History Against the Pagans 1 part 10/24

For the Tiber, swollen by unusual rains and overflowing beyond expectation both in duration and in magnitude, destroyed all the buildings of Rome that were set on level ground. Places of diverse character came together to one common ruin, since both what the slower flood-water held, it loosened by soaking, and what it found wanting in its torrent, it overthrew by its battering. A heavier devastation of fire followed the most grievous disaster of the waters; this fire—it is uncertain whence it arose—ranged over very many parts of the City, and not only wrought a pitiable destruction of men and houses, but also consumed in a single conflagration as much wealth as very many even foreign victories could not bestow.

Then, when it was ravaging everything around the forum, it seized upon the temple of Vesta, and—since not even the gods were coming to its aid—a momentary fire overpowered that fire which was thought to be eternal; whence Metellus too, while snatching away the gods that were about to burn, barely escaped, half-scorched in the arm. In the consulship of Titus Sempronius Gracchus and Gaius Valerius Falto, the Romans made war on the Falisci, and in that battle fifteen thousand of the Falisci were slain. In the same year the Cisalpine Gauls arose as new enemies; against them the war was waged with varied fortune; for in the first clash, under the consul Valerius, three thousand five hundred Romans fell; in the second, fourteen thousand Gauls were slain and two thousand captured, but on account of the earlier disaster a triumph was denied the consul. In the consulship of

Titus Manlius Torquatus and Gaius Atilius Bubulcus the island of Sardinia rebelled at the instigation of the Carthaginians. Whereupon the Sardinians were soon subdued and crushed; and against the Carthaginians, as violators of the peace which they themselves had sought, it was decreed to make war. On the contrary, the Carthaginians humbly begged for peace; and when, having sent envoys twice, they had accomplished nothing, and afterward, even with ten of their leaders likewise twice supplicating, did not obtain it, at last they earned it by the speech of Hanno, the least of men among their envoys. In this year the gate of Janus Geminus was closed, because in that same year there was war nowhere;

which had happened only under King Numa Pompilius. About this, then, we must be silent, and it is expedient to pass over in silence those times with which our own can in no way be compared, lest by this clamor we rouse the detractors of the days of their own life to insult us the more. Behold, the gates of Janus were shut, there was no war of the Romans abroad, and Rome, holding all her offspring resting in her bosom, did not sigh. And when was this? After the First Punic War; after how long a time? After four hundred and forty years; for how long? For one single year; and what followed in the next? To say nothing of the rest, the Gallic war and Hannibal with the Second Punic War.

Alas for me—how it even shames me to have learned and laid bare these things!—was that peace of a single year, or rather the shadow of a peace, a soothing of miseries or an incitement to evils? Did that drop of oil, falling into the midst of a great flame, extinguish the fuel of so great a fire, or feed it? Did a little cold water, drunk amid the most burning fevers, heal the sick man, or rather inflame him? For nearly seven hundred years—that is, from Tullus Hostilius down to Caesar Augustus—in one summer only did the Roman vitals not sweat blood; and among the very many ages of great centuries the wretched city—truly a wretched mother—scarcely at one single moment rested from the fear of mournings, not to say from the mournings themselves.

If any man had had so little rest in his life as this, would he even be said to have lived? Or, if anyone were driven the whole year long by pains and torments, but in the middle span of that very year passed only one single day tranquil and without struggles, would he from that receive any relief of his evils, and not rather reckon the whole year to miseries? 'But,' someone says, 'they set down this year as a glorious sign of untiring virtue.' Would that they had rather passed it over in forgetfulness of their continual calamity!

For just as in the human body leprosy is recognized only if, here and there among the sound parts of the skin, a different color appears, but if it so spreads itself everywhere that it makes all of one color, however counterfeit, that distinction is lost: so, if continuous toil had flowed on with equal endurance, without any longing to draw breath again, it would have been called a fixed bent of the will and a chosen habit.

