a weak analogy a student in florida will have facebook friends from many places not only his home town but fellow followers of facebook interest group or games we have no reason to suppose eusebius included anybody who wasn't christian nor do i treat this as fiction what i said was that eusebius may understand those numbers as poorly as his calculation that the nativity took place under herod in bc he asserts both and they are incompatible but if it were fiction one of the points of crime and punishment is the populousness of saint petersburg many russian novels on the other hand make a point of the restricted social circle of a country village if we had no other evidence we could guess at the size of saint petersburg and the sixe of an average village and especially the nobles in a village and not be faacros of hundreds and thousands off pmanderson