Seven Books of History against the Pagans

I have obeyed your instructions, most blessed father Augustine; and would that I had done so as effectively as willingly. Yet I am little troubled, in either direction, about the outcome: whether I have done rightly or otherwise.

For you have already laboured over that judgment, whether I could do what you were instructing; I, for my part, am content with the testimony of obedience alone, if indeed I have adorned it with willingness and effort.

For in the great house of a great householder, although there are many animals of various kinds useful in the service of the household, the care of the dogs is not the least. To them alone it is given by nature to be urged willingly toward that for which they are trained, and, through a certain inborn pattern of obedience, to be held in suspense solely by the expectation of a disciplined fear, until they are sent off with leave to act by a nod or a sign.

For they have their own impulses, coming as close to rational beings as they excel brute beasts: that is, to discern, to love, to serve.

For discerning between masters and strangers, they do not hate those they chase but are zealous for those they love; and loving their master and his house, they keep watch not as if from a natural aptitude of body, but they keep vigil from the awareness of an anxious love.

Hence also, as a mystical sign in the Gospels, the Canaanite woman did not blush to say, and the Lord did not disdain to hear, that the little dogs eat the crumbs under their masters' table.

Blessed Tobias too, following the angel as his guide, did not scorn to have a dog as companion. Therefore, bound to your general love by a special love, I have willingly obeyed your will.

For since my submission owes the deed to the command of your fatherhood, and the whole work is yours, since it returns to you from you, I have repaid it more abundantly by this alone that is mine: that I did it gladly.

You had instructed me to speak against the empty-talking perversity of those who, strangers to the City of God, are called pagans (*pagani*) from the crossroads and villages (*pagi*) of country places, or gentiles because they savour earthly things. Since they do not seek the future, and either forget or do not know the past, they nevertheless defame the present times as most beset by evils beyond the usual, for this reason alone: that Christ is believed and God is worshipped, while idols are less worshipped.

You instructed me, then, that from all the records of histories and annals that can be had at present, whatever I found in ages past that was grievous with wars, or wasted by diseases, or sad with famine, or terrible with earthquakes, or unusual for floods of water, or fearful for eruptions of fire, or savage with strokes of lightning and blows of hail, or wretched also with parricides and crimes, I should set out briefly in the ordered text of a volume.

Especially since it was not fitting that Your Reverence, intent on completing the eleventh book against these same pagans (whose ten books, like rays of the rising sun, shone throughout the world as soon as they were raised up from the watchtower of the church's

splendour), should be taken up with a slight little work; and since your holy son Julian of Carthage, a servant of God, was demanding with the same confidence with which he had asked that his request on this matter be satisfied,

I set to work, and first of all I was overwhelmed with confusion myself; for as I often reflected, the disasters of the present times seemed to me to have boiled over beyond measure.

For I found that past days were not only as grievous as these, but more terribly wretched the further they were from the remedy of true religion; so that this investigation has rightly made it clear that death, greedy for blood, reigned while the religion that would forbid bloodshed was unknown; that as this religion dawned, death was stunned; that death is shut in now that religion prevails; and that death will be wholly nothing when religion alone reigns,

excepting, of course, and setting apart those last days at the end of the age, at the appearance of Antichrist or also at the conclusion of the judgment, for which the Lord Christ foretold through the holy Scriptures, by his own testimony also, distresses to come such as there have not been before,

when, according to the true measure of him who is both now and always, but in a more open and graver crisis, through the unbearable tribulations of those times testing will follow the saints, and destruction the wicked.

And since nearly all the men eager to write, among the Greeks as among the Latins, who have spread abroad in words the deeds of kings and peoples for a lasting memory, have begun their writing with Ninus son of Belus, king of the Assyrians,

who, although by a blind opinion they would have it believed that the origin of the world and the creation of men had no beginning, nevertheless define kingdoms and wars as having begun from him,

as if, forsooth, the human race had lived until then in the manner of cattle, and then for the first time, as though shaken and roused to a new foresight, had awakened:

I have resolved to trace the beginning of man's misery from the beginning of man's sin, touching only a few points, and those briefly.

From Adam, the first man, to Ninus, the 'great king' as they call him, when Abraham was born, there are 3,184 years, which have been either passed over or not known by all the historians.

From Ninus or Abraham to Caesar Augustus, that is, to the birth of Christ, which was in the forty-second year of Caesar's rule, when peace was made with the Parthians, the gates of Janus were closed and wars ceased throughout the world, 2,015 years are counted, in which all the leisure and business of the men of action and the writers was spent.

Therefore the matter itself demands that I touch, as briefly as possible, on a few things from those books which, speaking of the origin of the world, have won credence for the past by foretelling the future and by the proof that followed:

not that we seem to force their authority on anyone, but because it is worthwhile to recall a commonly held opinion which we share with everyone.

First, because if the world and man are governed by divine providence, which is just as well as good, and man, who by the changeableness of his nature and the freedom of his choice is both weak and stubborn, must be governed with mercy when he needs help, and must also be justly corrected when he is immoderate in his freedom,

then anyone who sees the human race through himself and in himself perceives that this world has rightly been exercised from the beginning of man by alternating goods and evils;

next, since we are taught that sin and the punishment of sin began with the first man himself; and further, since even those historians, beginning from the middle of time, although they nowhere remember earlier ages, have described nothing but wars and disasters,

and what else are these wars to be called but evils turning now one way, now the other? And evils of this kind which existed then, as they also exist now in so far as they exist, are without doubt either manifest sins or hidden punishments of sins:

what hinders us from laying open the head of that matter whose body they have depicted, and from showing, even by the briefest account, that those earlier ages, which we show to have been far more numerous, endured similar miseries?

Being about to tell, then, from the founding of the world to the founding of the City, and then to the principate of Caesar and the birth of Christ, from which time the empire of the world has remained under the power of the City, or even to our own days, as far as I shall be able

to bring them to knowledge, and to display the conflicts of the human race, and the world, set on fire by the torch of greed and burning with evils in its various parts, as from

a watchtower, I think it necessary first to set out the very circle of the lands which the human race inhabits, as it was divided by our ancestors into three parts and then marked out by regions and provinces;

so that, when the local disasters of wars and diseases are displayed, all who are studious may more easily gain knowledge not only of events and times but also of places.

Our ancestors held that the circle of the whole earth, enclosed by the border of the Ocean, is three-cornered, and called its three parts Asia, Europe, and Africa, although some have thought there are two, that is, Asia, and then Africa, to be counted as part of Europe.

Asia, surrounded by the Ocean on three sides, stretches across the whole region of the east.

Toward the west, on its right, it touches Europe, which begins under the northern pole; on its left it leaves Africa; and below Egypt and Syria it has our sea, which we generally call the Great Sea.

Europe begins, as I said, in the northern region at the river Tanais, where the Riphaean mountains, turned away from the Sarmatian Ocean, pour out the river Tanais,

which, passing the altars and boundary marks of Alexander the Great set in the territory of the Rhobasci, swells the Maeotic marshes, whose immense overflow enters the Euxine Sea far and wide near the city of Theodosia.

From there a long strait is sent out near Constantinople, until this sea which we call Ours receives it.

In Spain the western Ocean is the boundary of Europe, especially where the Pillars of Hercules are seen at the Gades islands and the tide of the Ocean flows into the jaws of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The beginning of Africa is at the borders of Egypt and the city of Alexandria, where the city of Paraetonium lies, on this Great Sea which washes all the regions and lands in the middle.

From there, through the places the inhabitants call Catabathmon, not far from the camp of Alexander the Great, and above Lake Chalearzus, then past the borders of the Upper Avasitae, its line runs across the Ethiopian deserts and touches the southern Ocean.

The boundaries of Africa to the west are the same as those of Europe, that is, the jaws of the Strait of Gades.

Its farthest limit is Mount Atlas and the islands they call the Fortunate Isles.

And since I have briefly given the general divisions of the threefold world, I shall take care to indicate also the regions of the parts themselves, as I promised.

Asia, at the middle of its eastern front, has on the Eastern Ocean the mouths of the river Ganges; on the left the promontory of Caligardamana, below which to the south-east lies the island of Taprobane, from which the Ocean begins to be called the Indian Ocean;

on the right it has the promontory of Samara on Mount Imavus, where the Caucasus ends, below which to the north lie the mouths of the river Ottorogorra, from which the Ocean is called the Seric.

Within these boundaries is India, which has on the west the river Indus, which is received by the Red Sea, and on the north Mount Caucasus; the rest, as I said, is bounded by the Eastern and the Indian Ocean.

It has forty-four peoples, besides the island of Taprobane, which has ten cities, and besides very many other inhabitable islands.

From the river Indus, which is on the east, to the river Tigris, which is on the west, are these regions: Arachosia, Parthia, Assyria, Persis and Media, mountainous and rugged country.

These have on the north Mount Caucasus, on the south the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and in their midst the chief rivers Hydaspes and Arbis. In them are thirty-two peoples.

But it is generally called Parthia, although the holy Scriptures often call the whole of it Media.

From the river Tigris to the river Euphrates is Mesopotamia, beginning in the north between Mount Taurus and the Caucasus.

South of it comes Babylonia, then Chaldaea, and last Arabia Eudaemon, which stretches eastward in a narrow tract of land between the Persian and the Arabian Gulf.

In these are twenty-eight peoples.

From the river Euphrates, which is on the east, to Our Sea, which is on the west, and from the north, that is, from the city of Dagusa, which lies on the border of Cappadocia and Armenia not far from where the Euphrates rises, as far as

Egypt and the end of the Arabian Gulf, which stretches westward from the Red Sea, that is, from the Ocean, toward the south in a long, narrow channel thick with rocks and islands, the land is generally named Syria. It has the very large provinces of Commagene, Phoenicia and Palestine, besides the Saracens and Nabataeans, whose peoples are twelve.

At the head of Syria is Cappadocia, which has Armenia on the east, Asia on the west, the Themiscyrian plains and the Cimmerian Sea on the north, and Mount Taurus on the south, below which lie Cilicia and Isauria, as far as the Cilician Gulf, which faces the island of Cyprus.

The region of Asia, or, to speak properly, Asia Minor, except on its eastern side where it runs toward Cappadocia and Syria, is surrounded on every side by sea: on the north by the Euxine, on the west by the Propontis and the Hellespont, on the south by Our Sea. There is Mount Olympus.

Lower Egypt has on the east Syria Palaestina, on the west Libya, on the north Our Sea, on the south the mountain called Climax, and Upper Egypt, and the river

Nile, which seems to emerge from the shore where the Red Sea begins, at the place called the Mossylon market; then, flowing long toward the west and making in its midst an island named Meroe, it finally bends north and, swollen by its seasonal floods, waters the plains of Egypt.

Some authors report that it has its source not far from Atlas and at once sinks into the sands,

then after a short interval overflows in a vast lake, and from there flows eastward through the Ethiopian deserts as far as the Ocean, and bending again to the left, comes down to Egypt.

It is indeed true that there is a great river of this kind, with such a source and such a course, and that it truly produces all the monsters of the Nile; the barbarians near its source call it Dara, but the other inhabitants call it Nuhul;

but in the region of the peoples called Libyoaegyptians, not far from the river which we said bursts forth from the shore of the Red Sea, it is received into an immense lake and swallowed up,

unless perhaps by a hidden passage it discharges into the bed of the one that comes down from the east. Upper Egypt stretches a long way to the east.

It has on the north the Arabian Gulf, on the south the Ocean; for on the west it begins from Lower Egypt, and on the east it is bounded by the Red Sea. There are twenty-four peoples there.

And since we have described the southern part of all Asia, it remains to set out the part that is left, from east to north.

The Caucasus range first rises between the Colchians, who are above the Cimmerian Sea, and the Albanians, who are by the Caspian Sea. As far as the farthest east it seems to be a single ridge, but it has many names;

and many would have this same ridge believed to be that of Mount Taurus, because in fact Mount Parcohatras of Armenia, lying between the Taurus and the Caucasus, is thought to join the Taurus to the Caucasus;

but the river Euphrates shows that this is not so: pouring out from the foot of Mount Parcohatras and flowing south, it shuts off that mountain on its left and the Taurus on its right.

So the Caucasus itself, between the Colchians and the Albanians, where it also has its gates, is called Mount Caucasus;

from the Caspian Gates to the Armenian Gates, or to the source of the river Tigris, between Armenia and Iberia, they are called the Acroceraunian Mountains;

from the source of the Tigris to the city of Carrhae, between the Massagetae and the Parthians, Mount Ariobarzanes;

from the city of Carrhae to the town of Cathippus, between the Hyrcanians and the Bactrians, Mount Memarmali, where amomum grows; the ridge next to it is called Mount Parthau;

from the town of Cathippus to the village of Safris, between the Dahae, the Sacaraucae and the Parthyenae, Mount Oscobares, where the river Ganges rises and silphium grows;

from the source of the river Ganges to the sources of the river Ottorogorra, which are in the north, where the mountain-dwelling Paropanisadae live, Mount Taurus;

from the sources of the Ottorogorra to the city of Ottorogorra, between the Hunnic Scythians and the Gandaridae, Mount Caucasus.

Last of all, between the Eoae and the Passyadrae, is Mount Imavus, where the river Chrysorhoas and the promontory of Samara are received by the Eastern Ocean.

So from Mount Imavus, that is, from the lowest Caucasus, and the right-hand part of the east where the Seric Ocean extends, to the Boreum promontory and the river Boreum, and from there as far as the Scythian Sea in the north, to the Caspian Sea in the west, and to the extended ridge of the Caucasus in the south, there are forty-two peoples of the Hyrcanians and Scythians, wandering far and wide because of the barren expanse of the lands.

The Caspian Sea rises from the Ocean in the region of the north wind; both its shores near the Ocean are deserted and uncultivated. From there it stretches south through long narrows until, widened over great spaces, it ends at the foot of Mount Caucasus.

So from the Caspian Sea, which is on the east, along the shore of the northern Ocean to the river Tanais and the Maeotic marshes, which are on the west, along the coast of the Cimmerian Sea, which is to the south-west, to the head and gates of the Caucasus, which are to the south, there are thirty-four peoples.

But in general the nearer region is called Albania, and the farther, below the Caspian Sea and mountain, the land of the Amazons.

The boundaries of Asia have been set out as briefly as possible. Now I shall travel over Europe with my pen, as far as is granted to human knowledge.

It begins at the Riphaean Mountains, the river Tanais and the Maeotic marshes, which are on the east, and runs along the shore of the northern Ocean to Gallia Belgica and the river Rhine, which comes down from the west; then to the Danube, which they also call the Hister, which lies to the south and, flowing east, is received by the Pontus. On the east is Alania,

in the middle Dacia, where Gothia also is, then Germany, where the Suebi hold the greatest part; of all these there are fifty-four peoples.

Now I shall set out whatever the Danube shuts off from barbarian lands as far as Our Sea.

Moesia has on the east the mouths of the river Danube, on the south-east Thrace, on the south Macedonia, on the south-west Dalmatia, on the west Histria, on the north-west Pannonia, on the north the Danube.

Thrace has on the east the gulf of the Propontis and the city of Constantinople, formerly called Byzantium; on the north part of Dalmatia and a gulf of the Euxine Sea; on the west and south-west Macedonia; on the south the Aegean Sea.

Macedonia has on the east the Aegean Sea, on the north-east Thrace, on the south-east Euboea and the Macedonian Gulf, on the south Achaia, on the west-south-west the Acroceraunian Mountains at the narrows of the Adriatic Gulf, which mountains face Apulia and Brundisium, on the west Dalmatia, on the north-west Dardania, on the north Moesia.

Achaia is surrounded by sea on almost every side: on the east it has the Myrtoan Sea, on the south-east the Cretan Sea, on the south the Ionian Sea, on the south-west and west the islands of Cephallenia and Cassiopa, on the north the Corinthian Gulf, on the north-east a narrow ridge of land by which it is joined to Macedonia, or rather to Attica. This place is called the Isthmus, where Corinth is, which has in Attica, not far to the north, the city of Athens.

Dalmatia has on the east Macedonia, on the north-east Dardania, on the north Moesia, on the west Histria, the Liburnian Gulf and the Liburnian islands, on the south the Adriatic Gulf.

Pannonia, Noricum and Raetia have on the east Moesia, on the south Histria, on the south-west the Pennine Alps, on the west Gallia Belgica, on the north-west the source of the Danube and the frontier that separates Germany from Gaul between the Danube and Gaul, on the north the Danube and Germany.

The land of Italy stretches from north-west to south-east, having on the south-west the Tyrrhenian Sea and on the north-east the Adriatic Gulf; the part of it which is shared with and adjoins the continent is blocked by the barrier of the Alps,

which, rising from the Gallic Sea above the Ligurian Gulf, shut off first the territory of Narbonensis, then Gaul and Raetia, until they come to rest at the Liburnian Gulf.

Gallia Belgica has on the east the frontier of the river Rhine and Germany, on the south-east the Pennine Alps, on the south the province of Narbonensis, on the west the province of Lugdunensis, on the north-west the British Ocean, on the north the island of Britain.

Gallia Lugdunensis, drawn out long and bent narrow, half encircles the province of Aquitania.

It has on the east Belgica, on the south part of the province of Narbonensis, where the city of Arelate lies and the river Rhone is received by the Gallic Sea.

The province of Narbonensis, part of the Gauls, has on the east the Cottian Alps, on the west Spain, on the north-west Aquitania, on the north Lugdunensis, on the north-east Gallia Belgica, on the south the Gallic Sea, which lies between Sardinia and the Balearic islands; and it has off its front, where the river Rhone goes out into the sea, the Stoechades islands.

The province of Aquitania is bent into a circle by the slanting course of the river Liger, which for the most part is its boundary.

It has on the north-west the Ocean, which is called the Aquitanian Gulf, on the west the Spains, on the north and east Lugdunensis; on the south-east and south it touches the province of Narbonensis.

Spain as a whole is triangular in the lie of its land and, being surrounded by the Ocean and the Tyrrhenian Sea, is almost made an island.

Its first corner, facing east, hemmed in on the right by the province of Aquitania and on the left by the Balearic Sea, fits into the territory of Narbonensis.

The second corner points north-west, where Brigantia, a city of Gallaecia, raises a very tall lighthouse, a work among the few worth recording, facing toward Britain.

Its third corner is where the islands of Gades, facing south-west, look across an inlet of the Ocean toward Mount Atlas.

Hither Spain, beginning in the east, is drawn by the Pyrenean forest on its northern side as far as the Cantabrians and Asturians, and from there, through the Vaccaei and the Oretani, whom it has on the west, it is bounded by Carthage, set on the shore of Our Sea.

Farther Spain has on the east the Vaccaei, the Celtiberians and the Oretani, on the north the Ocean, on the west the Ocean, on the south the Gaditanian strait of the Ocean, from which Our Sea, which is called the Tyrrhenian, flows in.

And since the Ocean has islands, which they call Britain and Hibernia, which lie on the far side of the Gauls, within sight of Spain, they will be briefly described.

Britain, an island of the Ocean, stretches lengthwise to the north; on the south it has the Gauls. Its nearest shore opens to those crossing over at a city called Rutupiae port; from there it looks out, not far from the Morini, toward the Menapii and Batavi lying to the south.

This island is 800 miles in length and 200 miles in breadth.

Behind it, where it lies open to the boundless Ocean, it has the Orkney islands, of which twenty are deserted and thirteen inhabited.

Then there is the island of Thule, which, separated from the rest by a boundless distance and lying north-west in the middle of the Ocean, is known to scarcely a few.

Hibernia, an island lying between Britain and Spain, extends over a longer distance from south-west to north-east.

Its nearer parts, facing the Cantabrian Ocean, look from far off across a wide interval toward Brigantia, a city of Gallaecia, which faces it from the south-west toward the north-west, especially from that promontory where the mouth of the river Scena is and where the Velabri and Luceni dwell. This island is nearer to Britain, narrower in extent of land, but more useful for the mildness of its climate and soil; it is inhabited by the peoples of the Scots.

Next to it is the island of Mevania, itself of no small extent and of good soil; it too is inhabited by the peoples of the Scots. These are the boundaries of all Europe.

When our ancestors described Africa, as I said, as to be reckoned the third part of the world, they followed not measurements of area but principles of division.

For this Great Sea, which rises from the Ocean in the west, inclining more toward the south, has made the boundary of Africa, squeezed between it and the Ocean, narrower.

Hence some too, understanding it to be equal in length but much narrower, thought it unfitting to call it a third part, and, assigning Africa rather to Europe, preferred to call it a portion of the second.

Moreover, since much more land in Africa is uncultivated and unknown because of the heat of the sun than in Europe because of the severity of the cold (for almost all living and growing things approach the extreme of cold more patiently and tolerably than the extreme of heat), this is clearly the reason Africa seems smaller in every respect, in territory and in peoples: both because by its nature it has less space and because by the harshness of its climate it has more desert. Its description by provinces and peoples is as follows:

Libya Cyrenaica and the Pentapolis is the first in the part of Africa after Egypt.

It begins at the city of Paraetonium and the Catabathmon mountains, and from there extends along the sea to the Altars of the Philaeni. Behind it, as far as the southern Ocean, it has the peoples of the Libyo-Ethiopians and the Garamantes.

It has on the east Egypt, on the north the Libyan Sea, on the west the Greater Syrtes and the Trogodytes, opposite whom is the island of Calypso, on the south the Ethiopian Ocean.

The province of Tripolitana, which is also called Subventana or the region of the Arzuges, where the city of Leptis Magna is (although the Arzuges are a general name along a long stretch of the African frontier), has on the east the Altars of the Philaeni between the Greater Syrtes and the Trogodytes, on the north the Sicilian, or rather the Adriatic, Sea and the Lesser Syrtes, on the west Byzacium as far as the Salt Lake, on the south the barbarian Gaetuli, Nathabres and Garamantes, reaching to the Ethiopian Ocean.

Byzacium, Zeugis and Numidia. We find that Zeugis was formerly the general name not of one judicial district but of the whole province.

Byzacium, then, where the city of Hadrumetum is, Zeugis, where great Carthage is, and Numidia, where the cities of Hippo Regius and Rusiccada are, have on the east the Lesser Syrtes and the Salt Lake, on the north Our Sea, which faces the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, on the west Mauretania Sitifensis, on the south the Uzara mountains and beyond them the peoples of the Ethiopians, roaming as far as the Ethiopian Ocean.

The Mauretanias Sitifensis and Caesariensis have on the east Numidia, on the north Our Sea, on the west the river Malva, on the south Mount Astrixis, which divides the living land from the sands lying as far as the Ocean; in these the Gangines Ethiopians wander.

Mauretania Tingitana is the last of Africa. It has on the east the river Malva, on the north Our Sea as far as the Gaditanian strait, which is narrowed between the two facing promontories of Abenna and Calpe, on the west Mount Atlas and the Atlantic Ocean, on the south-west Mount Hesperius, on the south the peoples of the Autololes, whom they now call Galaules, reaching to the Hesperian Ocean.

This is the boundary of all Africa. Now I shall measure the positions, names and sizes of the islands that are in Our Sea.

The island of Cyprus is surrounded on the east by the Syrian Sea, which they call the Issic Gulf, on the west by the Pamphylian Sea, on the north by the Cilician Strait, on the south by the sea of Syria and Phoenicia. Its extent is 175 miles in length and 125 miles in breadth.

The island of Crete is bounded on the east by the Carpathian Sea, on the west and north by the Cretan Sea, on the south by the Libyan Sea, which they also call the Adriatic. It is 172 miles in length and 50 in breadth.

The Cyclades islands, of which the first on the east is Rhodes, on the north Tenedos, on the south Carpathos, on the west Cythera, are bounded on the east by the shores of Asia, on the west by the Icarian Sea, on the north by the Aegean Sea, on the south by the Carpathian Sea. All the Cyclades number fifty-four. They extend 500 miles from north to south and 200 miles from east to west.

The island of Sicily has three promontories: one called Pelorus, which looks to the north-east, near which is the city of Messana; the second, called Pachynum, below which is the city of Syracuse, faces south-east; the third, called Lilybaeum, where also a city of the same name lies, points west.

It is 159 miles from Pelorus to Pachynum and 187 from Pachynum to Lilybaeum. It is surrounded on the east by the Adriatic Sea, on the south by the African Sea, which lies opposite the Subventani and the Lesser Syrtes, on the west and north it has the Tyrrhenian Sea, and from the north-east to the east the Adriatic strait which divides the Tauromenitani of Sicily from the Bruttii of Italy.

The islands of Sardinia and Corsica are divided by a small strait, that is, of twenty miles. Of these, Sardinia has on the south, facing Numidia, the people of Caralis, and facing the island of Corsica, that is, toward the north, the people of Ulbia.