But since upon this tiny bit of leisure both the joys of the elders and the eagerness of the younger so greatly recline, it is surely made plain both what pleasantness this brevity had and what bitterness that long duration had—that is, both how welcome that rest would have been had it lasted long, and how much this ceaseless misery was to be shunned, if it could in any way have been shunned. In the year 517 from the founding of the City, Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general, was killed in war by the Spaniards, while he was secretly preparing another war against the Romans. In the following year the Roman envoys were killed by the Illyrians. Afterward a most savage war was waged with those same Illyrians:

in which, after many towns and peoples had been destroyed, the rest surrendered themselves in the consulship of Fulvius and Postumius. In the third year following, the ill-empowered pontiffs defiled the wretched city with sacrilegious sacrifices; for the decemvirs, going beyond the custom of ancient superstition, buried alive a Gaulish man and a Gaulish woman, together with a Greek woman, in the cattle-market. But this magical binding was straightway turned to the contrary; for those dire deaths of foreigners which they had wrought, they expiated with the most foul slaughters of their own people. Indeed, in the consulship of Lucius Aemilius and Gaius

Atilius Regulus being consuls, the senate was thrown into great dread by the defection of Cisalpine Gaul, since it was reported that even from Further Gaul a huge army was approaching, especially of the Gaesatae—a name not of a nation but of mercenary Gauls. And so the alarmed consuls drew together the forces of all Italy for the protection of the empire. When this had been done, eight hundred thousand armed men are reported to have been in the armies of both consuls, as Fabius the historian, who took part in that very war, wrote. Of these, the Romans and Campanians numbered two hundred ninety-nine thousand two hundred infantry, and twenty-six thousand six hundred cavalry; the rest of the multitude was of allies. When battle was joined at Arretium, the consul Atilius was killed:

the eight hundred thousand Romans—their own loss not even so great as ought to have terrified them—fled after a part of them had been slain: for the historians record that three thousand of them were then killed. And this is the more ignominious and shameful, that so great hosts scattered when so few had been lost, because they thereby betrayed that in their other victories they had prevailed not by strength of spirit but by the chances of war. For who, I ask, would believe that this number was even present in the Roman army, not to say that it fled? After this a second battle was fought with the Gauls, in which a full forty thousand Gauls were slaughtered. In the following year the consuls Manlius Torquatus and Fulvius Flaccus were the first to lead the Roman legions across the Po.

There a battle was fought with the Insubrian Gauls, of whom twenty-three thousand were slain and five thousand captured. Then in the year next to this, dire portents terrified the wretched City—wretched indeed, since on one side it was frightened by the roaring of enemies, on the other by the wickedness of demons; for in Picenum a river flowed with blood, and among the Tuscans the sky was seen to burn, and at Ariminum a clear light shone forth deep in the night, and three moons appeared, risen in separate regions of the sky. Then too, by a great earthquake, the islands of Caria and Rhodes were so shaken that, as roofs everywhere were collapsing, that huge Colossus also fell.

In the same year the consul Flaminius, despising the auspices by which he was forbidden to fight, clashed with the Gauls and conquered. In that war nine thousand Gauls were slain and seventeen thousand captured. After this the consul Claudius destroyed thirty thousand of the Gaesatae, where he himself, having advanced into the front line, killed King Virdomarus; and among the many towns of the Insubres, whom he had forced to surrender, he also took Mediolanum, a most flourishing city. Then the Histri were stirred up as new enemies, whom the consuls Cornelius and Minucius subdued, with much Roman blood indeed. Here for a little there emerges that ancient Roman appetite for wicked praise, even from acts of parricide.

For Fabius Censorinus killed his own son Fabius Buteo, accused of theft—a deed worthy, forsooth, which a father should think ought to be punished even by parricide, though not even the laws decreed against any man anything more than a fine of money or, at most, exile. In the year 534 from the founding of the City, Hannibal, the Carthaginian commander, destroyed Saguntum—a most flourishing city of Spain, a friend of the Roman people—first assailed by war, then encircled by siege and tormented by famine, bravely enduring all things both worthy and unworthy out of regard for the faith they had pledged to the Romans—only in the eighth month. The Roman envoys sent to him he most insultingly even kept from his sight.

