citizens of Antioch—specifically those of a more refined standing—approached the Prefect, and with tears complained of the excessive tax imposed; they implored the help of God. Then, a crowd of itinerant and foreign men from the lowest rabble, having had their spirits stirred, burst into criminal acts: first, they turned everything upside down in the public bath; then they approached the Prefect's house, invading the grilles and doors. And although they were forced back, they turned their fury elsewhere, attacking, defiling, and damaging the painted tablets of the Emperors with stones, and loading the Augusti themselves with insults and reproaches. Finally, they threw down the statues of the Emperor Theodosius and his wife Flacilla, who was already deceased, and dragged them through the districts B of the city; and they had already begun to inflict more damage when they were restrained by a band of archers sent in by the Prefect. The sedition having thus been extinguished, fear succeeded fury, and the expectation of impending punishment caused the forgetfulness of the burdensome and imposed tax. What followed from this will be narrated below in the review of the Homilies. Now, something must be said about the year of the sedition in which these homilies were delivered.
Dismissing the accounts of Sozomen and Theodoret, according to which this sedition and the speeches delivered thereafter would have to be set after the war against Maximus, learned men have already proven—from much more certain chronological notes—that this occurred before the war against Maximus, and Tillemont has asserted this in note 27 to the Life of the Emperor Theodosius. A most valid argument against that former opinion is elicited from Chrysostom’s own words, who testifies in the sixteenth homily, number 2, that this was the second year since he had begun to preach: he began when he was first ordained a presbyter in the course of the year 385, or the beginning of 386. Wherefore these speeches should be assigned to the year 388, or rather to 387. Baronius stands by the former opinion, followed by Petavius and Henricus Valesius, who conjecture them to be in the year 388 because in that year the tenth of Theodosius’s reign began, for whose celebration the aforementioned tribute was introduced. However, what is brought forth from Libanius to support that opinion is entirely intricate and can be twisted to either view. Furthermore, we elicit a note more certain than all these from the fact that the Emperor Theodosius was most certainly in Constantinople during the winter and Lent of the year 387, the year in which the sedition must have occurred: for during the time of the sedition, he was most certainly residing in Constantinople; whereas, in the following year, the Emperor was staying at Thessalonica at this very season. But what is brought forward to the contrary from the celebration of the tenth year of Theodosius, which began in the year 388, is, I say, nothing, since it is certain from the Fasti of Idatius and Marcellinus that he himself anticipated the celebration of his tenth year of Empire by one year, so that he might celebrate the tenth year together with his son Arcadius, who was entering the fifth year of his Empire in 387, just as Maximianus Herculius, when he was only in the eighteenth year of his reign, celebrated his twentieth together with Diocletian, who was in his twentieth. But more on this matter in the Life of Saint John Chrysostom.
A no other, not minor, difficulty arises, concerning which already in the Monitor to the homilies against the Ju