Its extent is 230 miles in length and 80 miles in breadth. It has on the east and north-east the Tyrrhenian Sea, which faces the port of the city of Rome, on the west the Sardinian Sea, on the south-west the Balearic islands lying far off, on the south the Numidian Gulf, on the north, as I said, Corsica.

The island of Corsica is full of angles with many promontories. It has on the east the Tyrrhenian Sea and the port of the City, on the south Sardinia, on the west the Balearic islands, on the north-west and north the Ligurian Gulf. It is 160 miles in length and 26 miles in breadth.

The Balearic islands are two, the greater and the lesser, each with two towns; the greater faces Tarraco, a city of Spain, and the lesser Barcelona, toward the north. Below the greater lies the island of Ebusus. Then they face Sardinia on the east, the Gallic Sea on the north-east, the Mauretanian Sea on the south and south-west, and the Iberian Sea on the west.

These are the islands set throughout the whole Great Sea from the Hellespont to the Ocean that are held more famous for their cultivation and their renown.

I have surveyed, as briefly as I could, the provinces and islands of the whole world. Now I shall set forth, as far as I am able, the local miseries of each people, as they have arisen unceasingly from the beginning, and how they arose for each.

When, after the making and adorning of this world, man, whom God had made upright and spotless, and consequently the human race, depraved by lusts, had grown filthy with sins, a just punishment at once followed the unjust licence.

The sentence of God the creator and judge, appointed for sinning man and for the earth because of man, and lasting as long as men shall inhabit the earth, we all, however unwillingly, either prove by denying it or bear by confessing it; and on obstinate minds their own weakness brands its testimony, where Scripture has not faithfully persuaded them.

Then, when the sea was poured back over the whole earth and the flood sent upon it, so that the whole world was covered and sky and sea were a single space, the whole human race was destroyed, a few being preserved in the ark by the merit of their faith to restore the stock: this the most truthful writers teach most clearly.

Yet even those have testified that it happened who, though they knew neither past times nor the very Author of time, nevertheless learned it by inference from the evidence of the stones which we often see on remote mountains, rough with shells and oysters and often hollowed out by water.

And although further things of this kind, both worth telling and of sure credit, could still be brought forward by us, let these two, as it were the chief ones, suffice: the transgression of the first man and the condemnation of his offspring and his life, and then the destruction of the whole human race,

only so that, if the gentile historians have touched on any of our events in any order, these may be set out more fully along with the rest, in the very order in which they occur.

In the 1300th year before the founding of the City, Ninus, king of the Assyrians, the first, as they themselves would have it, carried arms abroad out of lust for extending his dominion, and spent a bloody life of fifty years in wars throughout all Asia.

Rising from the south and from the Red Sea, he ravaged and subdued the Euxine Sea in the far north, and he taught the barbarism of Scythia, until then unwarlike and innocent, to rouse its sluggish savagery, to know its strength, to drink no longer the milk of cattle but the blood of men, and at last to conquer while being conquered.

Last of all he overcame in battle and killed Zoroaster, king of the Bactrians, who, they say, was also the inventor of the art of magic. Afterwards he himself, while besieging a city that had revolted from him, was struck by an arrow and died.

After his death his wife Semiramis succeeded him, a man in spirit, in dress her son, and for forty-two years she exercised peoples already greedy for blood by habit in the slaughter of nations.

Not content with the boundaries which she had received from her husband, then the only warrior, acquired in fifty years, the woman added to her empire Ethiopia, crushed by war and smeared with blood. She also made war on the Indians, whose land no one but she and Alexander the Great ever entered.

At that time it was crueller and graver than it is now to pursue and slaughter peoples living in peace, because then among them there were neither any fires of war abroad nor such exercise of greed at home.

This woman, burning with lust and thirsting for blood, amid unceasing debaucheries and murders, killing all whom she had summoned in royal fashion, treated in harlot fashion, and enjoyed in bed, at last, having shamefully conceived a son, impiously exposed him, and incestuously known him, covered her private disgrace with a public crime.

For she decreed that between parents and children, no regard for nature being paid, everyone should be free to seek marriage as he pleased.

In the 1160th year before the founding of the City, the region bordering Arabia, which was then called the Pentapolis, was wholly burned by fire from heaven, as Cornelius Tacitus, among others, reports. He says:

"Not far from there are plains which, they say, were once fertile and inhabited by great cities, and were burned by the stroke of lightning; but traces remain, and the land itself, solid in appearance, has lost its power to bear fruit."

And though in this place he said nothing about cities burned because of men's sins, as if he did not know of it, a little later, as though forgetting his plan, he adds:

"For my part, while I would grant that once famous cities were consumed by fire from heaven, I think the land is infected and corrupted by the exhalation of the lake."

By this statement, though unwillingly, he confessed that he both knew and granted the burning of the cities, which doubtless were consumed for the guilt of sins, and openly revealed that what he lacked was not trustworthy knowledge but the will to express belief. This will now be set out more fully by me.

On the border of Arabia and Palestine, where the mountains sloping down on either side give way to the plains below, there were five cities: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim and Zoar.

Of these Zoar was small, the others large and great, for they had the fertility of the soil beneath them, and the river Jordan, spread over the plains and divided most conveniently, was spent on increasing their abundance.

For this whole region, which used its goods badly, abundance of things was the cause of evils. For from abundance grew luxury, and from luxury foul lusts, so much so that males, working shamefulness with males, rushed headlong without even regard to places, conditions, or ages.

So God in his anger rained fire and sulphur on this land, and condemned to eternal destruction the whole region, burned up with its peoples and cities, to be a witness of his judgment for the future,

so that now too the shape of the region indeed appears, but it is found a region of ashes, and a sea poured over it now covers the central valley which the Jordan had watered.

And so great was the divine indignation kindled over things thought small, that because those people, using goods badly, had made the fruits of mercy the nourishment of lusts, the very land that had held these cities, first burned by fire and then overwhelmed by water, perished from common sight to eternal damnation.

So now, if they please, let those who, as far as in them lies, spit upon Christ, whom we have shown to be judge of the ages, distinguish the causes between Sodom and Rome and compare the punishments; which I need not go over again, chiefly because they are known to all.

And yet how gladly I would accept their opinions, if they would confess faithfully what they really think.

Although, since only a few murmur about Christian times, and that in corners, I would not think it should be taken too seriously, when the feeling and the speech of the whole Roman people, with one voice and equal judgment, is known.

For it has testified most beyond doubt that its accustomed pleasures were shaken for a little while only by a small and slight disturbance, so that it cried out freely: "If it gets back the circus, nothing has happened to it"; that is, the swords of the Goths did nothing at Rome if the Romans are allowed to watch the circus games.

Unless perhaps, as is the case with many, especially at this time, who after a long rest think even a small anxiety that arises an unbearable labour, they rank these most merciful admonitions, by which we are all touched at times, above the punishments of others that they have heard and read about.

These at least I warn, from this very fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, that they may learn and understand how God has punished sinners, how he can punish, and how he will punish.

In the 1070th year before the founding of the City, the Telchines and the Caryatii fought a stubborn battle against Phoroneus, king of the Argives, and the Parrhasians, with doubtful hope and without the fruit of victory.

And a little later the same Telchines, defeated in war and fleeing their homeland, ignorant of the world, believing that they were withdrawing themselves entirely from contact with all human habitation, seized the island of Rhodes, which was formerly called Ophiussa, as a safe possession.

In the 1040th year before the founding of the City there was a savage flood in Achaia, with the very great devastation of almost the whole province. Because it was poured out in the times of Ogyges, who was then founder and king of Eleusis, it gave his name to the place and the time.

In the 1008th year before the founding of the City there was in Egypt first an unusual and wearisome abundance, then a continuous and unbearable famine, which Joseph, a just and wise man, relieved by divine foresight: so the historian Pompeius and his abridger Justin teach, who among other things

says this: "Joseph was the youngest of his brothers; fearing his excellent intelligence, his brothers seized him and sold him to foreign merchants.

Carried off by them to Egypt, when he had there acquired the magic arts by his shrewd intelligence, he soon became very dear to the king himself. For he was most skilled in prodigies and was the first to establish the interpretation of dreams, and nothing of divine or human law seemed unknown to him,

so much so that, foreseeing the barrenness of the fields many years ahead, he had gathered the crops; and so great were his proofs that his answers seemed to come not from a man but from God.

Joseph's son was Moses, whom, besides the inheritance of his father's knowledge, the beauty of his appearance also commended. But when the Egyptians were suffering from scabies and leprosy, warned by an oracle, they drove him with the sick beyond the borders of Egypt, so that the plague might not creep on to more people."

So far Justin. But since this same Moses, whom they attest to have been wise and learned, wrote these things more fully and more truly, as deeds done by himself and his people, first the ignorance of these writers must be supplied by his trustworthiness and authority, which even they approve;

then the deceitful malice of the Egyptian priests must be refuted, who either by cunning, which is more evident, tried to remove from memory the evident wrath and mercy of the true God by confusing the account piecemeal, so as not to show, to the insult of their idols, that he deserved to be worshipped by whose counsel, as they would have had to teach, these evils were foretold and by whose help they were avoided; or perhaps, to take it more indulgently, they forgot.

For by the foresight of our Joseph, who was a servant of the true God and was devoutly and attentively concerned for the creatures of his Lord, they themselves, being priests, abounded in grain; but because they were false priests, they did not grieve with the others who were starving. Indeed, the one who is pleased forgets; the one who grieves remembers.

Yet, though histories and records are silent, the very land of Egypt bears witness for itself to the evidence of this time: for, brought then under the king's power and restored to its cultivators, it has paid down to now an unceasing tax of a fifth part of all its produce.

This great famine, then, was under a king of the Egyptians of Diospolis, whose name was Amosis, at the time when Baleus ruled the Assyrians and Apis the Argives.

Before the seven years of famine there were seven other preceding years of plenty. Their abundance, which would have perished the more carelessly the more richly it had arisen, our Joseph by his skill gathered and stored, and preserved all Egypt.

He acquired all the money for Pharaoh and glory for God, rendering with most just management tax to whom tax was due, honour to whom honour; he gathered all their cattle, lands and property; but those who had sold themselves with their lands at the price of receiving their rations he released on the fixed agreement of a fifth part.

Who would believe that this Joseph, whom God appointed for the Egyptians as the author of their preserved safety, so quickly fell from their memory that a little later they bound his sons and all his kin to slavery, afflicted them with labours, and ruined them with massacres?

It is no wonder, then, if now too some are found who, when they have turned aside the sword hanging over their necks by putting forward the Christian name, either conceal or defame the very name of Christ, by which alone they are saved, and claim that they are burdened by the times of those by whose merits they are set free.

In the 810th year before the founding of the City, Amphictyon reigned at Athens, third from Cecrops. In his times a flood of waters swept away the greater part of the peoples of Thessaly, a few being saved by taking refuge in the mountains, especially on Mount Parnassus, in whose region Deucalion then held the kingship,

who then received those fleeing to him on rafts, and sheltered and fed them on the twin ridges of Parnassus; for which reason they say the human race was restored by him.

Then too, Plato is witness, very many plagues and dreadful diseases raged in Ethiopia, almost to the point of desolation.

And lest it be thought that the times of God's wrath and of the fury of war are separate, at that time Father Liber subdued India, soaked it with blood, filled it with slaughter, and polluted it with lusts: a people that had never been subject to any man and was content only with its native quiet.

In the 805th year before the founding of the City, Pompeius and Cornelius testify that unspeakable evils and unbearable plagues fell upon the Egyptians: and since both put these forward as things to be told about the Jews, they troubled me a little because of their disagreement.

For Pompeius, or Justin, speaks thus: "When the Egyptians were suffering from scabies and leprosy, warned by an oracle, they drove Moses with the sick beyond the borders of Egypt, so that the plague might not creep on to more people. Having become the leader of the exiles, he stole the sacred objects of the Egyptians; and the Egyptians, seeking to recover them by arms, were forced by storms to return home."

But Cornelius says of the same matter: "Most authors agree that when a wasting disease which disfigured the body arose throughout Egypt, King Bocchoris approached the oracle of Hammon seeking a remedy and was ordered to purge his kingdom and to carry that race of men away to other lands as hateful to the gods.

So after the multitude had been sought out and gathered and left in waste places, while the rest lay stupefied in tears, Moses, one of the exiles, warned them not to expect any help from gods or men, but to trust themselves to him as a leader sent from heaven, by whose help they had first driven off their present miseries."

So Cornelius says that the Jews were driven into the desert by the compulsion of the Egyptians themselves, and afterwards he adds incautiously that by the help of Moses as leader they had driven off their miseries in Egypt. This shows that certain things vigorously done through Moses were concealed.

Likewise Justin asserts that Moses, driven out with the people, stole the sacred objects of the Egyptians, and that the Egyptians, attempting to recover them by arms, were forced back by storms and returned home. He too has disclosed something more, though not all, of what the other concealed.

Therefore, since both bore witness to Moses, that great leader, let the events be set out from him, as they were both done and told by him.

When the Egyptians were tormenting with labour the people of God, that is, the race of Joseph, by whose help they had been saved, oppressing them with slavery and, moreover, compelling them by a cruel command to kill their own offspring, God commanded through Moses as messenger that his people be sent away free to serve him;

and, being despised, he drove the stubborn with the harshest punishments: and they, burdened and crushed by ten plagues, at last compelled those whom they had refused to send away even to hurry.

After the waters turned to blood, which brought to those burning with thirst remedies worse than their punishments; after the horrid filth of frogs creeping over all things clean and unclean; after the stinging gnats, which, while the whole air quivered, could nowhere be avoided;

after the dog-flies running about with horrid motions even through the inner parts of the limbs and bitterly inflicting torments as grievous as they were shameful; after the sudden ruin and general slaughter of all cattle and beasts of burden; after the boils breaking out and running sores and, as they themselves preferred to call it, scabies and leprosy breaking out over their whole bodies;

after the hail mixed with fire, crushing men, herds and trees everywhere; after the clouds of locusts, which, when all was consumed, pursued even the very roots of the seeds; after the darkness, dreadful with apparitions,

palpable in its thickness, deadly in its long duration; and last, after the uniform death of the firstborn offspring in all Egypt and an equal storm of bereavement over all: those who had not yielded to God commanding yielded to God punishing; but soon, in a most evil repentance, daring to pursue those whom they had released, they paid the final penalty of their wicked obstinacy.

For their king drove the whole army of Egypt, equipped with chariots and horsemen, against the wanderers; its number we can estimate chiefly by this one argument, that six hundred thousand men feared it and fled.

But God, protector of the oppressed and avenger of the stubborn, suddenly divided the Red Sea and, the margins widened on either side, held up the walls of the stiffened waves raised like a mountain, so that, drawn on unhindered by hope of a road, the godly entered a way of salvation they had despaired of, the ungodly a pit of death they had not expected.

So while the Hebrews walked safely on dry ground, the masses of the standing waters were poured back behind them, and the whole multitude of Egypt with its king was overwhelmed and killed; and the whole province, already tormented by the plagues, was emptied by this last slaughter.

Very sure monuments of these deeds exist even now. For the tracks of the chariots and the ruts of the wheels are seen not only on the shore but also in the deep, as far as sight reaches; and if by chance they are disturbed for a time, by accident or curiosity, they are at once restored to their former appearance by divine power through winds and waves,

so that whoever is not taught the fear of God by zeal for the religion made known may be terrified by the example of his past vengeance.

In these times also so continuous and heavy a heat blazed that the sun, carried along off its course, is said not to have warmed the whole world with heat but scorched it with fire; and the Ethiopian could not bear the fervour pressed upon him beyond the usual, nor the Scythian a fervour unusual for him. From this also certain people, refusing to grant God his ineffable power, searching out empty little reasons, have woven the ridiculous fable of Phaethon.

Likewise, in the 775th year before the founding of the City, fifty murders of kin were committed in one night among the sons of the brothers Danaus and Aegyptus. Then Danaus himself, the contriver of such crimes, driven from the kingdom he had gained by so many outrages, went to Argos; and there, having shamefully persuaded the Argives to crime, he drove from the kingdom Sthenelas, who had received him as a needy fugitive, and reigned himself.

Then there was the cruel hospitality and crueller religion of Busiris, the bloodiest tyrant in Egypt, who drank the blood of innocent guests in pledge to the gods who shared his crimes: I would like to know whether this, doubtless execrable to men, seemed execrable even to the gods themselves.

Then too, to the incest of Tereus, Procne and Philomela was joined the murder of a kinsman, and a banquet of unspeakable food more execrable than both was added, when, because her sister's chastity had been taken and her tongue cut out, the mother killed her little son and the father ate him.

At the same time Perseus crossed from Greece into Asia; there he subdued barbarian peoples in a heavy and long war, and at last, as victor, gave his name to the conquered people: for from Perseus they were called Persians.

But now I am forced to confess that, for the sake of reaching the end in view, I pass over very much from so great a crowd of the world's evils and abridge all. For I could never pass through so dense a forest unless I also flew over it at times with frequent leaps.

For since the kingdom of the Assyrians lasted 1,160 years under nearly fifty kings down to Sardanapalus, and almost never rested until that time from waging or receiving wars, what end will be found, if we try to recall them by listing, not to say describing them?

Especially since the affairs of the Greeks are not to be passed over, and those of the Romans must above all be reviewed. Nor do I need now to recount the shameful deeds of Tantalus and Pelops, and their more shameful fables.

Of these, Tantalus, king of the Phrygians, having most shamefully carried off Ganymede, son of Tros, king of the Dardanians, kept him with the still greater foulness of the struggle that was joined, as the poet Phanocles affirms, who records that a very great war was stirred up because of this:

or because he would have this same Tantalus, as a follower of the gods, seem to have prepared the stolen boy for Jupiter's lust by a familiar pandering: he who did not hesitate to serve up even his own son Pelops at Jupiter's banquet.

I am weary too of telling the contests of Pelops himself against Dardanus and the Trojans, however great: because they are commonly celebrated in fables, they are listened to more carelessly.

I pass over also the things reported, in the writing of Palaephatus, about Perseus, Cadmus, the Thebans and the Spartans, through the inextricable recurrences of alternating evils.

I keep silent about the outrages of the Lemnian women, I pass over the lamentable flight of Pandion, king of the Athenians, I disregard the hatreds, debaucheries and murders of kin of Atreus and Thyestes, hateful even to heaven.

I omit Oedipus, killer of his father, husband of his mother, brother of his sons, his own stepfather. I prefer that it be left unsaid that Eteocles and Polynices laboured in mutual attacks so that neither of them should fail to be a fratricide.

I do not wish to recall Medea, wounded by savage love and rejoicing in the slaughter of her little children, and whatever was done in those times: one may infer how men endured what even the stars are said to have fled.

In the 560th year before the founding of the City there was a most fierce contest between the Cretans and the Athenians, in which, the peoples on both sides having been miserably crushed, the Cretans used a bloodier victory:

they cruelly gave over the sons of noble Athenians to be devoured by the Minotaur (whether I should call it more fittingly a wild man or a human beast I do not know), and fattened that misshapen monster on the plucked-out lights of Greece.

In the same days the Lapiths and the Thessalians fought in all too famous conflicts.

But Palaephatus, in the first book of his *Incredible Things*, reveals that the Thessalians themselves were believed and called Centaurs by the Lapiths, because as horsemen running about in war they seemed like one body of horses and men.

In the 480th year before the founding of the City, Vesozes, king of Egypt, eager either to embroil in war or to join in one kingdom the south and the north, regions divided by almost the whole sky and sea, was the first to declare war on the Scythians, having first sent envoys to tell the enemy the terms of submission.

To this the Scythians reply to the envoys that a most wealthy king had stupidly undertaken war against poor men, a war which on the contrary he himself should rather have feared, because of the uncertain outcome of war, with no rewards and manifest losses; furthermore, that they would not wait to be attacked, but would go out of their own accord to meet their plunder.

Nor was there delay, for deeds followed words. First they forced Vesozes himself in terror to flee back to his kingdom; then they attacked his deserted army and took all the equipment of war; and they would have plundered all Egypt as well, had they not been hindered by the marshes and driven back.

Turning back from there at once, they subdued Asia with endless slaughter and made it tributary; there they stayed fifteen years without peace, and were at last called back by the demand of their wives, who declared that unless they returned they would seek offspring from their neighbours.

Meanwhile among the Scythians two royal youths, Plynos and Scolopetius, driven from home by a faction of nobles, drew a great body of young men with them and settled on the coast of Pontic Cappadocia near the river Thermodon, subjecting to themselves the Themiscyrian plains; there, after long plundering everything near, they were treacherously slaughtered by a conspiracy of their neighbours.

Their wives, stirred by exile and widowhood, took up arms and, so that all might have an equal spirit from a like condition, killed the men who had survived; and, enflamed against the enemy by their own blood, they achieved vengeance for their slain husbands by the destruction of their neighbours.

Then, having gained peace by arms, they entered into unions with foreigners, soon killed the males born, carefully reared the females, burning off the right breasts of the infants so that the shooting of arrows might not be hindered; hence they were called Amazons.

They had two queens, Marpesia and Lampeto, who, dividing their force into two parts, took turns by lot in the conduct of war and the guarding of home.

So when they had subdued Europe for the most part, and had taken a good number of cities of Asia and themselves founded Ephesus and other cities, they called home the chief part of their army, laden with very rich plunder; the rest, left to guard the empire of Asia with Queen Marpesia, were slaughtered by an attack of enemies.

Her place was taken by her daughter Sinope, who crowned the singular glory of her courage with perpetual virginity.

Such admiration and fear of them had seized the nations roused by this fame that Hercules too, when he had been ordered by his master to bring the queen's arms, as though appointed to an inescapable danger, gathered all the chosen and noble youth of Greece, prepared nine long ships, and yet, not content with this swarm of strength, preferred to attack unexpectedly and surround them off guard.

Two sisters then ruled the kingdom, Antiope and Orithyia. Hercules, arriving by sea, overpowered them unwary, unarmed and idle through the carelessness of peace. Among the very many killed and captured, two sisters of Antiope were kept, Melanippe by Hercules, Hippolyte by Theseus.

But Theseus took Hippolyte in marriage, while Hercules returned Melanippe to her sister and received the queen's arms as the price of her ransom.

After Orithyia, Penthesilea held the kingdom, of whose courage among men we have received very famous proofs in the Trojan War.

Oh the pain of it! I am ashamed of human error. Women fleeing their homeland entered, roamed through and laid waste Europe and Asia, that is, the greatest and strongest parts of the world, and held them for almost a hundred years, overthrowing very many cities and founding others: and yet this was not counted a misery of men from the pressure of the times.

But now those Getae who are now also the Goths, whom Alexander declared were to be avoided, whom Pyrrhus dreaded, whom even Caesar shunned, having left and emptied their own seats and entered the Roman provinces with all their strength, and having long been displayed as a terror, now hope by prayers for an alliance of a Roman treaty, which they could have claimed by arms;

they ask for a seat of small habitation, not by their own choice but by our judgment, though the whole earth lay subject and open to them, free to take as much as they liked; they offer themselves for the defence of the Roman realm, they whom alone unconquered kingdoms feared.

And yet blind paganism, since it does not see that these things were achieved by Roman courage, does not believe that they were obtained by the faith of the Romans, nor does it acquiesce, though it understands, so as to confess that by the benefit of the Christian religion, which joins a kindred faith through all peoples, the men of that nation have been made subject to it without battle, whose women destroyed the greater part of the earth with immense slaughter.

But in the 430th year before the founding of the City are told the rape of Helen, the conspiracy of the Greeks and the gathering of a thousand ships, then the ten-year siege and finally the famous destruction of Troy.

In that war, waged most bloodily for ten years, which nations and how great peoples the same whirlwind involved and struck down the poet Homer, famous above all, has made plain in a most brilliant poem; nor is it our task to unravel it now in order, since it seems both long for this work and known to all.

But let those who have learned of the length of that siege, the atrocity of the destruction, the slaughter and captivity, see whether they are right to be offended by the present state of things, whatever it is, when enemies, by the hidden mercy of God, though they could pursue them in war with forces drawn up through all lands, follow them across all seas for the sake of peace, offering hostages; and, lest it be thought that they do this for love of quiet, offer themselves and their dangers against other peoples for the peace of the Romans.

A few years after this, what arms the arrival in Italy of Aeneas, a fugitive from Troy, stirred up, what wars it roused for three years, how many peoples it involved and struck with hatred and destruction, the instruction of the elementary school has branded on our memory too.

Between these times, moreover, lie the exiles and shipwrecks of the Greeks, the disaster of the Peloponnesians broken at the death of Codrus, the unknown Thracians rising to new wars, and a general upheaval then through all Asia and Greece.