Thereafter, out of hatred of the Roman name—a hatred which, when he was nine years old, he had most faithfully sworn before the altars to his father Hamilcar (though otherwise he was most faithless)—in the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Publius Sempronius Longus, he crossed the Pyrenees mountains, opened a way by the sword among the fiercest peoples of the Gauls, and on the ninth day at last came from the Pyrenees to the Alps; there, while he overcame in war the mountain Gauls striving to repel him from the ascent, and cleft the trackless crags with fire and steel, after lingering four days, on the fifth day at last, with the utmost toil, he reached the plains. They reckon that his army then numbered a hundred thousand infantry and twenty thousand cavalry.

The consul Scipio was the first to meet Hannibal, and when battle was joined at the Ticinus, being himself gravely wounded, he was delivered from death itself through his son Scipio—still wearing the boy's bordered toga, who was afterward surnamed Africanus—and so escaped. Nearly the whole Roman army was cut down there. Then, under the same consul, battle was fought at the river Trebia, and again the Romans were overcome with equal disaster. The consul Sempronius, having learned of his colleague's misfortune, returned with his army from Sicily; he likewise, engaging at the same river and losing his army, escaped almost alone. Yet in that battle Hannibal too was wounded. He afterward, when in early spring he was crossing into Etruria, was caught by a storm on the heights of the Apennines, and for two whole days lay immovable with his

army lay motionless, hemmed in and laden with snows, and grew stiff with cold. There a great number of men, very many beasts of burden, and nearly all the elephants perished from the bitterness of the cold. But meanwhile the other Scipio, brother of the consul Scipio, waged very many wars in Spain, and also conquered and captured Mago, a Carthaginian general, in battle. Then too the Romans were terrified by dire portents. For the orb of the sun seemed to grow smaller, and at Arpi shields were seen in the sky; the sun too seemed to fight with the moon; at Capena two moons rose in the daytime; in Sardinia two shields sweated blood; among the Falisci the sky seemed to be split as by a great gaping cleft; and at Antium, as men were reaping, bloody ears of grain fell into the basket.

Therefore Hannibal, knowing that the consul Flaminius was alone in his camp, set out at the very beginning of spring so that he might the more swiftly overwhelm him while unprepared, and he seized the nearer but marshy road. And since by chance the Sarnus, overflowing far and wide, had left the fields sodden and dissolved into mire — of which it has been said: 'and the Sarnus that waters the plains' — Hannibal, advancing into these with his army, lost a great part of his allies and pack-animals, since the mists which exhaled from the marsh chiefly took away all view. He himself, sitting upon a single elephant, which alone survived, barely escaped the difficulty of the journey; but the eye in which he had long been ailing he lost through the violence of the cold, the night-watches, and the toil.

But when he had come near to the camp of the consul Flaminius, by ravaging the surrounding places he provoked Flaminius to battle. This battle was fought at Lake Trasimene, where the Roman army, most disastrously surrounded by the cunning of Hannibal, was utterly cut to pieces; the consul himself too was slain. Twenty-five thousand Romans are reported to have been killed in that engagement, and six thousand taken captive. Of Hannibal's army two thousand fell.

This contest at Lake Trasimene was famous for so great a Roman calamity, especially since the ardor of the fighters was so intent that they did not in the least perceive a most violent earthquake which then happened to occur — so violent that it is reported to have demolished cities, shifted mountains, split rocks, and forced rivers to run backward. After the disaster wrought at Trasimene there followed the battle of Cannae, although in between came the time of the dictator Fabius Maximus, who by delaying checked Hannibal's onslaught. In the year five hundred and forty from the founding of the City, the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Publius Terentius Varro, sent against Hannibal, through the impatience of the consul Varro most disastrously lost nearly all the strength of Roman hope at Cannae, a village of Apulia.

