Alethia (Genesis in verse, with a prayer) 3.663–3.761

Then, as they set out, the joyful host keeps close at the side of his departing guests, and venerable awe shakes his breast with sweet fear and draws him on, astonished. For he sees that God's silent faces and stern looks were turned toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and at the same time the servants sent out as ministers of peace and of wrath; and when he learned what God was preparing with such great force, God revealing his secrets and explaining the reason for his coming, so that he who had learned what rewards of life await the chosen might also beware of what is to be feared, he dared of his own accord to ask the Lord whether he would destroy a city of an erring people for all the crimes of the guilty, if perhaps it held fifty upright citizens. “I will not destroy it,” he said. Then a coaxing questioning, bringing the number down little by little and pressing for pardon humbly, reducing the sums as it went back over them, won the Father's answer down to ten; and, so as not to reveal the whole of his gentle clemency, the Lord left his servant in the middle of his speech, still pressing further, and withdrew into his own kingdom. Meanwhile those sent to Sodom find Lot sitting by chance before the gates of the city, as the sun was already nearing the earth. When he saw the angelic men radiant with wondrous splendor, thinking them come from heaven (for God himself gave him understanding), he falls prostrate and adores them, invites them home, and prevails by his entreaties on them to spend the night under his roof, persuades them to dine with him, and serves them innocent food and sparing cups.

Look: toward sunset and the return of night a foul band of the crowd, of males, if it is right to say it, bursts out, and boys and old men vie in sharpening the fury of the young: they shout Lot's name aloud, that he should hand over those he has taken in. Alas, it is shameful, and surely better to be silent about how great the wickedness was than to betray it in words, even while condemning it, since already then by perverse custom it was the law of the unspeakable city. Wishing to calm their rage, Lot offers his daughters, whose virginity remained as at their birth, for whatever uses the crowd might wish, meaning by their sex to commit a lesser wrong. But profane hearts think worthless whatever is lawful, and rejoice to be forbidden, so as to have something to desire. So they strive to assault the very author of faith, the teacher of morals and of justice. When the force was now greater than human effort could repel by strength, then both the guests reveal their angelic powers behind their feigned bodies, snatch Lot back inside, and blind the raging crowd. The sentence kept the custom of right law: what came before the punishment closed the eyes of those to be condemned.

Then to Lot, trembling and his mind scarcely recovered, the holy ministers, (not) concealing their condition, since he had already perceived in his mind what he (too) feared, confess who they are, why they have come, what their orders are, what they wish to do for him. Let Lot announce destruction to his sons-in-law, if they are worthy to believe, since he himself is ordered to escape and to gather his mixed household, whose name is spread among many, and his sons-in-law: but their shameful origin did not deserve to feel the fear of God. Yet let no one think these alone of hard faith, since Lot too hesitates to leave his home. When, as daylight drew near, the two guests see him lingering and dragging out sluggish delays without end, they seize him by the hand with his wife and his maiden daughters and lead them far outside the walls, and bid them hurry and escape to the high mountains, with this command: that no one, ill-advised, should look back behind him at what he had passed. But Lot, fearing that the swift wrath of punishment might overtake him in his slowness, himself asked with tears for Segor, and pleased them by asking, since he moved the Lord to save many together, and shared with more the special gift of salvation granted to him and made merit out of a gift.

And now the clouds, swiftly covering the sky, drawn together as God mingled them by his fatherly power, had thickened not the usual mists, but those which Etna rolls, which Inarime vomits, which Aponus breathes out with its hot waters, which the earth, shaken by neighboring Vesuvius, belches forth, which the savage mouth of the Lycian Chimaera pants out from the vast gulf of its threefold furnace, and wherever a swift breath, kindling hidden sulphur and poured through a narrow passage, flows out steaming into the light through the broken earth. Not that he could not turn rains into fires as well, he who could found the whole world from nothing: but the good judge prefers to condemn with greater preparation those whom, pitying the world and the ruin of morals, he punishes as an example. So all things from every shore run together in a surging mass, and, packed by the blast, each kind of fuel for flames gathers into one, and, like a solid body, a curved vault of sulphurous metal covers the guilty lands and cities; this a swift breath, gathering strength in a narrow passage, struck and forced to crackle with a mighty crash, and, as the thunder answered the frequent lightning, to dismay men's minds, so that Lot's wretched wife, trembling, turned back her eyes, which was forbidden, and swiftly suffered the punishment of the broken law, turned into a statue of salt: and, robbed of light, the unhappy woman so lost her soul together with her whole body that, though her form remained, no corpse was left.

Then, fear driving out grief, Lot enters Segor all the faster, stunned by the horrifying evil. And the sun rises, more fervent with all its fire, flashing with angry glare, and aims its stern rays at Sodom. After the flames had wrapped its light in their own, and the loosened sulphur hurled down the fires bound up with it, and the burnings, distributed in a dry liquid, drip from their beds, a storm of lightning falls headlong from the dense air, wraps the cities and rages through all the fields, and the fiery tempest thunders with mingled shrieking (and) drowns the cries; and when it had found fuel on the overwhelmed lands and settled on the very sands, it raises an immense cone of fire from the joined tinder, and flames go back from the earth to the stars, until the rocks and the rebounding earth pass into ashes and the sands, sunk deep, are dissolved, and the fields, the turf consumed, open hollow bays in the sunken plains, and the moisture which had bound the lands together, poured out through opened veins and joining its forces, begets a sea of its own. What are we to think it means, that suddenly there is a lake, filled with wondrous power, where before there was a pyre? Did the good judge will to destroy the condemned by all the elements, or does gentle clemency rather mark a silent end to punishment, in that it quenched the flames with water? And perhaps matter contrary to fire betrays the rest of the judgment to come, and so does the holy Jordan flooding the lake, the river which first deserved to wash away the sins of men.