In the 64th year before the founding of the City, Sardanapalus reigned last among the Assyrians, a man more corrupt than a woman. Seen by his prefect Arbatus, who then governed the Medes, spinning purple on a distaff in a woman's dress among flocks of harlots, he was held in execration; soon, when the peoples of the Medes had been roused, he was challenged to war and defeated, and threw himself on a burning pyre. Thereafter the kingdom of the Assyrians passed to the Medes.

Then, with many battles springing up on every side, which it seems not at all fitting to discuss in order, it passed through various fortunes to the Scythians and Chaldaeans and by a like path back to the Medes.

In this brief account one must weigh how great were the ruins and disasters of nations, how many wars flowed, when so many such kingdoms changed hands so often.

After this Phraortes ruled the Medes, who spent the twenty-two years of his reign in very frequent wars with the Assyrians and Persians.

After him reigned Diocles, a man most experienced in arms and always engaged in wars, who at his death handed the widely enlarged empire to Astyages.

Astyages, having no male offspring, had a grandson, Cyrus, born among the Persians. But Cyrus, as soon as he grew up, gathered a band of Persians and declared war on his grandfather.

Moreover Astyages, forgetting the crime he had once committed against Harpalus, when he killed his only and little son and set him before the father to be eaten, and, so that happy ignorance might not take anything from his most unhappy bereavement, hastened to

reproach the father with the infamous feast by showing him the head and hands: unmindful, then, of this deed, he entrusted the conduct of the war to Harpalus himself, who at once handed over to Cyrus by treachery the army he had received. On learning this, Astyages himself, seizing his forces, set out against the Persians and renewed the contest more fiercely, having set before his men the fear that if anyone tried to give way in battle, he would be met with the sword.

Under that necessity the Medes fought hard, and when the Persian line, driven back again, was gradually giving way, their mothers and wives ran to meet them and begged them to return to battle; when they hesitated, the women lifted their garments and showed the private parts of their bodies, asking whether they wished to flee back into the wombs of their mothers or wives.

At this, blushing, they returned to battle and, making a charge, forced those they were fleeing to flee. There Astyages was captured; Cyrus took nothing from him but his kingdom, and set him over the very great nation of the Hyrcanians; for he himself did not wish to return to the Medes. This was the end of the empire of the Medes.

But the cities which had been tributaries of the Medes revolted from Cyrus; and this was for Cyrus the cause and origin of many wars.

At that time Phalaris the Sicilian seized a tyranny and plundered the people of Agrigentum.

Cruel in mind, crueller in his inventions, doing all things wickedly against the innocent, he once found someone whom, though unjust himself, he could justly punish.

For a certain Perillus, a worker in bronze, seeking the tyrant's friendship and thinking it a gift suited to his cruelty, made a bronze bull, in whose side he skilfully fitted a door to serve as an entry for thrusting in the condemned: so that when a man shut in there was roasted by fires set beneath, the capacity of the hollow bronze would amplify the sound of the voice wrung from him and give out, with a deadly beat, a murmur fit for the image, and in the wicked spectacle it would seem the lowing of a beast, not the groaning of a man.

But Phalaris, embracing the work but cursing the worker, provided material both for vengeance and for cruelty: for he punished the craftsman himself with his own invention.

A little earlier, too, there had been among the Latins a king, Aremulus, who, growing in crimes and impieties for eighteen years, was at last cut off by divine judgment with a thunderbolt, and paid at an unripe age the penalties he had ripened.

Let the Latins and Sicilians now choose, if they will, whether they would rather have lived in the days of Aremulus and Phalaris, who wrung out the lives of the innocent by torments, or in these Christian times, when the Roman emperors, formed above all by religion itself, after crushing tyrannies for the good of the commonwealth, do not exact punishment even for the wrongs done to themselves by the tyrants.

In the 30th year before the founding of the City a very great war was waged between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians with all their strength and spirit, in which by mutual slaughter they were driven to such a point that, as though conquered, they withdrew from each other and abandoned the war.

Then too a sudden incursion of the Amazons and the Cimmerians into Asia brought very great and long devastation and slaughter far and wide.

In the 20th year before the founding of the City, the Lacedaemonians, warring against the Messenians for twenty years with unwearied fury because their maidens had been scorned at a solemn sacrifice of the Messenians, involved the whole strength of Greece in their own ruin.

When they had devoted themselves with great curses and bound themselves by oaths never to return home unless Messene were taken, and, worn out by a long siege for ten years without gaining any fruit of victory, they were moreover being called back, moved by the complaints of their wives, who protested at their long widowhood and the danger of childlessness,

they held a consultation and, fearing that, if hope of offspring were cut off, this persistence was nurturing destruction for themselves rather than for the Messenians, they sent back to Sparta chosen men of the army, those who had come as reinforcements after the oath, and allowed them promiscuous intercourse with all the women: a licence infamous enough, yet not useful.

They themselves, keeping to their purpose, took the Messenians by fraud and pressed the conquered into slavery. But the Messenians, having long endured a bloody domination amid scourges and chains, shook off the yoke, took up arms and renewed the war. The Lacedaemonians chose Tyrtaeus, an Athenian poet, as their leader in battle.

Routed in three engagements, they made up their lost army by calling a band of slaves to freedom.

But when even so they judged that they must give up the contest for fear of danger, they were fired again by a poem composed by Tyrtaeus, poet and general, and recited before the assembly, and soon rushed into battle; and they clashed with such force of spirit that rarely has a bloodier battle blazed up; at last, however, the victory was the Lacedaemonians'. A third time the Messenians

renewed the contest, and the Lacedaemonians did not delay; both sides brought many forces to their help. The Athenians, however, prepared to attack the Lacedaemonians from the other side while they were occupied elsewhere.

Nor were the Lacedaemonians idle: for, being themselves occupied with the Messenians, they sent the Peloponnesians to meet the Athenians in battle. The Athenians, having sent a small fleet to Egypt and being unequal in strength, were easily defeated in a naval engagement. Then, the fleet recovered and strengthened also by a force of soldiers, they challenged the victors to battle.

The Lacedaemonians too, leaving the Messenians, turned their arms against the Athenians. For a long time there were varied and heavy battles and an uncertain state of victory, and at last, with the outcome undecided, both sides withdrew.

It must, however, be especially understood that Sparta is the same city as Lacedaemon, and hence the Lacedaemonians are called Spartans.

So the Lacedaemonians, called back from there to the Messenian war, so as not to leave the Athenians the intervening time at leisure, made a pact with the Thebans to restore to them the rule of the Boeotians, which they had lost in the time of the Persian war, if they would take up the war against the Athenians.

So great was the fury of the Spartans that, entangled in two wars, they did not refuse to take on a third, provided they could gain enemies for their enemies.

The Athenians, alarmed by so great a storm of wars, chose two generals, Pericles, a man of proven courage, and Sophocles, the writer of tragedies: they divided the army, ravaged the territory of the Spartans far and wide and added many cities of Asia to the empire of the Athenians.

From then on, for fifty years, they fought on land and sea with victory always uncertain, until the Spartans, their resources diminished and their good faith ruined, became a disgrace even to their allies.

But that these things weighed on Greece through so many rolling ages is thought of little account; while now it is not endured that pleasures are sometimes interrupted and lusts hindered for a little while.

Although there is this difference between the men of that time and those of this: that they bore these unbearable things with equanimity, because they had been born or brought up among them and knew nothing better; but these, accustomed throughout their lives to the unbroken fair weather of tranquillity and delights, are disturbed by every cloud of anxiety, however slight, that gathers.

And would that they would pray to him who can drive off even this slight disquiet, by whose gift they have had this continuity of peace unknown in other times.

And since I remember that I promised, when I was marking out the order of my account as by certain joints, that I would speak from the founding of the world to the founding of the City,

let this be the end of this volume, which we have unfolded from the founding of the world, so that the following book may begin from the founding of the City; it will contain the more closely woven evils of those times, since men were then more practised and more learned in wickedness.

I think there is no longer any man from whom it can be hidden that God made man in this world. Hence also when man sins the world is reproved, and, to restrain our intemperance, this earth in which we live is chastised by the failing of the other animals and the barrenness of its fruits.

So if we are God's creation, we are rightly also under God's governance; for who loves more than he who made? And who rules in more orderly fashion than he who both made and loves? And who can order and rule what is made more wisely and more strongly than he who both foresaw what was to be made and brought to completion what he foresaw?

Therefore that all power and all ordering is from God, those who have not read perceive and those who have read recognize. And if powers are from God, how much more kingdoms, from which the other powers proceed;

and if kingdoms are diverse, how much more fittingly some one greatest kingdom, to which the whole power of the other kingdoms is subject, such as was the Babylonian in the beginning, and then the Macedonian, afterwards also the African, and at the end the Roman, which remains to this day;

and by the same ineffable ordering, at the four cardinal points of the world, the leadership of four kingdoms standing out in distinct degrees: the Babylonian kingdom in the east, the Carthaginian in the south, the Macedonian in the north, the Roman in the west;

between the first and the last of which, that is, between the Babylonian and the Roman, as between an old father and a little son, the African and Macedonian came, short and intermediate, as guardian and trustee, admitted by the power of the time, not by right of inheritance. Whether this is so, I shall take care to set out most plainly.

The first king among the Assyrians who was able to stand out above the rest was Ninus. When Ninus was killed, Semiramis his wife, queen of all Asia, restored the city of Babylon and established it as the capital of the kingdom for the Assyrians.

The kingdom of the Assyrians stood long with unshaken power; but when Arbatus, whom others call Arbaces, prefect of the Medes and himself a Mede by nation, had killed his king Sardanapalus at Babylon, he transferred the name and sum of the kingdom to the Medes.

So the kingdom of Ninus and Babylon passed to the Medes in the same year in which Procas began to reign among the Latins, father of Amulius and Numitor and grandfather of Rhea Silvia, who was the mother of Romulus.

And to show fully that all these things were disposed by ineffable mysteries and the deepest judgments of God, and did not happen either by human strength or by uncertain chance: all ancient histories begin with Ninus, all Roman histories arise from Procas.

Then from the first year of Ninus's rule until Babylon began to be restored by Semiramis, sixty-four years intervene; and from the first year of Procas, when he began to reign, until the founding of the City by Romulus, there are likewise sixty-four years. So in the reign of Procas the seed of future Rome was sown, though no shoot yet appeared; in the same year of the reign of that Procas the kingdom of Babylon failed, though Babylon itself still stood.

When Arbatus withdrew to the Medes, the Chaldaeans kept part of the kingdom for themselves, and they claimed Babylon for themselves against the Medes.

So the power over Babylon was with the Medes, its ownership with the Chaldaeans; but the Chaldaeans, because of the ancient dignity of the royal city, preferred to call themselves its people rather than it theirs.

Hence it came about that Nebuchadnezzar and the other kings after him down to Cyrus, although they are read of as powerful by the strength of the Chaldaeans and famous by the name of Babylon, are nevertheless not counted in the number and rank of the illustrious kings.

So Babylon was dishonoured under the prefect Arbatus in the same year in which Rome, to speak properly, was sown under King Procas. Babylon was finally overthrown by King Cyrus at the same time as Rome was first freed from the domination of the Tarquin kings.

For at one and the same coincidence of times the one fell and the other rose: the one then first endured the domination of foreigners, the other then first spurned the arrogance even of its own; the one then, as though dying, left its inheritance, the other, coming of age, then recognized itself as heir; then the empire of the East fell and that of the West arose.

And not to delay longer with words, I commit myself to the teeth of madmen, but to be freed by the protection of the truth.

Ninus reigned fifty-two years. He was succeeded, as I said, by his wife Semiramis; and she, who herself reigned forty-two years, in the middle of her rule founded Babylon as the capital of the kingdom.

So Babylon, 1,164 years or thereabouts after it was founded, was stripped of its wealth and kingdom and deprived of its very king by the Medes and Arbatus, their king but its own prefect; yet it remained unharmed for some time afterwards.

Likewise Rome too, after as many years, that is, 1,164, was broken into by the Goths and Alaric their king, but its own count, and stripped of its wealth,

not of its kingdom; it still remains and reigns unharmed. Yet the order of correspondence between the two cities has been kept by hidden decrees so completely that there its prefect Arbatus seized the kingdom, and here this city's prefect Attalus tried to reign; although in this city alone, deservedly, the profane attempt was made void by the merit of a Christian emperor.

So I thought these things should be recalled chiefly for this reason: that, so great a secret of the ineffable judgments of God having been partly opened, those who murmur foolishly about Christian times may understand that one God disposed the times, both in the beginning for the Babylonians and at the end for the Romans; that it is of his mercy that we live, but of our own intemperance that we live wretchedly.

See: a like rise of Babylon and of Rome, like power, like greatness, like times, like goods, like evils; yet not a like outcome or like failing. For the one lost its kingdom, the other keeps it; the one was bereaved by the killing of its king, the other is secure with its emperor unharmed. And why is this?

Because there the foulness of lusts was punished in the king, here the most self-controlled equity of the Christian religion was preserved in the king; there, without reverence for religion, the licence of fury fulfilled the greed for pleasure, here there were both Christians who spared, and Christians who were spared, and Christians on account of whose memory and in whose memorial places sparing was done.

Therefore let them cease to tear at religion and to provoke the patience of God, on account of which they have it that even this too may go unpunished, if they ever desist.

Let them indeed recall with me the times of their ancestors, most restless with wars, execrable with crimes, foul with dissensions, most continuous in miseries, which they may rightly shudder at because they were, and must necessarily pray that they may not be:

and pray indeed to the one God alone, who then by hidden justice allowed them to happen, and now by open mercy grants that they should not be. These things will now be set out more fully by me from the very beginning of the City, going through the histories in order.

In the 414th year after the overthrow of Troy, and in the sixth Olympiad (which is customarily celebrated with contests and games at Elis, a city of Greece, every fifth year, after four full years between), the city of Rome was founded in Italy by the twins Romulus and Remus.

Romulus at once stained its kingdom with the murder of a kinsman, and with a like success of cruelty he endowed with the blood of husbands and parents the Sabine women, carried off contrary to custom and bound in shameless marriages.

So Romulus, having killed first his grandfather Numitor and then his brother Remus, seized power and established the City; he dedicated the kingdom of his grandfather, the walls of his brother, the temple of his father-in-law with blood; he gathered a band of criminals with a promise of impunity.

His first field of war was the forum of the City, signifying that foreign and civil wars mingled together would never be lacking.

The women of the Sabines, whom he had lured by a treaty and games, he seized as dishonourably as he defended them wickedly.

Their leader Titus Tatius, an old man pressing honourable claims of family duty, he long repelled by arms, and soon, when he had taken him into partnership of the kingdom, killed him.

A battle was fought with the Veientes, then small in name but already great in strength. The town of the Caeninenses was taken and destroyed.

Once arms were taken up there was never rest, since for them shameful want and foul hunger were to be feared at home if they ever settled down to peace. From here on I shall touch as briefly as possible the unceasing contests, always heavy in proportion to the measure of their strength:

that Tullus Hostilius, founder of military discipline, trusting in his well-trained youth, made war on the Albans, and that, after long uncertain hope and certain slaughter on both sides, he at last ended the worst results and doubtful outcomes by the short-cut of the combat of the triplets;

that, the peace again broken, Mettius Fufetius, in suspense in the war with Fidenae and planning treachery as well, paid for the guilt of a double mind by the punishment of a body torn apart by chariots dragging it in opposite directions;

that the Latins, under the leadership of Ancus Marcius, often fought and were sometimes overcome; that Tarquinius Priscus cut down all his neighbours, and the twelve peoples of Etruria, powerful then, in countless conflicts; that the Veientes, under the pressure of Servius Tullius, were defeated but not subdued;

that the kingdom of Tarquinius Superbus was taken by the crime of murdering his father-in-law, held by cruelty against the citizens, and lost by the outrage of the violated Lucretia; and, among his domestic vices and the virtues that shone out abroad, the strong towns of Latium taken by him, Ardea, Oricolum, Suessa and Pometia, and whatever he did against Gabii by his own fraud, by his son's punishment, or by Roman strength.

But how great evils the Romans endured through 243 years of that continuous domination of kings is shown not only by the expulsion of one king but also by their abjuring the royal name and power.

For if only his pride had been at fault, he alone should have been expelled, the royal dignity being kept for better men.

So when the kings had been driven from the City, the Romans, thinking it better to take counsel for themselves than to let anyone lord it over their liberty, created consuls; under them, as in the grown-up age of the growing commonwealth, it was exercised in more vigorous ventures.

In the 244th year after the founding of the City, Brutus, the first consul among the Romans, strove not only to equal but even to surpass the first founder and king of Rome in the murder of kin: for he dragged before the assembly his two young sons and as many brothers of his wife, the young Vitellii, accused of a plot to recall the kings to the City, beat them with rods and struck them with the axe;

then he himself, in the war with the Veientes and Tarquinienses, fell together with Arruns, son of Superbus, who met him in combat and died with him.

Porsenna, king of the Etruscans, a most weighty supporter of the royal name, forcing Tarquin back on them, terrified, shut in and besieged the trembling city for three years in a row; and had not either Mucius, by his steady endurance in burning his hand, or the maiden Cloelia, by her wonderful daring in crossing the river, moved the enemy, the Romans would surely have been forced to endure either captivity, overcome by the pressing enemy, or slavery, subjected to the restored king.

After this the Sabines, gathering forces from everywhere, marched on Rome with a great preparation of war. Dismayed by this fear, the Romans created a dictator, whose authority and power would outrank a consul; and this was of the greatest advantage in that war.

There follows the secession of the plebs from the patricians, when, while the dictator Marcus Valerius was holding a levy of soldiers, the people, goaded by various injuries, occupied the Sacred Mount in arms. What could be more atrocious than this ruin, when the body, cut off from the head, was planning the destruction of that through which it breathed? And the Roman name would have been finished by an internal ruin, had not a timely reconciliation crept in before the secession itself knew what it was.

Beyond those open disasters of wars, a hidden ruin presses on and threatens with wretched succession: for in the consulship of Titus Geganius and Publius Minucius the two greatest abominations of all evils, famine and pestilence, seized the weary City. There was a short respite from battles; yet there was no respite from deaths.

The Veientes, grievous Etruscan enemies, rising to war with the forces of their neighbours joined to them, were met by the consuls Marcus Fabius and Gnaeus Manlius: there, after the military oath by which the Romans had vowed not to return to camp except after victory, the battle was so fierce and the condition of vanquished and victors so equal that, with the greatest part of the army lost and the consul Manlius and the ex-consul Fabius killed in the fight, the consul Marcus Fabius refused to accept the triumph offered him by the senate, because mourning rather was owed for such great losses to the commonwealth.

How great a bereavement that family of the Fabii, most glorious in number and strength, brought upon the commonwealth by its fall, after it had been allotted the contest with Veii, the river that destroyed them and the gate that sent them out are witnesses, with names infamous to this day.

For when three hundred and six Fabii, truly the most brilliant lights of the Roman state, had asked that a war against the Veientes be decreed to them alone, they strengthened by first successes the hope of an expedition rashly undertaken; then, drawn into an ambush and surrounded by the enemy, they were all slaughtered there, only one being kept to announce the disaster, so that the fatherland might more wretchedly hear of those lost than it had lost them.

Nor were such things done at Rome only, but every province seethed with its own fires; and what the foremost poet described in one city, I would say of the whole world: "Everywhere cruel grief, everywhere fear, and very many a form of death."

So at the same time Cyrus, king of the Persians (whom I mentioned above for the sake of setting out the history, who was then ranging through Asia, Scythia and the whole East with arms, while Tarquinius Superbus, as king or as enemy, was pressing the City either with slavery or with war),

Cyrus, as I said, having subdued all against whom he had gone, attacked the Assyrians and Babylon, a people and a city then richer than all; but his onset was checked by the river Gyndes, second in size after the Euphrates.

For one of the royal horses, outstanding in whiteness and form, induced by confidence in swimming across, was seized and plunged down and drowned by the whirlpools which rose up where the rushing channel struck the ford.

The king, angered, resolved to take vengeance on the river, declaring that the one which had now swallowed a splendid horse should be left fordable by women barely wetting their knees. Nor was he slower in carrying it out: with all his forces, in a whole year, he cut the river Gyndes through great ditches, drew it off, and broke it into four hundred and sixty channels.

With diggers trained by that work, he also diverted the Euphrates, by far the strongest river, which flows through the middle of Babylon.

And so, with fordable shallows and the parts of the channel lying open, he made a dry way and took the city which, among mortals, it was almost equally incredible could have been built by human work or destroyed by human strength.

For many have reported that Babylon was founded by the giant Nebroth and restored by Ninus or Semiramis.

It was visible on every side on the level of a plain, most fertile by the nature of the place, laid out like a camp in a square with equal walls. The strength and size of its walls is scarcely credible to tell: fifty cubits broad and four times as high.

Its circuit is four hundred and eighty stadia. The wall, compacted of baked brick with bitumen poured between, is surrounded on the outside by a wide ditch that flows round like a river.

In the face of the walls are a hundred bronze gates. The breadth itself at the top of the battlements, with quarters for the defenders arranged equally on either side, takes swift four-horse chariots in the space between. Within, the houses of fourfold storeys are wonderful for their threatening height.

And yet that great Babylon, the first founded after the restoration of the human race, was now conquered almost with the least delay, taken and overthrown.

There then Croesus, king of the Lydians, famous for his wealth, having come to help the Babylonians, was defeated and fled anxiously to his kingdom. But Cyrus, after he had invaded Babylon as enemy, overthrown it as victor and ordered it as king, carried the war into Lydia, where he overcame without trouble an army already terrified by the earlier battle. He also took Croesus himself, and when he had taken him gave him both his life and his patrimony.

There is no need here to exaggerate the unstable states of changeable things: for that whatever is made by labour and hand slips and is consumed by age, captured Babylon confirms; as its empire arose first and most powerful, so it also gave way first, so that, as by a kind of right of the succeeding age, the inheritance owed might be handed to those who came after, who themselves would keep the same pattern of handing on.

So at the first attempts of Cyrus's approach great Babylon and vast Lydia succumbed; the widest arms of the East, together with their head, fell in the campaign of a single battle; and our people complain with unconsidered anxiety if the mass of that once most powerful Roman commonwealth now trembles, shaken more by the weakness of its own old age than by the strength of others.

Then the same Cyrus, in the success of the following time, made war on the Scythians. Queen Thamyris, who then ruled the nation, though she could have prevented him from crossing the river Araxes, allowed him to cross, first from confidence in herself, then because of the advantage of having the enemy shut in by the barrier of the river.

So Cyrus entered Scythia, pitched camp far from the river he had crossed, and moreover by a trick abandoned that camp furnished with wine and feasts, as if he had fled in terror. On learning this the queen sent a third of her forces and her young son to pursue Cyrus.

The barbarians, as though invited to a feast, were overcome by drunkenness; soon, Cyrus returning, all were cut down together with the youth.

Thamyris, having lost her army and her son, prepared to wash away the grief of mother and queen with the blood of the enemy rather than with her own tears. She feigned lack of confidence as though in despair at the disaster inflicted, and by gradually giving ground lured the proud enemy into an ambush.

There, with an ambush laid among the mountains, she destroyed two hundred thousand Persians together with the king himself, with this wonder added above all, that not even a messenger of so great a disaster survived.

The queen ordered Cyrus's head to be cut off and thrown into a wineskin filled with human blood, taunting him not like a woman: "Sate yourself," she said, "with the blood you thirsted for, of which you were insatiable for thirty years."

In the 245th year from the founding of the City, Darius, after Cyrus had been killed among the Scythians, obtained the kingdom by lot after some interval.

For between them reigned Cambyses, son of Cyrus, who, having conquered Egypt, abominating all the religion of Egypt, abolished its ceremonies and temples.

After him the Magi too dared to creep into the kingdom under the name of the king they had killed; but they were soon discovered and crushed.

So Darius, one of those who had checked the daring of the Magi with the sword, was made king by the consent of all. After he had recovered by war the Assyrians and Babylon, which were revolting from the kingdom of the Persians, he made war on Antyrus, king of the Scythians, chiefly for this reason: that he had not obtained the marriage he sought with his daughter.

A great necessity indeed, that for the lust of one man seven hundred thousand men should be exposed to the danger of death! For with an incredible preparation he entered Scythia with seven hundred thousand armed men, and as the enemy gave him no chance of a regular battle,

and moreover tore at the rear of his forces with sudden raids, fearing that his return would be denied him if the bridge over the river Hister were broken, he fled in alarm, having lost eighty thousand fighting men; yet he did not count this number of the lost among his losses, and he did not feel the loss of what scarcely anyone else would have dared to aspire to have.