For in that battle forty-four thousand Romans were killed, although a great part of Hannibal's army too was cut down. Yet in no Punic war were the Romans brought so near to the extremity of utter destruction. For in it perished the consul Aemilius Paulus; twenty men of consular or praetorian rank were killed; thirty senators were either captured or slain; three hundred men of the nobility; forty thousand foot-soldiers; three thousand five hundred cavalry. The consul Varro fled to Venusia with fifty horsemen. Nor is there any doubt that that would have been the last day of the Roman state, if Hannibal had pressed on to break into the City soon after his victory.

Hannibal, as a testimony of his victory, sent to Carthage three pecks of golden rings, which he had stripped from the hands of the slain Roman knights and senators. To such a degree, moreover, was there utter despair of the commonwealth among the surviving Romans that the senators thought a plan must be taken up for abandoning Italy and seeking new dwelling-places. And this, on the authority of Caecilius Metellus, would have been confirmed, had not Cornelius Scipio, then a military tribune — the same who was afterward called Africanus — with drawn sword deterred them and rather compelled them to swear an oath in his own words for the defense of their country. The Romans, daring as it were to breathe again from the dead in hope of life, created Decimus Junius dictator:

who, having held a levy, drew together from every quarter four legions of an immature and disorderly soldiery from the age of seventeen years. Then he also bound by the military oath, under the title of liberty, slaves of tried strength and goodwill, whether offered voluntarily or, if so it was needful, bought at public expense. The arms that were lacking they stripped from the temples; private wealth was poured back into the empty treasury. Thus the equestrian order, thus the trembling common people, forgetting their party-zeal, took counsel for the common good. The dictator Junius too, recalling an ancient deed of Roman distress, for the reinforcement of the army threw open as it were a sanctuary by edict, and with promise of impunity enrolled in the army all men who were liable for crimes and debts; their number amounted to six thousand men.

But Campania, or rather all Italy, utterly despairing of the restoration of the Roman state, fell away to Hannibal. After this the praetor Lucius Postumius, sent to fight against the Gauls, was cut down together with his army. Then, in the consulship of Sempronius Gracchus and Quintus Fabius Maximus, Claudius Marcellus, the former praetor designated proconsul, routed Hannibal's army in battle and was the first, after such great ruins of the commonwealth, to give hope that Hannibal could be overcome. The Scipios, moreover, in Spain crushed in a most grievous war Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander, who was assembling an army for Italy; for they reduced his army by thirty-five thousand men, whether by slaughter or by capture.

The Celtiberians, the first foreign force which the Romans began to have in their camps, having been won over by a bribe, they led from the enemy's alliance into their own camp. Sempronius Gracchus the proconsul, lured into an ambush by a certain Lucanian who was his host, was slain. Centenius Penula, a centurion, of his own accord demanded that the war against Hannibal be entrusted to him: by him he was cut down together with eight thousand soldiers whom he had led out into the line of battle. After him the praetor Gnaeus Fulvius, defeated by Hannibal with the loss of his army, barely escaped. I am ashamed at the recollection. For what shall I call it — rather the wickedness or the wretchedness of the Romans? Nay, more truly, either a wicked wretchedness or a wretched wickedness.

