Chapter 8 treats Eusebius’ picture of the dynamics between church and Rome. It argues that Eusebius not only suggested that Christianity had been of importance in the Roman world from its birth, but also that its interests had always been aligned with those of Rome. By appropriating the traditional binary model of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors from earlier Greek and Roman imperial historiography, Eusebius suggested that only those emperors traditionally seen to be tyrants had persecuted Christianity, and that those emperors most respected by posterity had actually gone out of their way to protect it. Periods of persecution were thus anomalous; toleration was the norm. Most challenging was the most recent such anomaly, the ‘Great Persecution’, fresh in his audience’s memory. By affiliating the recent tetrarchs with famous despots of the Roman past such as Nero and Domitian, Eusebius explained away their abuse of Christians as part of wider tyrannical abuse of Roman elites. This ingenious historical schema was the capstone to Eusebius’ accommodationist picture of Christian history, both as an essential part of his reassurance to his audience about the pedigree of Christianity and to further his argument that Christians were among the best of Roman society.