From there he attacked and subdued Asia and Macedonia. He also overcame the Ionians in a naval engagement. Then he attacked the Athenians and directed his arms against them because they had given help to the Ionians against him.

But the Athenians, when they learned that Darius was approaching, although they had asked help from the Lacedaemonians, nevertheless, having learned that the Persians were held back by the rest of a four-day religious observance, took hope from the opportunity and, drawing up only ten thousand citizens and a thousand Plataean auxiliaries, burst out against six hundred thousand of the enemy on the plains of Marathon.

Miltiades commanded in that war; relying on speed rather than on courage, in a sufficiently swift onset he closed with the enemy before he could be driven back by an unhindered shower of arrows.

So great was the difference in fighting in that war that on one side there seemed to be men ready to kill, on the other cattle prepared to die.

Two hundred thousand Persians fell on the plains of Marathon at that time.

Darius felt this loss: for, defeated and put to flight, he seized his ships and fled back to Persia.

But while he was renewing the war and striving for vengeance on the victors, he died in the midst of the preparation, in the 74th Olympiad, that is, in the 275th year after the founding of the City, at which time at Rome the virgin Popilia was buried alive for the crime of unchastity.

Xerxes, succeeding his father Darius in the kingdom, prepared for five years the war against Greece undertaken by his father; Demaratus the Lacedaemonian, who was then by chance living in exile with Xerxes, betrayed this to his countrymen by tablets first written and then covered with wax.

So Xerxes is said to have had seven hundred thousand armed men from his kingdom and three hundred thousand from auxiliaries, and also twelve hundred beaked ships and three thousand transports; so that it is rightly recorded that for the unheard-of army and the immense fleet the rivers scarcely sufficed for drinking, the lands for marching, the seas for sailing.

This column, so incredible in our times, whose number is now harder to establish than it was then to defeat, Leonidas, king of the Spartans, withstood with four thousand men in the narrows of Thermopylae.

Xerxes, scorning the small number set against him, ordered battle to be joined and hand-to-hand fighting begun. Moreover, those whose kinsmen and comrades had fallen on the plains of Marathon were the beginning both of the battle and of the slaughter.

Then a larger and more sluggish crowd succeeded them, and since, being neither free to charge, nor unencumbered to fight, nor ready to flee, it was propped up only by deaths, for three days on end it was not a battle of two peoples but the slaughter of one.

But on the fourth day, when Leonidas saw the enemy pouring round on every side, he urged his allied auxiliaries to withdraw from the battle, escape to the mountain top and keep themselves for better times; but he and his Spartans must undergo another lot: he owed more to his country than to his life.

Having dismissed the allies, he advised the Spartans that they should hope for very much glory and nothing of life; that they should wait neither for the enemy nor for day, but under cover of night they must break into the camp, mingle arms, throw the columns into confusion; nowhere would victors perish more honourably than in the enemy's camp.

Persuaded, then, to prefer death, they armed themselves to avenge their coming death, as though they were both exacting and avenging their own destruction. Wonderful to say, six hundred men broke into the camp of six hundred thousand.

Uproar arose through the whole camp. The Persians themselves also helped the Spartans by killing one another. The Spartans, seeking the king and not finding him, cut down and laid low everything, roamed through the whole camp, and among the dense heaps of bodies could scarcely pursue the few men left: victors without doubt, had they not chosen to die.

The battle was drawn out from the beginning of night into the greater part of the day: at last, weary with conquering, wherever each of them, as his limbs failed, felt himself satisfied with the vengeance for his death, there amid the obstacles of corpses and the field quivering with thick and half-congealed blood he fell, exhausted, and died. Xerxes, twice defeated on land, prepared a naval battle. But

Themistocles, the Athenian general, when he understood that the Ionians (by giving help to whom in the earlier war he had turned the attack of the Persians on himself) were bringing a fleet prepared to help Xerxes, resolved to stir them up toward his side and withdraw them from the enemy.

And because the opportunity of conferring was denied, he ordered messages to be put up and fixed on rocks in the places where the Ionians seemed likely to land with their ships, rebuking them with fitting reproach as once allies and partners in dangers but now unjustly idle, and urging them with religious exhortation to the rights of the ancient treaties, and especially warning them that, when battle was joined, they should back water as though giving way and take themselves out of the war.

So the king, keeping part of the ships with him, remained on the shore as a spectator of the battle. But Artemidora, queen of Halicarnassus, who had come to help Xerxes, threw herself most fiercely into battle among the foremost commanders, so that, reversing roles, feminine caution was seen in the man and manly daring in the woman.

When the battle was in doubt, the Ionians, according to Themistocles' instruction, began gradually to withdraw from the contest; their defection persuaded the Persians, already looking about for flight, to flee openly.

In that panic many ships were sunk and captured, but more, fearing the savagery of the king as much as the brutality of the enemy, slipped away home.

Mardonius approached the king, anxious after so many evils, urging that the king ought to return to his kingdom before evil rumour stirred up revolution at home;

but he himself, if the remaining forces were handed over to him, would both exact vengeance from the enemy and drive off the disgrace at home; or, if the adversities of war persisted, he would indeed give way to the enemy, but still without dishonour to the king.

The plan approved, the army was handed over to Mardonius. The king set out with a few to Abydos, where, as though conqueror of the sea, he had joined a bridge. But when he found the bridge broken up by winter storms, he crossed in terror in a fishing boat.

It was indeed something that the human race ought to look at and grieve over, measuring the changes of things chiefly by this reversal: that he was content to hide in a tiny boat, beneath whom the very sea had once lain hidden and had borne the yoke of its captivity when the bridge was joined;

that he needed the cheapest service of a single slave, he to whose power, while mountains were cut through, valleys filled and rivers drained, nature itself had given way.

The land forces too, which had been entrusted to the generals, so wasted away by toil, hunger and fear, and as disease broke out again so great a plague and so great a foulness of the dying arose, that the roads were filled with corpses, and even dreadful birds and shameless beasts, stirred by the allurements of food, followed the dying army.

But Mardonius, to whom Xerxes had committed the rest of the war, puffed up at first by a brief success, was soon cast down to the extreme. He took Olynthus, a town of Greece.

Having attempted by various solicitations to bring the Athenians to hope of peace, when he saw that their liberty could not be stormed, he burned part of the city and led all his apparatus of war into Boeotia.

There too a hundred thousand Greeks followed him and, joining battle without delay, destroyed his forces and forced Mardonius to flee with a few, stripped as from a shipwreck; they took the camp crammed with royal wealth, not without great loss to their ancient diligence: for after the division of this plunder Persian gold was the first corruption of Greek virtue.

So final ruin, once begun, pressed on the wretched. For by chance on the same day on which the forces of Mardonius were destroyed in Boeotia, part of the Persian army was fighting a naval battle in Asia beneath Mount Mycale.

There a new rumour suddenly filled the ears of both fleets and peoples, that the forces of Mardonius had been wiped out and the Greeks had been victors. Wonderful ordering of divine judgment, that the battle was joined in Boeotia at sunrise and announced in Asia at midday on the same day, across such great spaces of sea and land between!

This rumour especially favoured the outcome, in that it made the Persians, seized first by grief and then by despair at hearing of their allies' disaster, neither ready for war nor fit for flight. And so, dismayed and routed as they were, the enemy, made more steadfast by the success of good fortune, attacked them.

Xerxes, having become contemptible to his own people through the war unhappily waged in Greece, was entrapped in the palace by Artabanus his prefect and killed.

O times most worthy of longing and remembrance! O those days of untroubled calm, which are set before us to look back on as from darkness! In which, in the shortest interval, three wars snatched nineteen hundred thousand men from the bowels of one kingdom under three successive kings; not to speak of most unhappy Greece at that time, which by its dying surpassed the whole of this number at which we now grow dull.

That most famous Leonidas of the Lacedaemonians, in that war against Xerxes which was the last for himself and for the enemy, when he had spoken to his six hundred those most famous words of encouragement, "Have your breakfast as men who will dine in the underworld," nevertheless mercifully urged his auxiliaries, whom he ordered to leave the war, to keep themselves for better times.

See: when he promised better things to come, these men assert that the past was better; what else may be inferred, when each in his own time detests the present, but that times are either always good but unappreciated, or never better at all?

But at Rome (to return to the point from which I digressed; for I am not compelled by an interval in miseries to pass to others, but, as the evils once seething everywhere were bound together by the events themselves, so they are also told intermingled; for our purpose is to compare the times of the world with each other, not to insult the

sufferings of any part of it), at Rome, then, in the 290th year after the founding of the City, war being suspended for a little, a grave pestilence, which there always either cut short the rare truces that had been made or forced them to be made, blazed violently through the whole city, so that, as was fitting, by a preceding portent the sky was seen to burn when the capital of the nations was aflame with so great a fire of diseases.

For in that year the pestilence consumed both consuls, Aebutius and Servilius, wore down the military forces for the most part, and destroyed many nobles and especially the common people with foul

wasting; although even in the fourth year before a plague that had arisen had ravaged the same people.

In the next year exiled citizens and runaway slaves, led by Herbonius, a Sabine, seized and burned the Capitol.

There the young men, with Valerius as consul and commander, resisted most bravely; but the danger of the battle was so fierce and grave that the consul Valerius himself was killed there and moreover stained by his own death an unworthy victory over slaves.

The following year came, in which a consul was besieged with a defeated army. For the Aequi and Volsci overcame the consul Minucius in battle and, as he fled, surrounded him on Algidus with hunger and sword; and it would have ended unhappily, had not Quintius Cincinnatus, that outstanding dictator, crushed the enemy and broken the tight siege.

He, found in the country, summoned from the plough to the fasces, took up the office, drew up an army, soon became victor, put a yoke of oxen on the Aequi, and, holding victory as though it were the plough-handle, drove the subjugated enemy before him first of all.

In the year which was next to the 300th from the founding of the City, while envoys sent to the Athenians to bring over the laws of Solon were awaited, famine and pestilence restrained Roman arms.

In the 300th year itself, that is, in the 95th Olympiad, the power of the consuls handed over to the decemvirs for the sake of establishing the Attic laws brought great ruin on the commonwealth.

For first, of the decemvirs, while the others retired, Appius Claudius alone extended his power; and at once a conspiracy of the others followed, so that, despising the custom by which the insignia of power lay with one but the power was common, all did all things according to their own lusts.

So, among the other things which all took upon themselves most insolently, suddenly each one went out with twelve fasces and the other insignia of command:

and, by a new beginning of wicked ordering, the regard for the consuls set aside, a column of tyrants shone out; two tables of laws were added to the ten earlier ones; acting in very many things with most insolent arrogance, on the day on which it was customary to lay down office they went out with the same insignia.

The lust of Appius Claudius also greatly increased the hatred: in order to violate the maiden Verginia he first brought a suit claiming her as a slave; for which reason her father Verginius, driven by grief for her liberty and shame at the disgrace, struck down before the eyes of the people his daughter, dragged off to slavery, a dutiful killer of his own child.

Moved by the atrocity of this necessity and warned of the danger to liberty, the people occupied the Aventine hill in arms; nor did it cease defending liberty by arms until the conspiracy of the plotters resigned even its offices.

In the 103rd and 105th Olympiad, through almost the whole year, there were such frequent and such grave earthquakes in Italy that Rome was wearied by constant messages of innumerable shakings and collapses of villas and towns;

then the drought was so continuous and scorching that it denied hope of the earth's producing fruits for the present and the following

year. At the same time, when the Fidenates, enemies made terrible by a band of very great auxiliaries packed around them, were threatening the Roman citadels, Aemilius, dictator for the third time, drove off and healed the great mass of evil, Fidenae itself being scarcely taken.

So great was the contest of evils and of spirits among them that either wars pouring in from outside blotted out the disasters at home, or, after the losses of wars, when truces had been relaxed, various plagues blazing up from sky and earth ruined them with unceasing attack.

Sicily was from the beginning the homeland of the Cyclopes and after them always the nurse of tyrants, often even the captive of slaves; of whom the first fed on the flesh of men, the middle ones on tortures, the last on deaths; except that in foreign wars it was held either as plunder or as prize.

This island, to finish as briefly as possible, knew no rest from evils except now; indeed, so that the difference of the times may be declared more clearly, as before it alone among all always suffered either internal or external upheavals, so

now alone of all it never does. For even (to say nothing of the length either of that calamity by which it was oppressed, or, by contrast, of this peace which it enjoys) Etna itself, which then seethed with frequent eruptions to the ruin of cities and fields, now only smokes with a harmless appearance, to vouch for the past.

So (to pass over for the time the tyrants, of whom whoever was an avenger soon became a successor), in the intervening time, that is, in the 335th year from the founding of the City, when the people of Rhegium near Sicily were labouring with discord and the city was divided by dissension into two parts, one party called in veterans from the city of Himera in Sicily to help.

But they, having first driven from the city those against whom they had been called in, and then soon killed also those whom they had come to help, occupied the city with the wives and children of their allies, daring a crime to be compared with that of no tyrant:

for it would have been better for the people of Rhegium to suffer anything rather than of their own accord invite those to whom, as exiles, they themselves would leave their country, wives, children and household gods as plunder.

The people of Catana too, suffering from the Syracusans as grievous and hostile, asked help from the Athenians. But the Athenians, more in their own interest than their allies', sent a fleet prepared for Sicily, since they were striving to extend their own empire and feared that the Syracusan fleet recently prepared might profit the Lacedaemonians.

And since the Athenians who had been sent had made a prosperous beginning by killing the enemy, they brought back to Sicily larger forces and a stronger army under the generals Laches and Chariades.

But the Catanians, moved by weariness of the war, entered into a treaty with the Syracusans and spurned the help of the Athenians;

but afterwards, when the Syracusans transgressed the terms of peace, intending domination, they again sent envoys to Athens, who, unkempt in hair and beard and dressed in mourning, begged for mercy and help by both speech and dress.

So a great fleet was prepared under the generals Nicias and Lamachus, and Sicily was attacked again with such great forces that even those who had obtained them feared their own requests.

The Athenians at once fought two land battles with success and shut in the enemy, worn down in the city and surrounded by a fleet set against them, by land and sea.

But the Syracusans, their affairs broken and worn out, asked help from the Lacedaemonians. By them Gylippus was soon sent, alone indeed, but in whom the equivalent of all reinforcements was displayed. On arriving, when he heard that the state of the war was already tilting, he gathered auxiliaries partly in Greece, partly in Sicily, and occupied positions favourable for war.

Then, defeated in two battles but not dismayed, in a third encounter he killed Lamachus, put the enemy to flight and freed his allies from the siege.

From then on the Athenians, defeated in a land battle, tried the sea and prepared to engage in a naval contest; on learning this Gylippus summoned a fleet prepared by the Lacedaemonians;

likewise the Athenians, in place of the lost general, sent Demosthenes and Eurymedon with reinforcements; the Peloponnesians too, with the agreement and decree of many cities, sent great help to the Syracusans.

So under the appearance of an allied war they pursued their domestic quarrels, and, as though by agreement the contest had been transferred from Greece to Sicily, so both sides fought with their utmost strength.

So the Athenians were defeated in the first encounter and lost their camp too, with all the money, public or private, and with all the equipment of a long expedition;

their resources broken and reduced to narrow straits, Demosthenes urged that, while things were not yet wholly lost, however afflicted they seemed, they should return home and leave Sicily;

but Nicias, made more desperate from the beginning by shame at things badly done, insisted on remaining.

They renewed the naval contest and soon, led through inexperience into the narrows of the Syracusan sea, were surrounded by the enemy's ambush: Eurylochus, a general, was killed first, eleven ships were burned. Demosthenes and Nicias abandoned the fleet as though they would flee more safely by a land march.

Gylippus, however, first seized their hundred and thirty abandoned ships, then, setting out to pursue the fugitives themselves, captured and killed very many. Demosthenes escaped the disgrace of slavery by a voluntary death; but Nicias heaped up an unworthy and shameful life with the disgrace of captivity.

So the Athenians, having struggled for two years in Sicily, not without loss to the Lacedaemonians, were beset by other evils at home. For Alcibiades, earlier named general against Syracuse, soon detained for trial on a certain charge,

went into voluntary exile at Lacedaemon and drove the Spartans to press the troubled Athenians with a new war again, and not to allow them any space to breathe without being crushed.

All Greece so agreed with this undertaking as if forces had been gathered for the public good to put out a common fire, and as if counsel were being taken for it.

Darius too, king of the Persians, mindful of his father's and grandfather's hatred of this city, through Tissaphernes, prefect of Lydia, made a treaty with the Lacedaemonians and promised them the costs of war and troops.

Wonderful to say, the resources of the Athenians were then so great that, though the strength of Greece, Asia and the whole East attacked them, that is, attacked one city, by fighting often and never yielding they seem to have been worn out rather than conquered.

For at first Alcibiades compelled all their allies to defect from them to the Lacedaemonians; but, attacked by these too with plots out of envy, he fled and went over to Tissaphernes in Media.

Having at once become more intimate with him by his adaptable nature and the charm of his fitting eloquence, he persuaded him not to help the Lacedaemonians with such lavish wealth; that he ought rather to become the arbiter and spectator of this contest, and that the strength of Lydia should be kept intact against the victor.

For this reason Tissaphernes ordered part of the fleet with a considerable force to be taken to Lacedaemon, so that they would neither fight safe at another's risk with abundant support, nor, wholly abandoned, give up the contest they had undertaken.

Among the Athenians, when they had long been troubled by domestic discord, with danger threatening the supreme power was transferred to the senate by the will of the people: for discords are nourished by leisure, but when necessity presses, private causes and hatreds are put aside and counsel is taken in common.

But since this very thing was ruinous because of the arrogance inborn in the race and tyrannical lusts, at last the exile Alcibiades was recalled by the army and made commander of the fleet.

On learning this, the leading men first tried to betray the city to the Spartans; then, when they had planned this in vain, they went into exile of their own accord. So Alcibiades, having freed his country, directed the fleet against the enemy.

When battle was joined the Athenians won the victory. Moreover, the greater part of the Spartan army was killed, almost all its commanders too were slain, and eighty ships taken, besides those which perished burned and sunk in the fight.

Again the war, transferred to land, went just as unhappily for the Spartans. Broken by these events, the Lacedaemonians sought peace, but could not obtain it.

Besides, the Syracusan forces were recalled to Sicily on hearing of the attack of a Carthaginian war. Therefore Alcibiades with his victorious fleet ranged through all Asia, plundering and laying low everything with wars, fires and slaughter; he took and recovered very many cities which had earlier defected from the alliance.

So Alcibiades, having become a man of great name, entered Athens as victor amid the admiration and joy of all.

After a short interval he increased his strength, enlarged the army and fleet in number and sought Asia again. The Lacedaemonians, however, put Lysander in command of the fleet and the war.

Cyrus too, brother of Darius, set over Ionia and Lydia in place of Tissaphernes, strengthened them with great wealth and help. So Lysander, by a sudden attack, overwhelmed the army of Alcibiades, intent on plunder and therefore scattered and wandering everywhere, conquered it without any battle and cut it down as it fled.

This was a great disaster for the Athenians, and they received a wound much more terrible than the one they had lately inflicted. On learning this the Athenians supposed that Alcibiades had taken care to avenge the old grief of his exile by this crime of treachery,

and therefore they appointed Conon in his place, to whom they committed the remaining force and the conduct of the war.

Wishing at least to make up the exhausted forces in number, he enrolled old men and boys and drew up an army.

But a band of this kind brought no delay to the war, since war is usually decided by strength, not by number. So at once the unwarlike band was either captured or killed, and so great a slaughter of the slain was made in that battle that not only the dominion but even the name of the Athenians seemed to have been destroyed.

But they, in desperate straits, resolved to give the city to foreigners, so that those who a little before had ruled through all Asia might now, from this rabble, at least defend their walls and liberty; and, though even by their own judgment they were not sufficient to defend these even behind the shelter of walls, they nevertheless prepared to try a naval battle again.

Fury devoid of counsel thinks grief is courage, and as much as anger plans, so much daring promises.

So, all being partly captured and partly killed, nothing was left even of the remnants. Only the general Conon survived the war and the people; fearing the cruelty of the citizens, he went over to King Cyrus.

Euagoras, the Lacedaemonian general, taking away all their cities, left the Athenians nothing but an empty city; nor this for long, for afterwards he surrounded the city itself with a siege. Within, hunger, desolation and disease harassed the besieged,

and when, after all the abominations of miseries, which it is horror even to tell, no hope but death appeared, they sought peace.

Thereupon there was great deliberation between the Spartans and their allies: when very many declared that the most restless city should be levelled to the ground and the most hostile people abolished with its very name,

the Spartans said they would not allow one of the two eyes of Greece to be plucked out; moreover, they promised peace if the fortifications leading from the Piraeus harbour into the city were thrown down and they handed over their remaining ships of their own accord, and then if they accepted thirty chosen rulers.

When they had bound themselves to this condition and submitted, the Lacedaemonians appointed Lysander to settle the laws of obedience in the city.

This year was notable for the capture of Athens, the death of Darius, king of the Persians, and the exile of Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily.

So the thirty rulers appointed for the Athenians arose as thirty tyrants: at first they surrounded themselves with three thousand attendants, and soon also set seven hundred soldiers of the victorious army about their persons.

They inaugurated the slaughter of all, which was to follow everywhere, by killing Alcibiades, who, as he fled, was shut in a bedroom on his journey and burned

alive. When he had been killed, as though the avenger had been removed, they drained the wretched remnants of the city in security by slaughter and plunder. Theramenes too, one of their own number, whom they perceived to be displeased with these things, they slaughtered as an example and a terror to the rest.

So everyone fled the city in all directions; but since by a prohibition of the Lacedaemonians hospitality was denied to the exiles throughout Greece, all betook themselves to Argos and Thebes, where they were so warmed by the kindness of hospitality that they not only eased their grief for the lost fatherland but even began to plan the hope of recovering it.

Among the exiles was Thrasybulus, an energetic man, distinguished among his people for the nobility of his family, who became the leader in daring for the fatherland. So the gathered exiles took Phyle, a fort on the borders of Attica, and, aided by the resources of many cities, gathered strength; to them Lysias too, the Syracusan orator, sent five hundred soldiers with their pay, as if in aid of the city that was the common homeland of eloquence.

That battle was fierce; but since the one side fought for their country's freedom, the other for domination over others, the battle itself also gave judgment on their spirits and causes: for the defeated tyrants fled back into the city, and all whom they had earlier chosen as attendants from among the Athenians, now suspected of treachery, they removed from guarding the city.

They even dared to try to corrupt Thrasybulus himself; when this was hoped for in vain, they summoned help from Lacedaemon and rushed into war again. There two of the tyrants, by far the most savage of all, were slaughtered.

When Thrasybulus realized that the rest, defeated and put to flight, were for the most part Athenians, he followed them with shouts, held them back with a speech and bound them with prayers, setting before their eyes whom they wished to flee from and to whom to flee back; that he had undertaken war against thirty masters, not against wretched citizens; rather, all who remembered they were Athenians ought to follow the avengers of Athenian liberty.

This exhortation had such force with them that soon, returning to the city, they compelled the tyrants to leave the citadel and move to Eleusis. After these had received into partnership of the city their fellow citizens, till then exiles, the tyrants were roused to war by jealousy, since the freedom of others seemed to them their own slavery.

Then, battle having been declared, when they first came together as if to a conference, they were surrounded by an ambush and slaughtered as victims of peace. So, called back into one, after insatiable tears of great joy, they laid these first foundations of recovered liberty, with the solemn sworn declaration that past discords and animosities should be consigned to perpetual oblivion and undying silence.

This kind of pact, as though shaping a new institution of life and a new happiness of their state, they called an amnesty, that is, an abolition of evils. A most wise provision of the Athenians, especially after so many proofs of miseries, if in any way human affairs could hold firm, with men's agreement remaining, as they are ordained:

but this same agreement was corrupted almost amid the very words of the agreement, so that scarcely two years later Socrates, that most famous of philosophers, driven by evils, wrung his life from himself by poison among them; then, scarcely forty years later, to say nothing of other things, the same Athenians, their liberty wholly taken from them, were slaves under Philip, king of the Macedonians.

Nevertheless the Athenians, wisest of all, sufficiently taught even by their own evils that small things grow by concord and the greatest fall by discord, and that all things good or even evil that are done abroad are rooted in and sent forth from internal beginnings, wiped away hatreds at home and checked wars abroad, and left to their posterity an example from their ruin and a counsel from their recovery: if only, because of the most feeble changeableness of the human mind, what is resolved in adversity were kept in prosperity.

