AFRICANUS (Julius), an excellent historian of the third century, the author of a chronicle which was greatly esteemed, and in which he reckons 5500 years from the creation of the world to Julius Cæsar. This work, of which we have now no more than what is to be found in Eusebius, ended at the 221st year of the vulgar æra. Africanus also wrote a letter to Origen on the history of Susanna, which he reckoned supposititious; and we have still a letter of his to Arisides, in which he reconciles the seeming contradictions in the two genealogies of Christ recorded by St Matthew and St Luke.