Indeed all these things were fulfilled in our day, when we beheld with our very eyes the houses of prayer cast down from their height to the very foundations, and the inspired and sacred Scriptures committed to the fire in the midst of the market-places, and the shepherds of the churches shamefully hiding themselves here and there, while others were ignominiously seized and made a mockery by their enemies; when also, according to another prophetic word, contempt was poured out upon rulers, and He caused them to wander in a trackless waste, and in no way.
But it is not our part to describe their gloomy misfortunes at the last, even as it is not fitting for us to hand down to memory their dissensions toward one another and their unseemly deeds before the persecution. Wherefore we have resolved to record nothing more about them than that whereby we might justify the divine judgement.
Accordingly we were not led to make mention even of those who were tried by the persecution, or who made utter shipwreck of their salvation, and by their own will were cast into the depths of the surging billows; but we shall add to the general history only those things which may be of profit, first to ourselves, and then also to those who come after us. Let us therefore proceed from this point, describing in summary the sacred conflicts of the martyrs of the word of God.
This was the nineteenth year of the reign of Diocletian, in the month Dystrus—which the Romans would call March—in which, as the festival of the Saviour's Passion was drawing near, imperial letters were everywhere spread abroad, commanding that the churches be levelled to the ground and the Scriptures be made to vanish by fire, and proclaiming that those who held office should be deprived of honour, while those in households, if they persisted in the profession of Christianity, should be deprived of their liberty.
Such, then, was the first edict against us. But not long afterwards, other letters arrived, and in them the order was given that the presidents of the churches in every place should all first be committed to bonds, and then afterwards be compelled by every device to sacrifice.