ABSTRACT
The Constantinian legacy was hardly trouble-free. In the ongoing tensions between pagans and Christians, and with new disputes internal to the Church, the writing of history often took on highly polemical colours. In these chapters about Christian historiography in the Eastern empire, we find that notions of retributive justice were appealed to as much as a means of ideological and community resistance - nonconformism - as they were to legitimize the imperial order. The whole story is intricate in the telling, and cannot be rendered intelligible without attention to the logic of retibution as historians 'answered' each other in turn with counter-hermeneutics, invoking signs of divine requital for their causes.
