desire to separate man from God, in order that he might serve not God but them. Man, however, was implicated in this fall, lost his blessed abode and his soul was deserted by the divine spirit, and sank into the material sphere, in which only a faint reminiscence of God remained alive. As by freedom man fell, so by freedom he may turn again to God. The Spirit unites with the souls of those who walk uprightly; through the prophets he reminds men of their lost likeness to God. Although Tatian does not mention the name of Jesus, his doctrine of redemption culminates in his Christology. Historiography Unlike Justin, who had related the new Christian doctrine to philosophy, Tatian manifests a violent rejection of the forms of philosophical literature with which he is familiar and consequently turns to a safer literary genre: the writing of history. He thus recapitulates his treatise: Thus I believe I have summarily but with all my rigor analyzed the treatises of the sages, their 'chronologies' (χρόνοι) and their archives (ναγραφαί), each one in particular" (Tatian Oratio ad Graecos 41.2-3). Tatian gives the voice for the first time in the Christian lexicon to ναγραφή, annals or documentary chronology. Tatian claims that the Greeks learned historiography from the Egyptians (Oratio ad Graecos 1.1), who possessed exact techniques for chronology (38.1). For the Syriac the Greeks are skillful literati, bad philosophers, but they can never be good historians, for "for those who have a disjointed chronology it is impossible to say what is true of history" (31.4). The Greeks are embellishers of language and, in general, with respect to productive and artistic techniques they are skilled imitators, not creators or discoverers: "stop calling imitations inventions" (Oratio ad Graecos 1.1). He then asserts that the Greeks received from other cultures all the disciplines that they managed to practice: divination by dreams, prognostication by the stars, observation of the flight of birds, the art of sacrifice, astronomy, magic, geometry, the alphabet, poetry, singing, the mysteries, plastic arts, anagraphic records, the manufacture of musical instruments and metallurgy (1.1-2) he specifies in each case the nation from which the knowledge that the Greeks have of the arts comes from. However, although he does not recognize the inventive capacity of the Greeks, Tatian the Greeks, Tatian describes himself as a prudent historian on the model of Thucydides, whom he never names. He presents