Chapter 38: On generations and ages

5. Age (_aetas_) is used properly in two ways: for it is either the age of man, as infancy, prime, old age; or the age of the world, whose first age is from Adam to Noe; the second, from Noe to Abraham; the third, from Abraham to David; the fourth, from David to the migration of Judah to Babylon; the fifth, from then to the coming of the Saviour in the flesh; the sixth, which is now in progress and which will continue until the world is ended.

6. Julius Africanus was the first of our [writers] to set forth in the style of simple history, in the time of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the passing of these ages by generations and reigns. Then Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the priest Hieronymus of holy memory, published a complex history of chronological tables, using reigns and dates at the same time.[307]

[307] The reference in “complex history” (_complicem historiam_)
is to the parallel sets of chronological tables of the histories
of different peoples given by Eusebius.

7. Then others, among them especially Victor, bishop of the church of Tununa, reviewed the histories of earlier writers and filled out the deeds of subsequent ages down to the consulate of the second emperor Justinus.

8. We have noted with what brevity we could the total of these times from the beginning of the world to the emperor Augustus Heraclius and Suinthilanus, king of the Goths, adding at the side a column of dates by the evidence of which the total of past time may be known.