At almost the same time a civil war, indeed more than civil, scarcely ended by fratricide, was waged among the Persians. For when King Darius had died and Artaxerxes and Cyrus his sons disputed the kingdom, at last they contended with great preparations and with the ruin of provinces and peoples on both sides:

in that conflict, when chance had set the two brothers against each other as they charged from opposite sides, Artaxerxes, wounded first by his brother, escaped from death by the speed of his horse. Cyrus, however, soon overwhelmed by the royal guard, put an end to the contest. So Artaxerxes, gaining both the plunder of his brother's expedition and its army, strengthened the power of the kingdom by fratricide.

So all Asia and Europe were confounded with deaths and crimes, partly each within itself, partly with one another.

See in how small a page and in how very few words I have not so much unfolded the deeds of so many provinces, peoples and cities as wrapped up masses of miseries. For who could unfold in speech the disaster of that time, who its deaths, or who could equal its sorrows with tears?

Yet these very things, because they have faded through a long interval of ages, have become for us exercises of wit and the delights of tales. Although if anyone applies his mind more intently and with the whole affection of his mind almost mingles himself with those causes and wars, and again, set as on the height of a spectacle, measures both times in their qualities, I would readily say that he will judge that those times could not have been so unhappily disturbed and confounded except by an angry and averted God, nor these so ordered except by a propitious and merciful one.

Then in these times Sicily, shaken by a very heavy earthquake, was moreover laid waste by the seething fires of Mount Etna and hot ashes, with very great damage to fields and villas.

Then too the city of Atalante, adjoining Locris and connected to the land, was cut off by a sudden onrush of the sea and left desolate as an island. A plague too attacked the wretched remnants of the Athenians and long ravaged them.

In the 355th year from the founding of the City, the siege of Veii for ten continuous years wore down the besiegers more than the besieged. For the Romans, crushed by frequent sudden sallies of the enemy, were moreover compelled to engage in war in winter quarters, to winter under skins, and finally to endure hunger and cold in sight of the enemy;

at last they took the city, without any worthy testimony of Roman courage, by tunnels and a stealthy creeping in.

This victory, more useful than glorious, was followed first by the exile of the dictator Camillus, who won it over the Veientes, then by the invasion of the Gauls and the burning of the City.

Let anyone, if he can, dare to compare any disturbances of this time with that disaster, although he does not weigh the tale of a past evil equally with the injury of a present one.

So the Senonian Gauls under their leader Brennus, with a numerous and very strong army, while they were besieging the city of Clusium in what is now called Tuscia, saw the envoys of the Romans, who had come then to make peace between them, fighting against them in the battle line: moved by this indignation, they abandoned the siege of the town of Clusium and marched on Rome with all their strength.

The consul Fabius met them, raging as they were, with an army; yet he did not withstand them; rather, that hostile onset cut down, laid low and passed over it like a dry crop. The river Allia testifies to this disaster of Fabius, as the Cremera does to that of the Fabii. For no one would easily recount a like ruin of the Roman army, even if Rome had not been burned besides.

The Gauls entered the open city; they slaughtered the senators sitting stiff like statues in their seats, and, burned in the fire of their houses, buried them under the fall of their own roofs.

All the remaining youth, which is known to have been then scarcely a thousand men, hiding in the citadel of the Capitoline hill, they shut in by siege, and there they wore down, subdued and sold the unhappy remnant by hunger, plague, despair and fear:

for they agreed on a thousand pounds of gold as the price of departure, not because Rome was of small repute among the Gauls, but because they had already so worn it down that it could not then be worth more.

When the Gauls left, there remained within the once great circuit of the City an unsightly heap of shapeless ruins, and on every side the echo of a voice, striking against obstacles, answering those who wandered through the blocked ways and did not recognize their own places, held their trembling hearing in suspense. Horror shook their minds; the very silences terrified them: for scarcity in wide spaces is matter for fear.

Hence they thought of, agreed on and attempted changing their seat, inhabiting another town, even being counted under another name.

Behold the times by comparison with which the present is weighed; behold the times for which memory sighs; behold the times that strike repentance at the religion chosen, or rather neglected!

Truly these two captivities are equal and may be compared with each other: that one raging for six months, this one passing in three days; the Gauls, having wiped out the people and destroyed the City, pursuing even the very name of Rome into its last ashes, and the Goths, abandoning the intention of plunder, driving bewildered crowds to refuges of safety, that is, to the holy places; there scarcely any senator was found who escaped even by absence, here scarcely any is sought

who perished by chance in hiding; I might rightly compare thus: the number of those saved there was the number of those lost here. Plainly, what is shown by the fact must also be confessed: in this present disaster God was more severe, men less, since, by himself accomplishing what they had not fulfilled, he showed why he had sent them.

For since it was beyond human strength to set fire to bronze beams and to overthrow the masses of great structures, the forum with its empty images, which by wretched superstition falsely represent either a god or a man, was struck down by strokes of lightning; and of all these abominations, what the flame sent in by the enemy did not reach, fire sent from heaven overthrew.

And since the material for speaking is rich and can by no means be contained in this book, let this be the end of the present volume, so that we may pursue the rest in the following ones.

I have already declared in the previous book, and now necessarily repeat according to your instruction about the past conflicts of the world, that not everything, nor in every detail, can be set out that was done and as it was done, since great and countless things have been written most copiously and by very many; and the writers, though they did not have the same purposes, had the same events before them: since they unroll wars, we the miseries of wars.

Moreover, from this very abundance of which I complain a difficulty arises for me, and a more knotted anxiety confines me. For if I omit some things for the sake of brevity, it will be thought either that they were lacking to me now or did not exist at that time; but if, striving to indicate everything without expressing it, I gird it up in compendious brevity, I shall make it obscure, and for many it will be so said that it will not seem said:

especially since we, on the contrary, take care to commend the force of things, not their image; and brevity and obscurity, or rather brevity which is always obscure, though it offers an image of knowing, takes away the vigour of understanding. But since I know that both are to be avoided, I shall do both, so that each may in some way be tempered by the other, if neither many things seem passed over nor much compressed.

In the 364th year from the founding of the City, a year which Rome felt as most grievous because of a captivity unknown to it, while Greece held it magnificent because of an unaccustomed peace (for at the time when the Gauls held, after capturing and burning it, and sold Rome), Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, commanded through envoys that all Greece withdraw from arms and rest in peace, declaring that any opponent of the peace would be attacked in war.

The Greeks could surely have despised him giving such orders as steadfastly as they had often bravely defeated him, had they not seized the opportunity offered from any quarter, which they had so eagerly desired, as gladly as they did:

for they showed how reluctantly and wretchedly they had carried on those things until then, which they laid down so easily, even on unworthy terms. For what is so unworthy of free and brave men as, at the command of an enemy far removed, often defeated, still an enemy and threatening besides, to lay down arms and be slaves to peace? Unless, at the very sound of the announced peace, the sick intention of war had wasted away in the hearts of all, and unexpected rest had relaxed them, yawning and stupefied after long vigils of labours, before their will had set the agreed rest in order.

But whence so great a weariness oppressed the hearts and bodies of all peoples throughout Greece, which so easily persuaded savage spirits to acquiesce in an unknown leisure, I shall show as briefly as possible.

The Lacedaemonians, being men and Greek men, desiring more the more they had, after they had gained control of the Athenians, swallowed all Asia in the hope of domination.

So, stirring up war with the whole East, they chose Hircylides as general for this campaign. Since he saw that he had to fight against two very powerful prefects of Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes, he took a counsel suited to the time, to evade the weight of a double engagement: he attacked one by declaring war, and held the other in suspense by a pact of peace.

Pharnabazus denounced Tissaphernes to Artaxerxes, then their common king, as a traitor, especially as one who had agreed with the enemy in time of war on the terms of a treaty; and he urged the king to appoint in his place as commander in the naval war Conon, an Athenian, who was then by chance living in exile in Cyprus. So, having received five hundred talents of silver, Conon was summoned through Pharnabazus and put in command of the fleet.

On learning this, the Lacedaemonians too asked by envoys for help for the naval war from Hercynion, king of Egypt, from whom they received a hundred equipped triremes and six hundred thousand measures of grain; from their allies also they gathered great reinforcements on every side.

For this campaign they decreed by consent of all Agesilaus as general, a man lame in the foot, but they preferred, in the most difficult state of affairs, that their king limp rather than their kingdom. Rarely have generals so equal in all diligence come together in one war; worn out by most bitter battles against each other and smeared with much blood, they withdrew from each other as though unconquered.

So Conon, having again received pay from the Great King in person, returned to the fleet, invaded the enemy's lands, stormed towers, forts and other strongholds, and, like a storm let loose, laid everything low wherever he fell.

The Lacedaemonians, beset by evils at home, ceased to gape after foreign things and cast away the hope of domination with the danger of slavery threatening; they recalled Agesilaus, whom they had sent with an army into Asia, to help the fatherland.

Meanwhile Pisander, the commander left at Sparta by King Agesilaus, had prepared a very great and well-equipped fleet, moved by rivalry with the courage of Agesilaus, so that, while he conducted a land expedition, he too might range the coast in naval raids.

Conon, having taken up the task, gave a double care, owing diligence to his allies and loyalty to his country, so as to show to the one his nature and to offer the other his industry; in this more inclined to his citizens, that he spent the risk of others' blood for their quiet and liberty, and fought against most insolent enemies at the king's risk, for the reward of his country.

So they joined a naval battle, the Persians under Conon, the Spartans under Pisander; soldiers, rowers and the commanders themselves were swept with one equal ardour into mutual slaughter.

The greatness and atrocity of this war are shown by the state of the Lacedaemonians, declining from then on always into the future: for from that time the hope of the Spartans seemed to ebb and, slipping, to be carried backward, until, rising with difficulty and falling back wretchedly, it was spent and lacked both power and name.

For the Athenians this same battle was the beginning of recovering power, as for the Lacedaemonians of losing it. So first the Thebans, supported by the help of the Athenians, attacked them, wounded and trembling from the earlier disaster, inspired with much confidence because of the courage and diligence of their general Epaminondas, with whom they thought they could easily gain the rule of all Greece.

So a land battle took place, the Thebans winning with very little trouble. For in this conflict too Lysander was defeated and killed; Pausanias, the other general of the Lacedaemonians, accused of treachery, was sent into exile;

the Thebans, having gained the victory, gathered the force of their whole army and marched on Sparta, thinking they would enter without any trouble a city empty of defence, almost all of whose forces they had already destroyed together with the king, and which they saw abandoned by all its allies.

The Lacedaemonians, driven by the danger to the city, held some kind of levy of untrained soldiers and went out to meet the enemy. But having been conquered once, they had neither the courage nor the spirit to resist the victors.

So when only the slaughter of almost one side was going on, suddenly King Agesilaus, summoned from Asia, came upon the battle unexpectedly; he attacked the Thebans, already more joyful and slack from the success of a double victory, and overcame them without difficulty, especially since his forces were still almost intact. Agesilaus himself, however, was seriously wounded.

But the Athenians, when they learned that the Lacedaemonians had been raised up by an unexpected victory, trembling with fear of their former slavery, from which they had then scarcely begun to breathe again, gathered an army and joined it to the Boeotians in aid, entrusted to the general Iphicrates, who, quite young, barely twenty years old, fortified the weakness of his age with maturity of spirit.

Conon too, an Athenian man but commander of the Persian army, hearing of the return of Agesilaus, came back to ravage the lands of the Lacedaemonians. So the Spartans, shut in by the din of enemies sounding all around them and terrified, wasted away in almost final despair.

But Conon, after he had sated himself with the vast devastation of the enemy's soil, went to Athens, himself sad amid the greatest joy of the citizens, since he saw the city, once most adorned with people and culture, now consumed by the wretched squalor of ruins and desolation.

So he wrought a great monument of piety and compassion in its restoration: for he filled it, emptied by the Lacedaemonians, with the spoils of the Lacedaemonians, and rebuilt it, burned by the Persians, with Persians building.

Meanwhile Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, as was said at the beginning, commanded all the peoples of Greece through envoys to withdraw from arms and acquiesce in peace: not because he took merciful thought for the weary, but so that, while he was occupied with wars in Egypt, no invasion of his kingdom would be attempted.

So when all the Greeks were relaxed in a most longed-for quiet and torpid with domestic leisure, the Lacedaemonians, restless rather than vigorous, and intolerable by fury rather than by courage, after laying down wars attempted thefts of war.

For, spying out the absence of the Arcadians, they broke into their fort by a sudden attack. The Arcadians, roused by the injury, joined to themselves the help of the Thebans and sought back by war what they had lost by theft.

In that battle Archidamus, the Lacedaemonian general, wounded, when he saw his men already being slaughtered as conquered, asked through a herald for the bodies of the slain for burial: which among the Greeks is held to be a sign of victory conceded.

The Thebans, content with this admission, gave the signal for sparing and put an end to the contest.

Then, a few days of truce intervening, while the Lacedaemonians were turned to other wars, the Thebans with their general Epaminondas took confidence about invading Lacedaemon as though secure and abandoned. They came silently to Lacedaemon in the dead of night; but they did not find it as unguarded or undefended as they had thought:

for the old men, armed, with the rest of the crowd of unwarlike age, having foreknown the enemy's coming, threw themselves into the very narrows of the gates, and scarcely a hundred men worn out with age burst out against fifteen thousand soldiers. While they were sustaining so great a mass of war, the youth arrived and resolved without hesitation to engage the Thebans in open battle.

When battle was joined and the Lacedaemonians were being defeated, suddenly Epaminondas, general of the Thebans, fighting too incautiously, was wounded. Therefore, while fear arose in these from grief and stupor in those from joy, both sides withdrew as if by tacit consent.

But Epaminondas, gravely wounded, when he had learned of his men's victory and had kissed his shield, removed the hand with which he had closed the wound and opened an exit for the blood and an entrance for death: and the ruin of the Thebans so followed his death that they seemed not to have lost a general but themselves to have perished with him.

I have woven the tangled wickerwork of an undigested history, and, following in words step by step the uncertain cycles of wars waged here and there with frenzied fury, I have entangled them; for, as I see, I have written the more disorderly the more I have kept to the order.

The wicked desire of the Lacedaemonians for domination, among how many peoples, what cities, which provinces, what kind of movements of hatred, how many causes of conflict it stirred up, who could set out in number or order or reckoning? Since they themselves too are reported to have been afflicted no more by wars than by the confusion of wars:

for, this continuous war being drawn out through several generations, the Athenians, Lacedaemonians, Arcadians, Boeotians, Thebans, and at last Greece, Asia, Persia and Egypt with Libya and the islands carried on the greatest naval and land conflicts in indiscriminate raids. I could not report the thousands of men slain, even if I numbered the wars.

But now let anyone rail at these times and praise those, who does not know that all these peoples of those cities and provinces now grow old in nothing but games and theatres, just as then they wasted away chiefly in camps and battles.

That most flourishing city of the Lacedaemonians, then aspiring to the empire of the whole East, could scarcely have a hundred old men; so beset by unceasing evils, it wretchedly spent unripe lives:

and do men complain now, whose cities, filled with boys and old men, grow rich by the safe travels of young men and earn by peaceful exercises the wages of domestic pleasure? Unless perhaps, as for human changeableness all present things are commonly worthless, to those itching for novelties in deed and hearing even life itself is a weariness.

In the 376th year from the founding of the City all Achaia was shaken by a most savage earthquake, and two cities then, that is, Ebora and Helice, were swallowed up by chasms that broke open in the ground.

But I could now, on the contrary, tell of similar things in our own days at Constantinople, now likewise the chief of the nations, foretold and begun but not completed: when, after a terrible warning and a conscience foreknowing its own evil, the earth trembled, shaken from its foundations beneath, and flame poured from heaven hung above, until God, entreated by the prayers of the emperor Arcadius and the Christian people, turned away the present destruction,

proving that he alone is both the preserver of the humble and the punisher of the wicked. But I would yield it to modesty that these things be mentioned rather than set out, so that whoever knows may recall them and whoever does not may inquire.

Meanwhile the Romans, who for seventy years had been worn out and crushed by constant wars with the city of the Volsci, and besides with the Falisci, the Aequi and the Sutrini, at last in the days written above, under Camillus as leader, took these same cities and put an end to the reviving contest.

At the same time too they defeated the Praenestines, who had come fighting and killing as far as the gate of Rome, at the river Allia, with Titus Quintius commanding.

In the 384th year from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Lucius Genucius and Quintus Servilius, a great pestilence seized all Rome:

not, as is usual, a disturbance of the seasons' balance, more or less than normal (that is, either an untimely drought of winter, or a sudden heat of spring, or an unsuitable moisture of summer, or the undigested allurement of a rich autumn, and besides a corrupting breeze breathed out from the Calabrian forests), bringing sudden passing attacks of acute illnesses;

but grave and long-lasting, no different in either sex, not unlike in any age, it wasted all continuously for two years with a general consumption, so that even those it did not drive to death it left emptied and afflicted with a foul leanness.

The detractors of Christian times would complain at this point, I think, if I passed over in silence with what ceremonies the Romans then appeased the gods and calmed the diseases.

When the pestilence grew worse day by day, the pontiffs as advisers urged that stage plays be put on for the gods who demanded them. So, to drive away a temporary plague of the body, a perpetual disease of souls was summoned.

Here indeed there is rich room for grief and reproach; but on a matter in which Your Reverence has already exercised the zeal for wisdom and truth, it is not right for me to venture; let it be enough for me to have reminded, and to have referred the reader, whatever his purpose, to the fullness of that reading.

This wretched plague and its more wretched expiation were followed the next year by a sad enough portent. For suddenly in the middle of the City the earth burst apart, and through a vast chasm the gaping depths suddenly lay open.

The shameless cave remained a long time with its open abyss, a spectacle and terror to all, and, as the gods' interpreters said, demanded the wicked burial of a living man.

Marcus Curtius, an armed knight, satisfied the wicked jaws by throwing himself in, and cast into the cruel earth an unexpected surfeit, for which it was too little that it received through tombs those dead of so great a pestilence, unless, split open, it also swallowed the living.

In the 388th year from the founding of the City, again a terrible flood of Gauls settled by the river Anio at the fourth milestone from the City; doubtless it would easily have seized the alarmed city by the weight of its numbers and the eagerness of its courage, had it not grown torpid with leisure and slowness.

There Manlius Torquatus began a most fierce battle in single combat, and Titus Quintius the dictator finished it in a most bloody engagement. Very many Gauls, put to flight in this battle, renewed their forces, rushed again into war, and were overcome by the dictator Gaius Sulpicius.

A little later a battle with the Etruscans followed under Gaius Marcius: in which one may infer how many men were killed, since eight thousand Etruscans were captured.

A third time in the same days the Gauls spread out for plunder through the coastal regions and the plains below the Alban mountains; against them, a new levy of soldiers having been held and ten legions enrolled, sixty thousand Romans went out, the help of the Latins being refused them.

Marcus Valerius finished this battle, helped by a raven, from which he was afterwards called Corvinus. For when the Gallic challenger had been killed, the enemy, terrified and fleeing in scattered groups, were heavily slaughtered.

I think that the first treaty struck with the Carthaginians, which was at the same time, should also be counted among the evils; especially since such grievous evils arose from it that they seem to have begun from then.

For in the 402nd year from the founding of the City envoys were sent from Carthage to Rome and made a treaty.

That a hailstorm of evils and continual darkness of continuous miseries would follow this entry of the Carthaginians into Italy, the trustworthiness of histories, the infamy of places, and the abomination of the days on which those things were done all bear witness.

Then too night was seen to stretch into the greater part of the day, and a hail of stone coming down from the clouds beat the earth with real stones.

In those days too Alexander the Great was born, truly a whirlpool of miseries and the most atrocious whirlwind of the whole East.

Then too Ochus, also called Artaxerxes, after finishing a very great and long war in Egypt, drove very many of the Jews into deportation and commanded them to live in Hyrcania by the Caspian Sea:

the opinion is that they remain there to this day with very great increase of their race and will some day break out from there.

In the storm of that war, passing through, he also destroyed Sidon, the richest city of the province of Phoenicia, and Egypt, although he had earlier been defeated, he then subjected to the empire of the Persians, subdued and crushed by the sword.

From here at once wars were undertaken by the Romans against the Samnites, a people strong in wealth and arms, on behalf of the Campanians and Sidicini; the Samnite war, waged in an uncertain state, was taken over by Pyrrhus, perhaps the greatest enemy of the Roman name; the war with Pyrrhus was soon followed by the Punic war:

and although the gates of Janus, always open, show that there was never a respite from the disasters of wars after the death of Numa, yet from that time, as though at midday, a heat of evils pressed on the whole sky blazed up.

Moreover, once the Punic war had begun, whether wars, slaughter, ruins and all kinds of unspeakable deaths ever ceased except under the rule of Caesar Augustus, let whoever thinks the Christian times are to be defamed inquire, find out and declare.

Apart from that, however, amid the Punic wars, in the passing of one single year, as of a bird flying by, because of the closing of the gates of Janus amid the fevers and diseases of the commonwealth, the Romans were so enticed by this briefest sign of peace, as by the slightest draught of cold water, that, growing hot again for the worse, they were afflicted much more gravely and violently.

But if it is beyond all doubt established that under Caesar Augustus, for the first time, after the peace with Parthia, the whole world, arms laid down and discords abolished, settled in a general peace and a new quiet, obeyed the laws of the Romans, preferred Roman law to its own arms, and, scorning its own leaders, chose Roman judges;

and finally that all nations, all provinces, countless cities, innumerable peoples, the whole earth had one will, to serve peace with free and honourable zeal and to take counsel for the common good (which before not even one city or one people of citizens, or, what is more, one household of brothers could have maintained continuously);

and if, since these things came about under the rule of Caesar, it is also manifest by the clearest proof that in the very reign of Caesar the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ shone forth in this world:

then those whom envy drove to blasphemy will be forced, though unwilling, to recognize and confess that this peace of the whole world and its most tranquil calm came about not by the greatness of Caesar but by the power of the Son of God, who appeared in the days of Caesar, and that the world itself obeyed, in a general knowledge, not the emperor of one city but the creator of the whole world, who, as the rising sun floods the day with light, so at his coming mercifully clothed the world with an extended peace. This will be set out more fully when, the Lord himself bringing it about, we come to that point.

So in the 409th year from the founding of the City the Romans made war on the rebelling Latins, in the consulship of Manlius Torquatus and Decius Mus. In that war one consul was killed, the other became the killer of his son.

For Manlius Torquatus killed his son, a young man, a victor, the slayer of Metius of Tusculum, a noble knight and an enemy who was then especially challenging and insulting.

But the other consul, when in a renewed engagement he saw the wing he commanded being cut down and crushed, threw himself of his own accord among the densest enemies and fell.

Manlius, although victor, did not deserve, as a triumphing slayer of his son, the procession of the noble Roman youths which is customarily shown.

In the year following this, Minucia, a Vestal Virgin, was condemned for incest committed and buried alive in the field which is now called the Accursed.

But after a short interval of time I shudder to report what was done. For in the consulship of Claudius Marcellus and Valerius Flaccus Roman matrons burned with an incredible madness and love of crimes.

That was indeed a foul and pestilent year; the dead were already being carried out in crowds everywhere, and yet all simply believed it came from corrupted air, when, a certain slave girl coming forward as informer and proving it, first many matrons were compelled to drink the poisons they had brewed, and then, as soon as they drank, they were consumed.

So great was the multitude of matrons privy to these crimes that three hundred and seventy of them are reported to have been condemned at once.

In the 422nd year from the founding of the City, Alexander, king of the Epirotes, uncle of that Alexander the Great, having brought his forces over into Italy, while he was preparing war against the Romans and was engaged in wars around the cities neighbouring Rome, eager to strengthen the forces of his army and either gain allies for himself or withdraw them from the enemy, was defeated and killed in a very great war in Lucania by the Samnites, who were supporting the Lucanian people.

But since I have advanced somewhat in reviewing Roman disasters, reminded also by the mention of this Alexander, I shall gather, as far as I can, great things into small compass concerning Philip, king of the Macedonians, who had as wife Olympias, sister of this Alexander of Epirus, and by her begot Alexander the Great, going back a very few years.

In the 400th year from the founding of the City, Philip, son of Amyntas and father of Alexander, obtained the kingdom of the Macedonians and held it twenty-five years, in which he piled up all these heaps of bitterness and all these masses of evils.

He was first given by his brother Alexander as a hostage to the Thebans and was educated for three years in the house of Epaminondas, a most vigorous general and a great philosopher.

When Alexander himself had been killed by the crime of their mother Eurydice (although she, having already committed adultery and first killed another son and widowed her daughter, had promised marriage to her son-in-law upon her husband's death), he was compelled by the people to take up the kingdom, which he was guarding for the little son of his slain brother.

Wearied abroad by the onset of enemies rising up on every side and at home by fear of plots often detected, he first waged war with the Athenians.

Having defeated them, he turned his arms against the Illyrians and, slaughtering many thousands of the enemy, took Larissa, a most noble city.

From there he invaded Thessaly, not so much from love of victory as from ambition to have the Thessalian cavalry, whose strength he might mix into his army.

So, the Thessalians being seized unexpectedly and brought under his power, by joining the strongest squadrons and forces of horse and foot he made a most invincible army.

So, the Athenians defeated and the Thessalians subdued, he married Olympias, sister of Arybas, king of the Molossians. Arybas, thinking that by this, since he was contracting an alliance with the Macedonians by kinship with the king, he would enlarge his own empire, was deceived by this very thing, lost it, and grew old as a private man in exile.

Then Philip, while besieging the city of Methone, lost an eye from the stroke of an arrow. But he soon stormed and took the city itself.

Thereafter he subdued by force almost all Greece, first outwitted by his counsels. For the cities of Greece, while each desired to rule, all lost their rule, and while they rushed without measure to mutual destruction, they realized only when crushed and enslaved that what each lost was perishing for all.

While Philip watched their mad dealings as from a watchtower, and, always suggesting help to the weaker side, cunning craftsman of deceit, fostered contentions, the kindling of wars, he subjected to himself conquered and conquerors alike.

The immoderate domination of the Thebans gave him the opportunity to gain the domination of all Greece: when they had defeated the Lacedaemonians and the Phocians, worn out also by slaughter and plunder, and had moreover burdened them in the common council of Greece with so great a fine of money as they could in no way pay, they forced them to take refuge in arms.

So the Phocians, with Philomelus as leader and supported by the help of the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, joined battle, routed the enemy and took the camp of the Thebans. In the next battle, amid immense slaughter of both peoples, Philomelus was killed; in his place the Phocians made Onomarchus general.

But the Thebans and Thessalians, giving up a levy of their own citizens, of their own accord sought as their leader Philip, king of Macedonia, whom earlier they had laboured to repel as an enemy. Battle was joined, the Phocians were cut down almost to extermination, and victory went to Philip.

But the Athenians, on hearing the outcome of the war, to keep Philip from crossing into Greece, seized the narrows of Thermopylae in the same way as they had earlier when the Persians approached.

So Philip, when he saw himself shut out from entering Greece by the blocking of Thermopylae, turned the war prepared against the enemy upon his allies: for the cities whose leader he had been a little before, which lay open to congratulate and receive him, he attacked as an enemy, cruelly

plundered them, and, every sense of alliance utterly abolished, sold the wives and children of all at auction; he also overthrew and despoiled all the temples; and yet in twenty-five years he was never defeated, as though the gods were angry.

After this he crossed into Cappadocia and there waged war with equal treachery; he killed neighbouring kings captured by deceit and subjected all Cappadocia to the empire of Macedonia.

Then, after the slaughter, burnings and plundering carried out in allied cities, he turned to the murder of his brothers, whom, born to his father of a stepmother, he feared as co-heirs of the kingdom, and set about killing them.

When he had killed one of them, two fled to Olynthus: Philip soon attacked it as an enemy, filled that most ancient and flourishing city with slaughter and blood, emptied it of wealth and men, and gave the brothers, dragged out, to punishment and death.

Then, elated by the destruction of his allies and the murder of his brothers, thinking everything he had thought of allowed to him, he seized the gold-bearing places in Thessaly and the silver mines in Thrace, and, so as to leave no right or law unviolated, having seized the sea and scattered his fleet, he began also to practise piracy.

Moreover, when two brothers, kings of Thrace, disputing about the boundaries of their kingdom, had by consent chosen him as judge, Philip, after the manner of his character, came to the judgment as if to a war, with an army drawn up, and deprived the unsuspecting young men of life and kingdom.

But the Athenians, who had earlier repelled Philip's entry by fortifying Thermopylae, now of their own accord seeking peace with him, warned that most fraudulent enemy that the guard of the entrance had been neglected.

The other cities of Greece too, so as to be more intently free for civil wars, under the appearance of peace and treaty submitted of their own accord to foreign domination,

especially since the Thessalians and Boeotians were demanding of Philip that he show himself the declared leader against the Phocians and wage the war he had undertaken, while the Phocians, joining the Athenians and Lacedaemonians with them, laboured both with money and prayers to have the war either postponed or removed.

Philip secretly promised different things to both: to the Phocians he confirmed by oath that he would give peace and pardon, to the Thessalians he pledged that he would soon be present with an army; yet he forbade both to prepare for war.

So Philip, his forces drawn up, entered the narrows of Thermopylae without fear and, having occupied them, fortified them with garrisons placed.

Then for the first time not the Phocians alone but all Greece felt itself captured: for first Philip, breaking faith and trampling his oath, gave the Phocians to unspeakable tearing apart, then, ravaging the cities and territories of all, by his bloody presence brought it about that he was feared even when absent.

When he returned to his kingdom, after the manner of shepherds who lead their flocks now through summer pastures, now through winter ones, he transferred peoples and cities at his pleasure, as each place seemed to him to need filling or emptying.

Everywhere a pitiable sight and a most atrocious kind of misery met the eye: to suffer ruin without an invasion, captivity without war, exile without crime, domination without a victor.

Amid the goads of injuries an overwhelming fear pressed the wretched, and grief itself grew by its very concealment, sunk the deeper the less it was permitted to declare it, as they feared that even their tears might be taken for defiance.

Some peoples, torn from their seats, he set against the borders of enemies; others he placed at the farthest limits of the kingdom; some, from jealousy of their strength, lest they be able to do what they were believed able to do, he divided up to fill out depleted cities.

So that once most glorious body of flourishing Greece, its liberty first extinguished, fell into many torn little pieces.

But when he had done these things throughout a number of the cities of Greece and still held all down by fear, inferring from the plunder of a few the wealth of all, and thinking a maritime city necessary as a useful source of profit for completing an equal devastation in all, he judged Byzantium, a noble city, most suitable, so that it might become his base by land and sea; and when it resisted he at once surrounded it with a siege.

This Byzantium, once founded by Pausanias, king of the Spartans, and afterwards enlarged by Constantine, the Christian emperor, and called Constantinople, is now the seat of a most glorious empire and the capital of the whole East.

But Philip, after a long and fruitless siege, so as to restore by plundering the money he had exhausted by besieging, took to piracy. So he sold off a hundred and seventy captured ships full of merchandise and relieved his gasping want with a small refreshment.

Then he divided his army for taking plunder and managing the siege. He himself set out with the bravest, took many cities of the Chersonese and carried off the wealth of the routed peoples. He also passed over into Scythia with his son Alexander, intent on plunder.

Atheas then reigned over the Scythians: when he was pressed by war with the Histrians, he asked help from Philip through the people of Apollonia; but when the king of the Histrians soon died, freed both from fear of war and from need of help, he dissolved the treaty agreement made with Philip.

Philip, abandoning the siege of Byzantium, attacked the Scythian war with all his forces, and when battle was joined, though the Scythians excelled in both number and courage, they were defeated by Philip's fraud.

In that battle twenty thousand boys and women of the Scythian race were captured, a great quantity of cattle carried off, no gold or silver found: and this first gave credence to Scythian poverty. Twenty thousand noble mares were sent to Macedonia to supply the breed.

But as Philip was returning, the Triballi met him in war, in which Philip was so wounded in the thigh that his horse was killed through his body. When all thought him dead, they turned to flight and lost the plunder. Then for a little while, until he recovered from the wound, he rested in peace;

but as soon as he recovered he made war on the Athenians, who, placed in so great a crisis, took as allies the Lacedaemonians, once enemies, and wearied the cities of all Greece with embassies, that they should attack the common enemy with common strength. So a number of cities joined the Athenians, but fear of war drew some to Philip.

When battle was joined, though the Athenians excelled by a far greater number of soldiers, they were nevertheless defeated by the courage of the Macedonians, hardened by constant wars.

That this battle was far more atrocious than all earlier wars the outcome itself showed: for this day ended, for all Greece, the glory of domination acquired and the condition of most ancient liberty.

Afterwards Philip exercised a most bloody victory over the Thebans and Lacedaemonians: for he beheaded some of the leading men of the cities, drove others into exile, and deprived all of their goods.

Those long since driven out by their citizens he restored to their country; of these he set three hundred exiles as judges and rulers, who, to heal an old grief with new power, would not let the unhappily oppressed peoples breathe again in hope of liberty.

Moreover, having held a great levy of soldiers from all Greece in support of the royal arrangements, he prepared two hundred thousand foot and fifteen thousand horse, besides the army of the Macedonians and a boundless barbarism of nations, to send on a Persian expedition into Asia.

He chose three generals, that is, Parmenio, Amyntas and Attalus, to send ahead against the Persians. And while the forces written above were being gathered from Greece, he decided to celebrate the marriage of Alexander (who was the brother of his wife Olympias and was afterwards struck down by the Sabines in Lucania, and whom he had made king of Epirus as the price of the debauchery he had committed on him), joining him to his daughter Cleopatra.

When he had been asked, the day before he was killed, what end a man should most desire, he is said to have answered that the best was one that could befall a brave man suddenly and swiftly by an unexpected sword, after the glories of his virtues, while he reigned in peace, without struggle of body or disgrace of mind: and this soon happened to him.

Nor could he be prevented by the angry gods, whom he had always held of little account and whose altars, temples and images he had overthrown, from obtaining the death most chosen, as it seemed to him.

For on the day of the wedding, when he was going to magnificently prepared games between the two Alexanders, his son and his son-in-law, he was surrounded and killed in a narrow passage without guards by Pausanias, a noble Macedonian youth.

Let them now assert and extol with many words these things as the praises of brave men and fortunate deeds, men for whom the most bitter calamities of others turn into sweet tales; if only they themselves never lament, in a sadder telling, the injuries by which they are sometimes vexed.

But if they want others, hearing their own complaints, to be affected as much as they felt in suffering them, let them first compare not past with present, but deeds with deeds, and judge both from hearing, as arbiters of others' affairs.

For twenty-five years the fraud, ferocity and domination of one king drove on the burnings of cities, the destructions of wars, the subjugations of provinces, the slaughter of men, the plundering of wealth, the seizing of cattle, the sale of the dead and the captivity of the living.

These deeds done by Philip, brought to our memory, would be enough as an example of miseries, even if Alexander had not succeeded him in the kingdom. His wars, or rather the evils of the world following in order under his wars, I suspend for a little, so that here, for the correspondence of the times, I may insert Roman affairs.

In the 426th year from the founding of the City, a notable infamy of the Romans made the Caudine Forks very celebrated and famous. For when in the earlier war twenty thousand Samnites had fallen, Fabius the master of horse joining battle, the Samnites, with more circumspect care and better-prepared equipment, encamped at the Caudine Forks;

there, when they had shut in the consuls Veturius and Postumius and all the forces of the Romans by the narrowness of the places and by arms, Pontius their leader so abused the security of victory that he thought he should consult his father Herennius whether to kill the trapped men or spare them when subjugated: he chose to keep them alive for disgrace.

For it was agreed that the Romans had very often before been defeated and killed, but never captured or forced to surrender.

So the Samnites, having gained the victory, ordered the whole Roman army, shamefully captured, stripped even of arms and clothing, with only single cheaper coverings allowed each for covering the private parts of the body, sent under the yoke and subjected to slavery, to lead a long procession.

Receiving six hundred Roman knights as hostages, they sent the consuls back, loaded with ignominy, emptied of all else.

Why should I labour in words to exaggerate the stain of this foulest treaty, I who would rather have been silent? For today the Romans would either not exist at all or would be slaves under Samnite domination, if they, when subject to the Samnites, had kept the faith of the treaty which they do not want kept toward themselves by their subjects.

In the following year the Romans broke the agreement confirmed with the Samnites and forced them into war; joined under the pressure of the consul Papirius, it caused great slaughter on both peoples.

While on the one side anger at the recent disgrace, on the other the glory of the recent victory spurred the fighters on, at last the Romans conquered by stubbornly dying; nor did they cease from being killed and killing alike until, the Samnites conquered and their leader captured, they put the yoke back on them.

Then the same Papirius stormed and took Satricum, after driving out the Samnite garrison. This Papirius was then held among the Romans so very warlike and vigorous that, when Alexander the Great was said to be planning, coming down from the East, to take Africa by force and from there cross into Italy, the Romans reckoned that among the other generals, then the best in their commonwealth, he would be the foremost who could withstand Alexander's onset.

So Alexander, in the 426th year from the founding of the City, succeeded his father Philip in the kingdom. He gave the first proof of his spirit and courage by swiftly crushing the movements of the Greeks, whose author, in urging them to revolt from the rule of the Macedonians, had been the orator Demosthenes, corrupted by Persian gold.

So he spared the Athenians when they begged off the war, and moreover released them from fear of a fine; the Thebans he destroyed together with their demolished city and sold the rest at auction; the other cities of Achaia and Thessaly he made tributary; the Illyrians and Thracians too he soon subdued, transferring the war there.

Then, as he was about to set out for the Persian war, he killed all his kinsmen and nearest relatives. In his army there were thirty-two thousand foot, four thousand five hundred horse, a hundred and eighty ships. With so small a band, whether it is more wonderful that he conquered the whole world or that he dared to attack it is uncertain.

In his first engagement with King Darius there were six hundred thousand Persians in the battle line, who, overcome no less by the skill of Alexander than by the courage of the Macedonians, turned their backs. So there was a great slaughter of Persians. In Alexander's army a hundred and twenty horsemen and only nine foot soldiers were lost.

Then he besieged, stormed and took Gordium, a city of Phrygia, which is now called Sardis, and gave it to plunder. Then, when the approach of Darius with great forces was announced to him, fearing the narrowness of the places he was in, he crossed Mount Taurus with wonderful speed and, covering five hundred stadia in one day's march, came to Tarsus; and there, when, sweating, he went down into the very cold river Cydnus, he grew stiff and, his sinews contracting, came near to death.

Meanwhile Darius advanced into battle with three hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse. This multitude of enemies moved even Alexander, chiefly in view of his own small numbers, although he had long since learned, having overcome six hundred thousand enemies with the same small force, not only not to fear battle but even to hope for victory.

So when each army had halted within a spear's throw and the leaders, running about, sharpened with various incentives the peoples intent on the signal for battle, the battle was joined with great spirit on both sides:

in it both kings, Alexander and Darius, were wounded, and the contest was doubtful until Darius fled; thereafter a slaughter of the Persians followed.

Then eighty thousand foot and ten thousand horse were slain, and forty thousand captured. Of the Macedonians there fell a hundred and thirty foot and a hundred and fifty horse. In the Persian camp much gold and other wealth was found. Among the captives of the camp were the mother and the wife, who was also his sister, and two daughters of Darius;

when Darius could not obtain their ransom even by offering half the kingdom, he gathered for the third time all the strength of the Persians and the help of their allies and renewed the war.

But while Darius was doing this, Alexander sent Parmenio with forces to attack the Persian fleet; he himself set out for Syria; there, of the many kings coming to meet him of their own accord with fillets, he chose some, changed others, destroyed others; and Tyre, a most ancient and flourishing city, resisting in reliance on the Carthaginians, its kinsmen, he crushed and took.

Thereafter he overran Cilicia, Rhodes and Egypt with persistent fury. Then he went to the temple of Jupiter Hammon, so that by a lie composed for the occasion he might abolish the disgrace of an uncertain father and the infamy of an adulterous mother.

For he secretly instructed the priest of the shrine himself, summoned to him, what he wished to be answered to him as he consulted, as their historians say. So Alexander was sure, and has revealed to us, that, the gods themselves being dumb and deaf, it is in the power of the priest to invent what he wishes or in the will of the consulter to hear what he prefers.

Returning from Hammon for the third Persian war, he founded Alexandria in Egypt.

Darius, having lost hope of peace, set four hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse in battle against Alexander as he returned from Egypt, near Tarsus.

Nor was there delay in fighting; all rushed onto the steel with blind rage: the Macedonians emboldened by enemies so often defeated by them, the Persians preferring to die unless they conquered.

Rarely in any battle has so much blood been shed. But Darius, when he saw his men being conquered, though ready to die in battle, was compelled by the persuasion of his men to flee.

In this battle the strength and kingdoms of Asia fell, and the whole East passed into the power of the Macedonian empire; and all the confidence of the Persians was so worn away in this war that after it no one dared to rebel, and the Persians, after an empire of so many years, patiently accepted the yoke of slavery.

Alexander spent thirty-four continuous days surveying the plunder of the camp; he entered Persepolis, the capital of the Persian kingdom, most famous and crammed with the wealth of the whole world;

but when he learned that Darius was held bound in golden fetters by his own kinsmen, he resolved to pursue him. So, ordering the army to follow, he set out himself with six thousand horse and found him on the road, left alone, pierced with many wounds and breathing out the last of life through his wounds.

When he was dead, with empty pity he ordered him carried back to the tombs of his ancestors and buried; yet he kept in cruel captivity not only, I will not say, his mother or wife, but even his little daughters.

In so great a multitude of evils belief in what is said is most difficult: in three battles and as many years fifteen hundred thousand foot and horse were consumed, and these from that kingdom and those peoples from which, not many years before, nineteen hundred thousand are reported to have been destroyed:

although besides these disasters, in the same three years very many cities of Asia were crushed, all Syria laid waste, Tyre destroyed, Cilicia emptied, Cappadocia subdued, Egypt made over; the island of Rhodes too, trembling, of its own accord submitted to slavery, and very many provinces lying below the Taurus, and Mount Taurus itself, subdued and conquered, accepted the yoke long refused.

And lest anyone perhaps think that then either the East alone was subdued by Alexander's forces or Italy alone was wearied by Roman restlessness: then too the war of Agis, king of the Spartans, was waged in Greece, that of Alexander, king of Epirus, in Lucania, and that of Zopyrion the prefect in Scythia.

Of these, Agis the Lacedaemonian, having roused all Greece to rebel with him, engaged the very strong forces of Antipater and, amid great slaughter on both sides, fell himself.

Alexander, aiming in Italy at the empire of the West in rivalry with Alexander the Great, after numerous and grave wars waged there, was overcome by the Bruttii and Lucanians, and his body was sold for burial.

Zopyrion, prefect of Pontus, having gathered an army of thirty thousand, dared to make war on the Scythians, was cut down to extermination, and was utterly wiped out with all his forces.

So Alexander the Great, after the death of Darius, subdued the Hyrcanians and the Mardi; there too, while he was still intent on war, Halestris or Minothea, a wanton Amazon, aroused by the desire to conceive offspring by him, came upon him with three hundred women.

After this he attacked the Parthians in battle; long resisting, he almost destroyed them before he conquered them.

Then he subdued the Drangae, Euergetae, Parimae, Parapameni, Adaspii and the other peoples who lived at the foot of the Caucasus, founding there a city of Alexandria on the river Tanais.

But his cruelty toward his own was no less than his rage against the enemy. This is shown by the murder of his cousin Amyntas, the killing of his stepmother and her brothers, the slaughter of Parmenio and Philotas, the deaths of Attalus, Eurylochus, Pausanias and many leading men of Macedonia, and the wicked killing of Clitus too, heavy with years, an old friendship:

when at a banquet, trusting in the king's friendship, he defended the memory of the king's father against the king, who was ranking his own deeds above his father Philip's, he was run through with a hunting spear by the king, offended for nothing, and as he died stained the common banquet with blood.

But Alexander, insatiable of human blood, whether of enemies or even of allies, always thirsted for fresh gore.

So, rushing into wars with persistent onset, he received in surrender the Chorasmi and the Dahae, an untamed people; he killed the philosopher Callisthenes, his fellow pupil under Aristotle, with very many other leading men, because, setting aside the custom of greeting, he would not worship him as a god.

After this he sought India, to end his empire at the Ocean and the farthest East. He came to the city of Nysa; he stormed the Daedalian mountains and the realm of Queen Cleophylis, who, when she had surrendered, redeemed her kingdom by lying with him.

When Alexander, having traversed and subdued India, came to a rock of wonderful steepness and height, to which many peoples had fled, he learned that Hercules had been prevented by an earthquake from storming that same rock. Moved by rivalry, to surpass the deeds of Hercules, he gained the rock with the greatest labour and danger and received all the peoples of that place in surrender.

He waged a most bloody war with Porus, the bravest king of the Indians, in which Alexander, engaging Porus himself in single combat, was thrown when his horse was killed and escaped the presence of death by the rush of his guards; Porus, pierced with many wounds, was captured.

Having restored him to his kingdom in testimony of his courage, he founded two cities there, Nicaea and Bucephala, which he ordered to be called by the name of his horse. Then the Macedonians stormed the Adrestae, Catheni, Praesidae and Gangaridae, after slaughtering their armies.

When they came to the Cofides, there they joined battle against two hundred thousand enemy horsemen; and when, already worn by age, sick at heart and weary in strength, they had won with difficulty, they built a camp more magnificent than usual as a memorial.

Thereafter Alexander went to the river Acesines; by it he was carried down to the Ocean; there he crushed the Gesonae and Sibi, whom Hercules founded. From there he sailed to the Adri and Subagri, peoples who met him with eighty thousand armed foot and sixty thousand horse.

When battle was joined, a long, doubtful and bloody fight at last gave the Macedonians an almost sad victory. For when the enemy's forces were routed Alexander led the army to the city; and when he had climbed the wall first, thinking the city empty, he leapt down inside alone:

when hostile enemies had surrounded him on every side, it is incredible to say that neither the multitude of the enemy, nor the great force of missiles, nor the great shouting of those attacking him terrified him; alone he cut down and put to flight so many thousands.

But when he felt himself being overwhelmed by the multitude poured round him, protecting his back by the barrier of the wall, he held off those facing him more easily until, at his danger and the shouting of the enemy, the whole army broke through the walls and burst in.

In that battle, pierced by an arrow below the breast, he fought on one knee until he had killed the man by whom he had been wounded.

Then, embarking on ships, while he was travelling along the shores of the Ocean, he came to a certain city ruled by King Ambira. But in storming the city he lost a great part of his army through the enemy's arrows smeared with poison; and after an herb shown to him in a dream was given in drink to the wounded and the rest were relieved, he stormed and took the city.

Afterwards, as though the turning-post had been rounded, he entered the river Indus from the Ocean and quickly returned to Babylon.

There envoys of the terrified provinces of the whole world awaited him, that is, of the Carthaginians and the cities of all Africa, but also of the Spaniards, the Gauls, Sicily and Sardinia, and besides of most of Italy.

So great a fear of the leader established in the farthest East had seized the peoples of the farthest West that you might see from there an embassy travelling through the whole world to a place to which you would scarcely believe rumour had reached.

But Alexander, at Babylon, while still thirsting for blood with his greed ill checked, drank poison through the plot of a servant and died.

O hard mind of men and heart always inhuman! I myself, who review these things to establish the alternating calamity of all times, in the telling of so great an evil, at which the whole world trembled either at the death itself or at the fear of death it received, did I weep with my eyes? Did I grieve in heart? In turning these things over, did I, on account of the common condition of living, make the miseries of our ancestors my own?

And yet, if ever I tell of myself, how I first saw unknown barbarians, how I avoided hostile ones, how I flattered those in power, how I guarded against the faithless, how I slipped away from those lying in wait,

and finally how, wrapped in a sudden mist, I escaped those pursuing me on the sea and attacking me with stones and spears, and almost already seizing me with their hands, I would want all who hear me to be moved to tears, and I grieve silently over those who do not grieve, reckoning it to the hardness of those who do not believe what they have not endured.

The Spaniard and the Morinian went to Babylon to entreat Alexander, and of their own accord sought out a bloody master through Assyria and India, so as not to receive him as an enemy, travelling over the bounds of the earth, unhappily known to both Oceans: and yet the memory of so violent a necessity has either failed through forgetfulness or grown cheap with age.

And do we think that it will cling to perpetual memory that, while most of the world is secure, a fleeing robber violated one corner? As if indeed, I will not say the Indian or the Assyrian in reverse, but even the Spaniard himself, who suffers the enemy, had begged the Goths and Suebi for peace.

But if those times of Alexander are judged worthy of praise for the courage by which the whole world was gained rather than of detestation for the ruin by which the whole world was overthrown, there will also be found now very many who think these present things praiseworthy, because they conquered much, and count the miseries of others their own happiness.

But someone may say: these are enemies of the Roman world. The answer will be: this too seemed so then to the whole East about Alexander, and the Romans too seemed such to others, when they attacked in wars those unknown to them and living in quiet. But they strove to acquire kingdoms, these to overthrow them. The destructions of an enemy and the judgments of a victor are different things.

For they too first afflicted with wars those whom afterwards they ordered by their laws; and these now disturb as enemies the things which (may God not permit it) if they held them subdued, they would strive to order after their own manner, to be called great kings by posterity, they who are now judged by us most savage enemies.

By whatever name such deeds are reckoned, that is, whether they are called miseries or virtues, both, compared with earlier ones, are smaller in this time; and so both tell in our favour in comparison with Alexander and the Persians: if it is now to be called virtue, the enemies' is smaller; if misery, the Romans' is smaller.

In the 450th year from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Fabius Maximus for the fifth time and Decius Mus for the fourth, four of the bravest and most flourishing peoples of Italy came together in one column and treaty. For the Etruscans, Umbrians, Samnites and Gauls, conspiring in one column, tried to destroy the Romans.

The spirits of the Romans trembled at this war and their confidence was shaken; they did not dare to hope everything from their strength: they divided the enemy by guile, thinking it safer to entangle themselves in more wars than in heavy ones.

So when, by sending some of their men ahead into Umbria and Etruria to ravage the enemy's fields, they had compelled the army of the Umbrians and Etruscans to return to protect their own, they hastened to engage in war with the Samnites and Gauls.

In that war, when the Romans were pressed by the onset of the Gauls, the consul Decius was killed. Fabius, however, after great slaughter of Decius's part, at last conquered.

In that battle forty thousand Samnites or Gauls were slain, and seven thousand Romans are reported to have been lost, from the part of Decius alone, who was killed.

Livy reports that there were, besides the Etruscans and Umbrians whom the Romans by craft called away from the war, 140,330 foot soldiers of the Gauls and Samnites and 47,000 horse, and that a thousand chariot-fighters in arms stood against the Roman battle line.

But (as has often been said, that always either the domestic quiet of the Romans was interrupted by foreign wars or their external successes were weighed down by internal diseases, so that their great spirits might be pressed from every side in every way) a pestilence in the city burdened this bloody and sad victory, and funeral processions of the dead meeting them polluted the triumphal parades. Nor was there anyone to whom joy at the triumph could be urged, when the whole city was sighing either over the sick or over the dead.

The following year came, in which the Romans, the war with the Samnites being renewed, were defeated and fled into their camp.

Afterwards the Samnites, taking on a new appearance and spirit, that is, with silvered arms and clothing, and with minds prepared to die unless they conquered, offered themselves to battle.

The consul Papirius, sent against them with an army, when he was forbidden to engage by the chicken-keeping augurs with their empty conjectures, laughed at them and finished the war as happily as he had steadfastly taken it up.

For in this battle twelve thousand of the enemy are reported slain and three thousand captured. But this victory too, truly praiseworthy, which empty augurs could not hinder, diseases suddenly arising spoiled.

For so great and so unbearable a pestilence then seized the city that, to calm it by any means, they thought the Sibylline books should be consulted, and they brought that horrible Epidaurian serpent along with the very stone of Aesculapius: as though the pestilence had not either been calmed before or arisen after.

Moreover, in the next year from then the consul Fabius Gurges fought badly against the Samnites: for, having lost his army, he fled defeated into the City.

So when the senate was deliberating about removing him, his father Fabius Maximus, begging off his son's disgrace, offered of his own accord to go as legate to his son, if the opportunity of driving off the disgrace and waging war again were given him.

When this was granted and battle was joined, when he saw his son the consul suddenly shut in as he fought, with Pontius, leader of the Samnites, pressing on and the enemy's missiles hostile, the devoted old man rode on horseback into the middle of the column.

Moved by this deed, the Romans threw their whole line in there, until, the enemy army destroyed, they captured Pontius himself, the leader, conquered and overpowered.

In that battle twenty thousand Samnites were slain and four thousand captured with their king; and at last the Samnite war, which had dragged on for forty-nine years with much slaughter of Romans, was ended by the loss of the captured leader.

In the following year war was waged with the Sabines under the consul Curius, in which how many thousands of men were killed and how many captured the consul himself showed: for when he wanted to report in the senate the size of the Sabine land acquired and the multitude of the people captured, he could not set out the number.

In the 463rd year from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Dolabella and Domitius, the Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites too, having made an alliance with the Etruscans and Senonian Gauls, were preparing a revived war against the Romans; the Romans sent envoys to entreat the Gauls.

When the Gauls had killed them, the praetor Caecilius, sent with an army to avenge the death of the envoys and suppress the enemy's uprising, was overwhelmed by the Etruscans and Gauls and perished.

Besides, seven military tribunes were killed in that battle, many nobles slaughtered, and thirteen thousand Roman soldiers laid low in that war.

So every time the Gauls blazed up, Rome was worn down with all its resources, so that under the present raiding of the Goths it ought rather to remember the Gauls.

But now I am called back to unroll what wars the generals of the Macedonians waged among themselves during these same times in which the Romans suffered these things: who, after Alexander's death, having been allotted different provinces, consumed one another in mutual wars.

Their most tumultuous time I seem to myself to watch as though, looking by night from a mountain watchtower at some immense camp, I should see nothing in the great space of the plain except countless fires.

So throughout the whole kingdom of Macedonia, that is, throughout all Asia and most of Europe and the greatest part of Libya, horrible masses of wars suddenly blazed up:

while they especially ravaged the places in which they blazed up, they disturbed all the rest with the terror of rumour, as with the darkness of smoke.

But I shall by no means set out the wars and destructions of such great kings and kingdoms unless I first reveal the kingdoms themselves together with the kings.

So Alexander for twelve years pressed with the sword the world trembling beneath him, but his chief men tore it apart for fourteen years, and like greedy cubs they tore to pieces the rich prey laid low by a great lion, and, provoked to quarrel with one another by rivalry over the prey, broke themselves.

So first Egypt and part of Africa and Arabia fell by lot to Ptolemy. Laomedon of Mytilene received Syria, bordering this province, Philotas Cilicia, Philo the Illyrians.

Atropatus was set over Greater Media, the father-in-law of Perdiccas over the Lesser. The Susian people were assigned to Scynus, Greater Phrygia to Antigonus, son of Philip.

Nearchus was allotted Lycia and Pamphylia, Cassander Caria, Menander Lydia. Leonnatus received Lesser Phrygia.

Thrace and the regions of the Pontic Sea were given to Lysimachus, Cappadocia with Paphlagonia to Eumenes. The supreme command of the camp went to Seleucus, son of Antiochus; Cassander, son of Antipater, was put in charge of the king's bodyguards and attendants.

In farther Bactria and the regions of India the former prefects, who had begun to serve under Alexander, remained. Taxiles held the Seres, set between the two rivers Hydaspes and Indus.

Python, son of Agenor, was sent to the colonies founded among the Indians. Oxyarches received the Parapameni at the edge of Mount Caucasus.

The Arachosians and Gedrosians were assigned to Sibyrtius. Statanor received the Drangians and Arians, Amyntas the Bactrians, Scythaeus the Sogdians, Statanor the Parthians, Philip the Hyrcanians, Phrataphernes the Armenians, Tlepolemus the Persians, Peucestes the Babylonians, Archon the Pelasgians, Archelaus Mesopotamia.

So the cause and origin of the wars was a letter of King Alexander in which he ordered all exiles to be restored to their country and liberty; for the powerful men of the cities of Greece, fearing that the exiles, their liberty recovered, would plan revenge, revolted from the kingdom of the Macedonians.

First the Athenians, gathering an army of thirty thousand and two hundred ships, waged war with Antipater, to whom Greece had fallen by lot; through the orator Demosthenes they also joined Sicyon, Argos, Corinth and the other cities to themselves as allies, and surrounded Antipater with a siege.

There their leader Leosthenes, pierced by a missile thrown from the walls, was killed. The Athenians met Leonnatus, who was bringing help to Antipater, crushed his forces and killed him.

Perdiccas made war on Ariarathes, king of the Cappadocians, and defeated him. In that victory he gained nothing but wounds and dangers, for before the storming of their city all set fire to their houses and burned themselves and all their possessions.

After this war arose between Antigonus and Perdiccas, with many provinces and islands most grievously torn apart on account of help either refused

or given; it was long deliberated whether the war should be carried into Macedonia or waged in Asia: at last Perdiccas himself sought Egypt with a huge army. So Macedonia, its generals running off in two directions, armed itself against its own vitals.

Ptolemy, equipped with the strength of Egypt and the forces of Cyrene, prepared to meet Perdiccas in war. Meanwhile Neoptolemus and Eumenes fought it out with each other in a most bloody battle.

Neoptolemus, defeated, fled to Antipater, and urged him to overwhelm Eumenes unexpectedly; Eumenes, thinking this would happen, caught the ambushers in an ambush.

In that war Polyperchon was killed; Neoptolemus and Eumenes were pierced with mutual wounds, but Neoptolemus died, Eumenes escaped as victor.

Perdiccas, engaging Ptolemy in a most bitter war, lost his forces and was himself also killed. Eumenes, Python, Illyrius and Alcetas, brother of Perdiccas, were declared enemies by the Macedonians, and the war against them was assigned to Antigonus.

So Eumenes and Antigonus, bringing very great forces against each other, clashed. Eumenes, defeated, fled to a very strongly fortified fort, from which he asked by envoys for the help of Antipater, then most powerful: terrified by this news, Antigonus withdrew from the siege.

But not even so did Eumenes have firm hope or sure safety. So, as a last counsel, he asked for help from the Argyraspids, so called from their silvered arms, that is, the soldiers who had served under Alexander:

they, listening disdainfully to their leader in the disposition of the war, were defeated by Antigonus and deprived of their camp, and lost their wives and children and at the same time everything they had acquired under Alexander.

Afterwards they shamefully asked the victor through envoys to return to them what they had lost. Antigonus promised to return it if they would bring Eumenes to him in chains.

So they, enticed by hope of recovery, by a most disgraceful betrayal led their leader, whose standards they had followed a little before, captured and chained, they themselves captives, and soon were dispersed with the foulest ignominy in the army of Antigonus.

Meanwhile Eurydice, wife of Arrhidaeus, king of the Macedonians, did many wicked things in her husband's name through Cassander, whom, having shamefully known him, she had advanced through all the grades of honours to the highest summit; and he, at the woman's lust, afflicted many cities of Greece.

Then Olympias, mother of King Alexander, at Polyperchon's urging, when she came from Epirus into Macedonia with Aeacides, king of the Molossians, escorting her, and was kept from the borders by Eurydice, with the support of the Macedonians ordered King Arrhidaeus and Eurydice to be killed.

But Olympias herself also at once paid the deserved penalty of cruelty: for when with a woman's daring she carried out many murders of leading men, on hearing of Cassander's approach, distrusting the Macedonians, she withdrew with her daughter-in-law Roxane and her grandson Hercules into the city of Pydna:

there she was at once captured and killed by Cassander. The son of Alexander the Great with his mother was sent to the citadel of Amphipolis to be guarded.

When Perdiccas, Alcetas and Polyperchon and the other generals of the opposing party, whom it would be long to recount, had been killed, the wars among Alexander's successors seemed ended,

when Antigonus, burning with desire for domination, pretended that Hercules, the king's son, must be freed from confinement by war.

On learning this Ptolemy and Cassander, entering into alliance with Lysimachus and Seleucus, prepared war strenuously by land and sea. Antigonus with his son Demetrius was defeated in that war.

Cassander, having become Ptolemy's partner in victory, when he was returning to Apollonia, came upon the Avieniatae, who, because of the unbearable multitude of frogs and mice, had left their native soil and ancient dwellings and, emigrating, were seeking new seats, offering peace for the meantime.

But Cassander, recognizing both the courage and the multitude of the people, lest, driven by necessity, they should shake and invade Macedonia with war, received them into alliance and settled them in the farthest borders of Macedonia.

Then, when Hercules, son of Alexander, was already fourteen years old, fearing that all would prefer him as the legitimate king, he secretly had him killed with his mother.

Ptolemy again clashed with Demetrius in a naval battle, and, having lost almost all his fleet and army, fled defeated into Egypt.

Elated by this victory, Antigonus ordered himself to be called king together with his son Demetrius; following this example, all took for themselves the royal name and dignity.

So Ptolemy and Cassander and the other generals of the other faction, when they saw themselves being deceived one by one by Antigonus, encouraging one another by letters, agreed on a time and place to come together and prepared war against Antigonus with common forces.

Cassander, entangled in wars with his neighbours, sent Lysimachus, the most famous general of all, with a huge force on his behalf to help his allies.

Seleucus too, coming down from Greater Asia, joined as a new enemy of Antigonus. For this Seleucus waged very many wars throughout the East among the partners of the Macedonian kingdom.

At the beginning he stormed and took Babylon in war. He subdued the Bactrians rising in new movements.

Then he made a crossing into India, which after Alexander's death, as though the yoke had been pulled and shaken off its neck, had killed his prefects, with a certain Androcottus as leader to vindicate its liberty. He afterwards, acting cruelly against the citizens, himself pressed into slavery those whom he had defended from foreign domination.

So Seleucus, though he had waged many grave wars with this Androcottus, at last, the conditions of the kingdom being settled and peace made, withdrew.

So, the forces of Ptolemy and his allies being united, battle was joined; the more powerful its preparation, the graver its ruin: for in it the strength of almost the whole Macedonian kingdom then fell.

In that very war Antigonus was killed; but the end of this war was the beginning of another: for since the victors did not agree about the plunder, they were again drawn apart into two factions: Seleucus joined Demetrius, Ptolemy Lysimachus;

When Cassander died, his son Philip succeeded. So, as if afresh, new wars of Macedonia were born.

Antipater ran through with his own hand his mother Thessalonice, Cassander's wife, though she was begging pitiably for her life.

His brother Alexander, while preparing war against his brother to avenge their mother, was trapped and killed by Demetrius, whose help he had sought.

Lysimachus, since he was pressed by a most hostile war with Dorus, king of the Thracians, could not fight against Demetrius.

Demetrius, elated by the addition of Greece and all Macedonia, planned to cross into Asia.

But Ptolemy, Seleucus and Lysimachus, having learned in the former contest how great the strength of concord was, made an alliance again, united their armies, and carried the war into Europe against Demetrius.

Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, joined them as companion and ally in the war, hoping that Demetrius could be driven from Macedonia. Nor was the hope vain: for when Demetrius's army had been corrupted and he himself put to flight, Pyrrhus seized the kingdom of Macedonia.

Then Lysimachus killed his son-in-law Antipater, who was plotting against him, and, hating him beyond human custom, killed his own son Agathocles.

In those days the city of Lysimachia was overthrown by a most fearful earthquake and became a cruel tomb for its crushed people.

All his allies deserted Lysimachus, who stained himself with constant murders of kin, and, defecting to Seleucus, urged that king, already inclined by rivalry for the kingdom, to make war on Lysimachus.

It was a most shameful spectacle: two kings, of whom Lysimachus was seventy-four years old and Seleucus seventy-seven, clashing, standing in the battle line, bearing arms, to snatch each other's kingdoms.

This was indeed the last war of Alexander's fellow soldiers, but one that seems to have been kept as an example of human misery:

for though, thirty-four of Alexander's generals being already dead, they alone possessed the world, and, not regarding the very narrow limits of their old age and life, they thought the limits of the whole world narrow for their empire.

In that war Lysimachus, who before this battle had lost or killed fifteen children, was killed last of all. So Lysimachus was the end of the Macedonian struggle.

But not even Seleucus rejoiced in so great a victory unpunished: for neither did he himself, after seventy-seven years, find the rest of a natural death, but ended the life unhappily wrung from him as if by an untimely death:

for at the instigation of Ptolemy, whose sister Lysimachus had had in marriage, he was entrapped and killed.

These are the dealings of kinship and alliance among parents, children, brothers and allies. Of so much weight among them were divine and human religion.

Let them indeed blush at the remembrance of the past, those who now know that by the intervention of Christian faith alone, and with only an oath in between, they live with enemies and do not suffer hostile things;

by whom it is most beyond doubt proved that it is not, as those men did before, that they struck treaties over a slain sow, but that now, between barbarians and Romans, calling their Creator and Lord to witness, they keep with the Gospels brought for the oath so great a faith as then not even nature could keep between parents and children.

Now let the end of the Macedonian war be also the end of the book, especially since from here the wars of Pyrrhus begin and the Punic wars soon follow.

Virgil reports that Aeneas said, when after his own dangers and the shipwrecks of his men he was with difficulty consoling his remaining companions: "Perhaps one day it will please you to remember even these things."

This saying, once aptly framed, always brings back its threefold force with very different effects: past things are held the more pleasing in words the more grievous they are told in deeds, and future things, while they become desirable through weariness of the present, are always believed to be better;

but with the present things themselves no just comparison of miseries can be made in any respect, because these things that are, however small they may be, affect us with much greater trouble than those which, whether past or to come, though they are called great, meanwhile do not exist at all.

As if someone, tickled by fleas at night and made anxious by wakefulness from it, should perhaps remember other wakeful nights, which he once long endured from the most burning fevers: doubtless he would bear the disquiet of these more impatiently than the memory of those.

But although it may seem so to everyone's feelings according to the capacity of the times, will anyone nevertheless be found who, even in that very anxiety, would declare that fleas are worse than fevers? Or would take it more bitterly to lie awake healthy than to have been unable to sleep when about to die?

Since this is so, I somehow grant these delicate and querulous people of ours that they may think grievous, by feeling them, these things by which we are now at times admonished, because it is expedient so; but I do not close my eyes to their asserting that they are graver by comparison.

Just as, if someone coming out in the morning from the softest bed and a most comfortable bedroom should see that the backs of the pools had stiffened with the night's frost and the grass had turned white, and, admonished by the unexpected sight, should say, 'It is cold today,' he would by no means seem to me to be blamed, because he would have spoken either by common usage or by his own feeling.

But if, running back in alarm into his bedroom and covering himself with the bedclothes, or rather hiding in them, he should cry out that the cold was altogether as great as it never was even in the Apennines, when Hannibal, shut in and overwhelmed by snows, lost elephants, horses and the greatest part of his army:

I would not only not bear this man, sickened by childish indulgences, saying such things, but would even drag him from his very bedclothes, witnesses of his idleness, among the people and into public, and, bringing him outdoors, would show him children playing, delighting and sweating in that same frost and from it,

so that wordy triviality, spoiled by delicate nourishment, might be taught that the violence is not in the time but the sluggishness in itself, and in the comparison of things to be judged it might be proved, not that their elders endured small things, but that they themselves are not able to endure even small ones.

This I shall prove more clearly by recalling to their memory the disasters of the past, setting out first, as the order is, the war of Pyrrhus. Its cause and origin was this.

In the 464th year from the founding of the City, the Tarentines, catching sight from their theatre of a Roman fleet that happened to be passing, attacked it as enemies; only five ships scarcely escaped by flight; the rest of the fleet was dragged into port and destroyed; the captains of the ships were slaughtered, all fit for war killed, the rest sold for a price.

At once envoys sent by the Romans to Tarentum to complain of the injuries inflicted were beaten by the same people and brought back injuries increased besides. From these causes a huge war arose.

The Romans, measuring who and how great were the enemies roaring about them, were driven by the last necessity to force even the proletarians into arms, that is, to enrol in the army those who were always exempted in the City for the sake of supplying offspring: since care for offspring is vain unless the present situation is provided for.

So the Roman army with the consul Aemilius rushed into all the territory of the Tarentines, laid everything waste with fire and sword, stormed very many towns, and cruelly avenged the injury insolently received.

At once the Tarentines, supported by very many garrisons of neighbours, were especially strengthened by Pyrrhus, who, because of the greatness of his strength and counsels, transferred to himself the conduct and name of the war.

For, being about to defend Tarentum, a city founded by the Lacedaemonians and akin to Greece, he brought into Italy the whole strength of Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia, and was the first to bring elephants, until that time unseen by the Romans, twenty in number: terrible by land and sea, with men and horses, arms and beasts, and finally by his own strength and wiles,

except that, entrapped by an ambiguous answer of that most empty Delphic spirit and most lying rascal, whom they themselves call a great prophet, he met the outcome of one who had not consulted.

So near Heraclea, a city of Campania, and the river Liris the first battle was joined between King Pyrrhus and the consul Laevinus. The day was spent in a most grievous contest, all on both sides intent on dying, not knowing how to flee.

But when the Romans saw the elephants brought in between the clashing columns, fierce in form, heavy in smell, terrible in bulk, surrounded and terrified by a new kind of fighting, with the horses especially panicking, they scattered in flight.

But after Minucius, first hastatus of the fourth legion, cut off with his sword the trunk a beast stretched out against him, and compelled it, maddened by the pain of the wound, to turn from the battle and rage against its own side, and they began to be disturbed and confused by its unrestrained running about, an end was put to the battle, by the kindness of night as well.

That the Romans were defeated their shameful flight revealed: of them there are said to have fallen then 14,880 foot and 1,310 captured; of horse 246 killed and 802 captured; 22 standards were lost.

For how great a number of Pyrrhus's allies was lost on the other side has not been handed down to memory, chiefly because it is the custom of ancient writers not to record the number of the slain on the side that won, lest the losses of victory stain the

glory of the victory, unless perhaps so few fall that the small number of the lost increases admiration and terror of the courage, as was the case in the first engagement of the Persian war with Alexander the Great: of whose army, among almost four hundred thousand enemies killed, only nine foot soldiers are reported lost.

But Pyrrhus testified to his gods and men the atrocity of the slaughter he had received in this war, fixing an inscription in the temple of Tarentine Jupiter in which he wrote: "Men who before were unconquered, best father of Olympus, these I conquered in battle and was conquered by them."

And when he was reproached by his allies for calling himself conquered when he had conquered, he is said to have replied: "Truly, if I conquer again in the same way, I shall return to Epirus without a single soldier."

Meanwhile the Roman army, after it had fled secretly from the camp defeated, felt the wretched disaster of war increased and heaped up by graver portents.

For foragers who had happened to go out, as though some hostile storm had arisen with a horrible crash of the sky, were seized and burned up by dreadful thunderbolts.

For the same whirlwind laid low thirty-four of them; twenty-two were left half-dead; very many beasts of burden were killed and taken: so that it is rightly reported to have happened not as a sign of future devastation but as the devastation itself.

The second battle between Pyrrhus and the Roman consuls was on the borders of Apulia, where the slaughter of the war fell to both, but especially to Pyrrhus, and the victory to the Romans.

For when for a long time, all rushing stubbornly into mutual slaughter, the outcome of the war hung in doubt, Pyrrhus, wounded with his arm pierced, was the first to leave the battle. But Fabricius the legate was also wounded then.

The elephants, found in the first battle to be capable of being wounded and put to flight, were then goaded by fires placed beneath their hind and soft parts, and, carrying about the burning towers moreover in trembling fury, became the ruin of their own side.

In that battle five thousand Romans were slain, but of the army of Pyrrhus twenty thousand were laid low. Fifty-three of the king's standards were taken, eleven of the Romans' lost.

Pyrrhus, broken by the war, when Agathocles, king of Syracuse, had died, was summoned to the rule of Sicily and went to Syracuse.

But the misery of the Romans ceases with no truces; the interval between wars is consumed by the evils of diseases, and when there is a pause from battle abroad, anger is at work within

from heaven. For in the consulship of Fabius Gurges for the second time and Gaius Genucius Clepsina, a grave pestilence attacked the City and its territory; seizing all, but especially women and cattle, it emptied them of future offspring by killing the young in the womb, and forced abortions were cast out in premature births with danger to the mothers, so that it was believed the succession would fail and the race of living things would cease, the lawful order of life-giving birth being taken away.

Meanwhile the consul Curius met Pyrrhus on his return from Sicily, and this third war against the Epirotes was waged in Lucania, in the Arusinian plains.

So when at the first clash Pyrrhus's soldiers trembled at the Romans' charge and, looking about for flight, were trying to yield the battle, Pyrrhus ordered the elephants to be brought in from the reserves.

The Romans, now used to fighting beasts, had prepared fire-darts wrapped in tow and smeared with pitch, made clinging besides with hooked barbs, and, hurling them aflame onto the backs of the beasts and their towers, without difficulty turned the raging and burning beasts back to the destruction of those whose support they had been.

They say the king had eighty thousand foot in that battle and six thousand horse. Of these thirty-three thousand are reported slain and thirteen hundred captured.

Pyrrhus at last, in the fifth year after he had come, fled from Italy defeated. After many most grievous wars which he waged, he fell in Greece at Argos, a most flourishing city of Achaia, struck by a stone, led astray by greed for the Spartan kingdom.

Then too among the Romans Sextilia, a Vestal Virgin, convicted and condemned of incest, was buried alive at the Colline Gate.

In the 475th year from the founding of the City the Tarentines, learning of Pyrrhus's death, again stirred up new arms against the Romans, and asked for and received help from the Carthaginians through envoys.

Battle was joined and the Romans won; in which the Carthaginians even then, though not yet judged enemies, felt that they could be defeated by the Romans.

In the following year Roman severity cut down a great part of its own vitals.

For long before, when Pyrrhus was approaching, the eighth legion, distrusting Roman hope, dared a new crime: it killed all the people of Rhegium, whom it was guarding as a garrison, and claimed all the plunder and the town itself for itself.

The punishment of this crime against such wicked rebels was ordered to the consul Genucius, who, having besieged the city of Rhegium and captured all, himself exacted fitting punishments from the other deserters and robbers, but sent the Roman soldiers of the whole legion to Rome; by order of the people they were beaten with rods in the middle of the forum and struck with the axe.

Rome seemed to itself then to conquer, when it killed its own whole legion, which would doubtless have been reckoned conquered if it had lost it in battle with an enemy.

In the 478th year from the founding of the City foul and dreadful portents were either seen at Rome or reported. The temple of Salus was broken up by a stroke of lightning; part of the wall beneath the same place was, as they say, struck from heaven.

Three wolves entering the city before dawn brought in a half-eaten corpse and, scattering it limb by limb in the forum, left it, terrified themselves by the noise of men.

At Formiae the walls were burned on every side and broken up by many strokes of lightning.

In the territory of Cales a flame suddenly belched forth from a split chasm of the earth, seething terribly for three days and three nights, and scorched five iugera of land to ash, its fertile sap wholly drained, so that it is reported to have consumed not only crops but even trees with their deepest roots.

In the following year the consul Sempronius led an army against the Picentes. And when both lines, drawn up, had halted within a spear's throw, suddenly the earth shook with so horrible a crash that both columns, terrified by the astonishment of the marvel, were stunned.

For a long time the astonished peoples on both sides hesitated, with an awareness that their undertaking had been prejudged; at last, with a swift charge, they entered the battle.

That war was so sad that it may rightly be said that the earth, about to receive so much human blood, then trembled with a horrible groan. The Romans, very few of whom escaped in that battle, conquered.

In the 480th year from the founding of the City, among many portents, blood was seen to flow from the earth and milk from the sky. For in very many places gore welled up from springs and flowed, and from the clouds, milk coming down drop by drop like rain, dreadful showers, as it seemed to them, watered the earth.

At that time the Carthaginians, having given help to the Tarentines against the Romans, when they were rebuked by the senate through envoys, heaped upon the most shameful stain of a broken treaty a perjury committed in advance. Then too the Volsinians, most flourishing of the Etruscans, almost perished from luxury.

For when, licence having been extended into custom, they freed their slaves indiscriminately, admitted them to banquets and honoured them with marriages,

the freedmen, received into a share of power, planned to seize its fullness by crime; and, freed from the yoke of slavery, they burned with ambition for domination; and those whom, as subjects, they had loved with equanimity as masters, now as free men they cursed because they remembered they had been their masters.

So the freedmen, conspiring in crime (so great was their band that they gained their daring without contest), seized the city and claimed it for their kind alone, usurped by crime the estates and wives of their masters, and drove the masters far off as exiles; and these wretched men, exiles and destitute, were brought to Rome, where, having displayed their misery and wept their complaint, they were both avenged and restored through Roman severity.

In the 481st year from the founding of the City a huge pestilence blazed up at Rome, whose atrocity I am content to indicate, because I cannot fill it out in words.

For if the length of time it lasted is asked, it stretched on ravaging for more than two years; if the depopulation it caused, a census was ordered to inquire not how many men had perished but how many had survived; if the violence with which it struck, the Sibylline books are witnesses, which answered that it had been imposed by heavenly anger.

But lest it offend anyone, as a temptation to quibbling, that when the Sibyl said the gods were angry we seem to have said heavenly anger, let him hear and understand that these things, even if they are mostly done through aerial powers, are nevertheless not done at all without the judgment of almighty God.

At the same time Caparronia, a Vestal Virgin, accused of incest, died by hanging; her seducer and the slaves privy to it were punished.

See how many and how great things we enumerate as having happened continuously, very many in single years, in which rarely or almost never was nothing sad done; and this although the same writers, having set themselves rather the task of praising, avoided the multitude of miseries,

lest they offend those for whom and about whom these things were written, and seem to terrify rather than instruct their hearers by examples from the past.

Moreover, we, placed at the last of the times, cannot know the evils of the Romans except through those who praised the Romans.

From this it may be understood how great were the things deliberately suppressed because of their horror, when such great things are found that could slip out faintly amid the praises.

And since from here the Punic wars follow, the matter itself requires that a few things be told about Carthage, which is found to have been founded by Elissa seventy-two years before the city of Rome, and about its disasters and domestic evils, as Pompeius Trogus and Justin set them out.

The Carthaginians always had discord among themselves as a native and internal evil; through its unhappy agitation they never spent any times either prosperous abroad or quiet at home.

But when, among other evils, they were also labouring with pestilence, they used murders as remedies: for they sacrificed men as victims and brought to the altars children under the age of puberty, an age which would rouse the pity even of enemies.

About this kind of sacred rites, or rather sacrileges, I do not find what most to discuss. For if some demons dared to command rites of this kind, that the deaths of men should be satisfied by the slaughter of men, it should have been understood that they were hiring themselves as workmen and helpers of the pestilence, so that they themselves killed those whom it had not seized:

for it is the custom to offer sound and uncorrupted victims, so that they did not calm the diseases but anticipated them.

So the Carthaginians, the gods being turned away because of sacred rites of this kind (as Pompeius Trogus and Justin acknowledge; but, as is established among us, because of their own presumption and impiety, God being angry),

when they had long fought unhappily in Sicily, the war transferred to Sardinia, were again defeated more unhappily still. For this reason they ordered their general Mazeus and the few soldiers who had survived into exile. The exiles, seeking pardon through envoys and repulsed, surrounded their country with war and siege.

There Mazeus, leader of the exiles, hanged his son Carthalo, a priest of Hercules, on a cross before the eyes of his country, just as he was, with his purple and fillets, because he had come to meet him clad in purple as though insulting him.

After a few days he took the city itself; and when, having killed very many of the senators, he was ruling bloodily, he was killed. These things were done in the times of Cyrus, king of the Persians.

After this Himilco, king of the Carthaginians, while waging war in Sicily, suddenly lost his army to a horrible plague. Nor was there delay:

with the people falling in crowds from the diseases, each was quickly seized, soon dead, and no longer buried; when the news of this evil had filled Carthage, stunned by sudden grief, the city was thrown into turmoil no differently than if it had been captured.

everything resounded with wailing, doors were shut everywhere, all public and private duties were abandoned; all ran down to the harbour and questioned the few who had survived the disaster, as they came off the ships, about their own people.

After the wretched people understood about the disaster of their own, while those men were silent or groaning, then along the whole shore the voices of mourners, then the shrieks and tearful complaints of unhappy mothers were heard.

Amid this the general himself came forth from his ship, ungirt, in a dirty slave's tunic; at the sight of him the mourning columns joined together; he too, stretching his hands to heaven, accused and bewailed now his own, now the public misfortune;

at last, crying out through the city, he finally entered his house, dismissed with a last address all who followed him weeping, and then, the doors barred and even his sons shut out, ended his grief and his life with the sword. These things were done in the times of Darius.

After this Hanno, a certain Carthaginian who surpassed the strength of the commonwealth with his private wealth, conceived the desire to seize domination. He thought it a useful plan, under pretence of the marriage of his only daughter, to kill with poison over their cups all the senators whose dignity he judged would stand in the way of his undertakings.

This plan, betrayed by servants, was avoided without punishment, lest in the case of a powerful man the thing known should cause more trouble than the thing planned. Foiled in this plan, Hanno prepared to attempt the crime by another device: he stirred up the slaves, with whom he might suddenly overwhelm the unwary city.

But when he understood that he had been betrayed and forestalled before the day fixed for the slaughter, he seized a certain fort with twenty thousand armed slaves.

There, while he was stirring up the Africans and the king of the Moors, he was captured, and first beaten with rods, then, his eyes gouged out and his hands and legs broken, as though punishment were exacted from each limb separately, he was killed in sight of the people.

His body, torn by blows, was fixed to a cross; his sons and all his kin were handed over to punishment, lest anyone of the same family should ever think of imitating or avenging him. These things were done in the times of Philip.

After this the Carthaginians, when they learned that the city of Tyre, the source of their origin, had been captured and overthrown by Alexander the Great, fearing that he would cross into Africa, sent a certain Hamilcar, surnamed Rhodanus, a man outstanding for eloquence and shrewdness, to search out the doings of Alexander.

He was received through Parmenio as a deserter, then admitted into the king's army, and reported everything to his fellow citizens by tablets written and then covered over with wax. When he returned to Carthage after Alexander's death, they killed him, as though he had sold the city to the king, not only with an ungrateful spirit but even with cruel envy.

Then, when they were waging constant and never prosperous enough wars against the Sicilians and had surrounded with a siege Syracuse, then the most flourishing city of Sicily, they were outwitted by the wonderful ingenuity of Agathocles, king of Sicily, and brought to the extremes of despair.

For Agathocles, when he was besieged at Syracuse by the Carthaginians and saw himself neither equal in war in the equipment of his forces nor able to endure a siege by the sufficiency of his pay, with a plan well foreseen and better concealed crossed into Africa with his army. There he revealed to his men what he was undertaking and then taught them what had to be done.

At once, with one mind, they first burned the ships in which they had come, so that there would be no hope of fleeing back; then, while he laid low everything toward which he turned and burned villas and forts, he was met by a certain Hanno with thirty thousand Carthaginians. He killed him with two thousand of his men; he himself lost only two in that war.

By this battle, the spirits of the Africans being incredibly broken and those of his men immensely increased, he stormed cities and forts, drove off huge plunder and slaughtered many thousands of the enemy.

Then he pitched camp at the fifth milestone from Carthage, so that they might watch from the walls of the city itself the losses of their richest possessions, the devastation of the fields and the burning of the villas.

A sadder report was added to the present evils. For it was announced that in Sicily too the army of the Africans had been destroyed with its general, which Andro, brother of Agathocles, had in fact overwhelmed when it was unwary and almost idle.

When this rumour spread through all Africa, not only the tributary cities but even allied kings revolted from them. Among them the king of Cyrene too, Ophellas, made a pact with Agathocles for partnership in the war, while he ardently aspired to the kingdom of Africa.

But after they had joined their armies and camps into one, he was entrapped by Agathocles with flatteries and plots and killed.

The Carthaginians, gathering forces from every side, blazed into war. Agathocles, having with him the forces of Ophellas, engaged them and overcame them with much blood of both armies and in a heavy battle.

By the crisis of this contest so great a despair was brought on the Carthaginians that, had not a mutiny arisen in Agathocles' army, Hamilcar, general of the Carthaginians, would have deserted to him with his army. For this offence, by order of the Carthaginians, he was fixed to a gibbet in the middle of the forum and offered a cruel spectacle to his people.

Then, when after the death of Agathocles the Carthaginians were laying Sicily waste with a fleet prepared, they were often overcome in land and sea battles by Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, summoned from Italy, and at last turned to the Roman wars.

Oh the pain! Do those who complain of recent things read these things about the ancients? Indeed they read them, and judge them not with fairness but with rivalry.

For they are stung by that very great and unspeakable goad, which they themselves do not perceive, not because of bad times but because of Christian times; and it is the outflow of an envious sore, that whatever is done under what is execrated seems more atrocious:

just as among us too it is often seen by the eyes of enemies that those whom they execrate do nothing in word or deed that is not depraved, nothing not underhand, nothing not to their injury; and this quite simply, for envy so warps the captured heart that it does not see what is by nature straight;

of whose number these are, but much more wretched, because they are enemies of God and consequently enemies of the truth (about whom we say these things weeping, and whom we reprove mercifully, if they will allow it, so as to heal

them), who see these things with a diseased eye, and therefore the things they see seem double to them, and, confused by the darkness of wickedness, they fall into this, that by seeing less they see more, while yet they cannot see what is as it is;

who think the scourges of a father heavier than the fires of an enemy; who call God, who coaxes, admonishes and redeems, harsher than the devil, who persecutes, dominates and slaughters;

although, if they understood it of a father, they would rejoice at the chastisement, and if the fruit of the training were foreseen, the discipline would be tolerable; and because of the hope which is now given to the nations, but before had not been, they would count things lighter, even if they suffered heavier ones.

Although they can learn contempt for miseries even from their own, among whom the greatest evils were esteemed the greatest goods, so long as they attained a celebrated and illustrious glory of fame:

from whom it may be inferred how much we, to whom a blessed eternity is promised, ought to endure for life, when they could endure so much for fame.

In the 483rd year from the founding of the City, that is, in the consulship of Appius Claudius and Quintus Fabius, the Romans sent help to the Mamertines, whose city was Messana, a noble city of Sicily, against Hiero, king of Syracuse, and the forces of the Carthaginians joined to Hiero: they sent the consul Appius Claudius with an army.

He so quickly overcame the Syracusans and Carthaginians that the king himself too, terrified by the greatness of events, declared that he had been conquered before he engaged:

and he, his strength thereafter broken and his confidence lost, when he begged for peace as a suppliant, received it, fined two hundred talents of silver by order of the consuls.

The consuls surrounded Agrigentum, a city of Sicily, and the Carthaginian garrisons there with siege works and a rampart.

And when Hannibal the elder, general of the Carthaginians, shut in by that siege, had been reduced to extreme want, Hanno, a new general of the Carthaginians, with fifteen hundred horse and thirty thousand foot and also thirty elephants, intervened unexpectedly and put off the storming of the city for a little.

But the city was soon taken. The Carthaginians were defeated and routed in a very great battle, eleven elephants brought into Roman power, and the people of Agrigentum all sold at auction; Hannibal the elder escaped with a few by a sally.

In the consulship of Gnaeus Cornelius Asina and Gaius Duilius, when Hannibal the elder was ravaging the coast of Italy with a fleet of seventy ships prepared, the Romans too ordered a fleet to be built and equipped.

The consul Duilius quickly accomplished this; for within sixty days after the trees had been cut, a fleet of a hundred and thirty ships was launched and stood at anchor.

Cornelius Asina, the other consul, went with sixteen ships to the island of Lipara; there, called out by Hannibal as if to a conference on peace, he was taken by Punic fraud and killed in chains.

When Duilius, the other consul, heard this, he set out with thirty ships against Hannibal. When the naval battle was joined, Hannibal, having lost the ship in which he sailed, escaped in a skiff; thirty-one of his ships were captured, thirteen sunk, three thousand men are reported killed, seven thousand captured.

Afterwards, in the consulship of Gaius Aquilius Florus and Lucius Cornelius Scipio, the Carthaginians put Hanno, appointed in place of Hannibal, in command of a naval battle to defend the Sardinians and Corsicans; defeated by the consul Scipio, having lost his army, he threw himself among the densest enemies and was killed there.

In the same year three thousand slaves and four thousand naval allies conspired to destroy the city of Rome, and, had not an early betrayal forestalled the plan, the city, left without a garrison, would have perished by the hand of slaves.

In the year next to this, the consul Calatinus, making for Camarina, a city of Sicily, rashly led his army into narrows which the Carthaginian forces had long since blocked.

When he had no means at all either of resisting or escaping, he was freed by the courage and effort of Calpurnius Flamma, who with a chosen band of three hundred men seized a hill occupied by the enemy and turned all the Carthaginians on himself by fighting, until the Roman army passed through the besieged narrows with the enemy not pressing.

All three hundred were killed in that battle; Calpurnius alone, though pierced with many wounds and covered with corpses, escaped.

Hannibal the elder, put in command of the fleet again by the Carthaginians, engaged the Romans unhappily in a naval battle and was defeated; a mutiny arising in his army, he was covered with stones and died.

The consul Atilius ranged over and overthrew Lipara and Melita, noble islands of Sicily.

The consuls, ordered to carry the war into Africa, made for Sicily with three hundred and thirty ships; Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general, and Hanno, commander of the fleet, met them. When a naval battle was joined the Carthaginians were put to flight and lost sixty-four ships.

The victorious consuls crossed into Africa and first of all received the city of Clupea in surrender.

Then, making for Carthage, they ravaged three hundred forts or more and carried hostile standards around Carthage.

The consul Manlius, leaving Africa with the victorious fleet, brought back to Rome twenty-seven thousand captives with huge spoils.

Regulus, allotted the Carthaginian war, while marching with his army, pitched camp not far from the river Bagradas: there, when a serpent of wonderful size was devouring very many of the soldiers who went down to the river out of the need for water, Regulus set out with his army to attack the beast.

But when javelins availed nothing on its back and every stroke of missiles was in vain, for they slid off the horrid lattice of its scales as off a slanting tortoise of shields and were in a wonderful way driven back by the body itself so as not to harm the body, and when moreover he saw a great multitude crushed by its bite, trampled by its rush, and even killed by its pestilent breath, he ordered ballistas to be brought, by which a millstone struck against its spine broke the structure of its whole body.

For such is the nature of the serpent that, though it seems to lack feet, it is so equipped with ribs and scales, which it has arranged in like fashion from the top of its throat to the bottom of its belly, that it supports itself on the scales as on claws and on the ribs as on legs.

For it does not, like a worm, which has no rigid spine, unfold its motion in a straight line by stretching forward the contracted parts of its little body step by step and contracting the stretched ones; but with alternate efforts it carries its winding sides around, so that along the outer curve of its spine it stretches the stiff edge of its ribs, and on the ribs, by nature set upright, it fixes the claws of its scales; and by doing this alternately and quickly, it not only glides over flat ground but also climbs slopes, equipped with as many footholds as ribs.

The reason for this, then, is that if it is struck by some blow in any part of its body from belly to head, it is weakened and cannot move; because wherever that blow falls it breaks the spine, through which the feet of the ribs and the movements of the body were worked. Hence too this serpent, which had so long resisted so many javelins, invulnerable, gave way, weakened, at the blow of one stone, and soon, surrounded by missiles, was easily overcome.

Its skin, brought to Rome, which they say was a hundred and twenty feet long, was for some time a wonder to all.

Regulus waged a most fierce war against three generals, that is, the two Hasdrubals and Hamilcar summoned from Sicily, in which seventeen thousand Carthaginians were slain, five thousand captured, eighteen elephants led off, and eighty-two towns surrendered to the Romans.

The Carthaginians, broken by wars and drained by disasters, asked Regulus for peace. But when they heard the unbearable and harsh conditions of peace, thinking it safer to die armed than to live wretched, they decided to hire not only the help of the Spaniards and Gauls, which they had long had in great numbers, but also of the Greeks.

So they summoned Xanthippus, king of the Lacedaemonians, with auxiliaries and put him in command of the war. Xanthippus, having inspected the Carthaginian forces and led them out onto the plain, with their equipment far changed for the better, joined battle with the Romans.

There was a huge ruin of Roman strength there: for thirty thousand Roman soldiers were laid low in that engagement. Regulus, that noble general, was captured with five hundred men, thrown into chains, and in the tenth year of the Punic war at last provided the Carthaginians with a notable triumph.

Xanthippus, aware of so daring a deed and fearing the change of unstable things, at once left Africa for Greece.

So the consuls Aemilius Paulus and Fulvius Nobilior, hearing of the capture of Regulus and the disaster of the Roman army, ordered to cross into Africa with a fleet of three hundred ships, made for Clupea. The Carthaginians came there at once with an equal fleet; nor could the naval battle be put off.

A hundred and four ships of the Carthaginians were sunk, thirty captured with their fighting men, and besides thirty-five thousand of their soldiers were killed; of the Romans, nine ships being sunk, eleven hundred soldiers perished. The consuls pitched camp at Clupea.

Two Hannos, generals of the Carthaginians, again came there with a great army, and when battle was joined they lost nine thousand soldiers.

But (as then among the Romans there was never lasting good fortune, and whatever successes they had were at once overwhelmed by great masses of evils) when the Roman fleet was returning to Italy laden with plunder, it was overturned by an unspeakable shipwreck: for of three hundred ships two hundred and twenty perished; eighty were barely saved by throwing their cargo overboard.

Hamilcar, general of the Carthaginians, sent with an army into Numidia and Mauretania, after acting as an enemy and bloodily against all, because they were said to have welcomed Regulus gladly, condemned the rest to pay a thousand talents of silver and twenty thousand oxen; but the leading men of all the peoples he fixed to gibbets.

In the third year (as untamed fury always quickly forgets dangers) the consuls Servilius Caepio and Sempronius Blaesus crossed into Africa with two hundred and sixty ships, ravaged the whole coast that lies around the Syrtes, and, advancing inland, took and overthrew very many cities and carried huge plunder to the fleet.

Then, as they were returning to Italy, near the promontory of Palinurus, which runs out from the Lucanian mountains into the deep, they were dashed on the rocks and unhappily lost a hundred and fifty transport ships and the noble plunder cruelly acquired.

At length among the Romans the enormity of miseries overcame their most wicked greed: for the fathers, now weary of naval affairs, decreed that no fleet of more than sixty ships should be kept for the defence of Italy; which decree, driven by untamed greed, they at once broke.

Besides, the consul Cotta crossed into Sicily and fought in very many battles against the Carthaginians and Sicilians by land and sea, and left throughout all Sicily unburied heaps of slain, partly of enemies, partly even of allies.

In the consulship of Lucius Caecilius Metellus and Gaius Furius Placidus, Hasdrubal, the new general of the Carthaginians, came from Africa to Lilybaeum with a hundred and thirty elephants and more than thirty thousand horse and foot, and at once joined battle with the consul Metellus near Panormus.

But Metellus, fearing the great force of the beasts, using great counsel first drove them either to flight or to death, and so easily overcame the enemy's force, however great: twenty thousand Carthaginians were slain in that battle; twenty-six elephants too were killed, and a hundred and four captured, which, led through Italy, offered a very great spectacle to the Italian peoples. Hasdrubal fled with a few to Lilybaeum and in his absence was condemned to death by the Carthaginians.

After this the Carthaginians, weary of so many evils, decreed that peace must be sought from the Romans. For this purpose they thought Atilius Regulus, formerly a Roman general, whom they had been holding captive for five years, should be sent especially among the other envoys: when he returned from Italy, peace not obtained, they cut off his eyelids, bound him in a machine, and killed him by keeping him awake.

Then the other Atilius Regulus and Manlius Vulso, both consuls for the second time, set out for Lilybaeum with a fleet of two hundred ships and four legions: when the Romans tried to besiege that town, set on a promontory, they were defeated by Hannibal, who was the son of Hamilcar, coming upon them, and, having lost the greater part of their army, they themselves barely escaped.

After these the consul Claudius set out against the enemy with a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships to the harbour of Drepana; there he was soon met by the Carthaginian fleet and overcome. He himself fled with thirty ships to the camp at Lilybaeum; all the rest, that is, ninety, were either captured or sunk; eight thousand soldiers are reported slain, twenty thousand captured. Gaius Junius too, Claudius's colleague, lost his whole fleet by shipwreck.

In the following year too the Carthaginian fleet crossed into Italy and laid waste very many parts of it far and wide.

Meanwhile Lutatius, crossing into Sicily with a fleet of three hundred ships, while he was stirring battle among the foremost at the city of Drepana, was pierced through the thigh and rescued with great difficulty when he was already being overwhelmed.

Moreover, the Carthaginians hastened to Sicily with four hundred ships and great forces under Hanno as leader. Nor was Lutatius slower; indeed he forestalled the plans of the Carthaginians with wonderful speed. After the fleets of both had stood very near each other at the Aegates islands all night, with their anchors almost interwoven, at daybreak Lutatius first gave the signal for battle.

As the fight grew fierce Hanno, defeated, turned his ship and was the first leader of the flight. A considerable part of his army made for Africa with him, others fled to Lilybaeum; sixty-three Carthaginian ships were captured, a hundred and twenty-five sunk, thirty-two thousand men captured and fourteen thousand slain; but of the Romans twelve ships were sunk.

Lutatius then came to the city of Eryx, which the Carthaginians held, and there, joining battle, killed two thousand Carthaginians.

Then the Carthaginians in headlong haste sent to the consul Lutatius and then to Rome: they begged for peace, which they at once obtained on the conditions proposed before.

The conditions were that they should leave Sicily and Sardinia and, for the costs of the war, pay three thousand Euboic talents of pure silver in equal instalments over twenty years.

This peace was made after the twenty-third year from when the First Punic War had begun.

Who, I ask, could set out in speech one war of two cities waged for twenty-three years, how many kings of the Carthaginians, how many consuls of the Romans, how many columns of armies, what number of ships it brought together, routed and crushed? And only then, if those things seem fully weighed, let judgment be passed on the present.

In the 507th year from the founding of the City a sudden overthrow of Rome itself forestalled the triumph of the Romans; for I may say without rashness that never did even a moderate joy come upon Rome without a very grievous mourning suddenly crushing it. For in the consulship of Quintus