Who would believe that at that time, when the treasury of the Roman people was begging meager funds by private contribution, the soldier in the camp was nothing but a boy, or a slave, or a criminal, or a debtor — and not even so was he sufficient in number; that the senate in the curia seemed almost wholly composed of newcomers; and finally, when with everything thus diminished and broken there was such despair that the plan of abandoning Italy was being entertained: — that at that time, when one domestic war, as we have said, could by no means be borne, three transmarine wars besides were undertaken? One in Macedonia against Philip, the most powerful king of Macedonia; another in Spain against Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother; a third in Sardinia against the Sardinians and another Hasdrubal, a Carthaginian general;

besides this, a fourth, that of Hannibal, by which they were being pressed in Italy. And yet a brave despair, turning one way or the other, advanced to better things; for in all these wars they fought while despairing, and by fighting they conquered. From which it is plainly shown that the times then were not more peaceful through leisure, but that men were stronger through their miseries. In the year five hundred and forty-three from the founding of the City, Claudius Marcellus barely took Syracuse, the most opulent city of Sicily, at the second assault; for, having long besieged it, he had been repelled by the marvelous devices of Archimedes, a Syracusan citizen endowed with admirable genius, and could not storm it. In the tenth year after Hannibal had come into Italy, in the consulship of Gnaeus Fulvius and Publius

Sulpicius being consuls, Hannibal moved his army from Campania and, with great destruction of all things, advancing through the Sidicine and Suessan territory by the Latin Way, encamped at the river Anio, three miles from the City, amid the incredible terror of the whole community. While the senate and people were dismayed by their various concerns, the matrons too, distracted with panic, ran about the battlements and were eager both to carry stones onto the walls and to fight foremost before the walls. Hannibal himself, with light-armed cavalry, drew near in hostile fashion right up to the Colline Gate, and then drew up all his forces in line of battle. But the consuls and Fulvius the proconsul did not decline the fight.

But when the battle-lines had been drawn up and stood on both sides, with the prize of the coming victory being Rome itself in their very sight, so great a downpour mixed with hail suddenly burst from the clouds that the disordered ranks, barely keeping hold of their arms, gathered themselves back into their own camps. Then, when fair weather had returned and the forces had gone back into the field and into line, a still more violent tempest poured down and curbed their boldness with greater dread of the men, and forced the terrified armies to flee back into their tents. Then Hannibal, turning to religion, is reported to have said that at one moment the will to gain Rome was not given to him, at another the power. Let the disparagers of the true God now answer me on this point: was it Roman bravery, or divine compassion, that kept Hannibal from seizing and overthrowing Rome?

Or perhaps these men, thus preserved, disdain to confess that Hannibal both feared while a victor and gave proof of it while withdrawing — and if it is manifest that that divine protection came from heaven by means of the rain, and that the rain itself is ministered at fitting and necessary seasons by none other than through Christ, who is the true God — I think that even from such things it can be known with sufficient certainty, and cannot be denied:

and especially now — since, as a proof of His power, when in a disturbing drought it constantly happens that rain is sought, and by turns now the pagans, now the Christians, pray, and never, even by their own witness, has it come to pass that the longed-for showers come except on the day on which it is permitted to entreat Christ and for Christians to pray — it stands beyond doubt that the city of Rome, through this same true God, who is Christ Jesus, ordering all things according to the good pleasure of His ineffable judgment, was both then preserved for the belief in the faith that was to come, and is now in part chastised for its own unbelief. But truly in Spain both the Scipios were slain by the brother of Hasdrubal. In Campania Capua was taken by Quintus Fulvius the proconsul;

the chief men of the Campanians took their own lives by poison; the whole senate of Capua, though the Roman senate forbade it, Fulvius put to death by execution. After the Scipios had been slain in Spain, when, with terror struck into all and all hesitating, Scipio, though still very young, offered himself of his own accord, and there was a shameful scarcity in the treasury, on the advice of Claudius Marcellus and Valerius Laevinus, who were then consuls, all the senators brought their stamped gold and silver openly into public to the quaestors, so that they left themselves nothing but their individual rings and amulets, and for their sons, and then through their daughters and wives, only single ounces of gold apiece and no more than single pounds of silver.

Scipio, twenty-four years of age, having obtained by lot the proconsular command in Spain, with his mind set chiefly on avenging his father and his uncle, crossed the Pyrenees and at the first assault took New Carthage, where the greatest pay-funds, strong garrisons, and great stores of gold and silver of the Carthaginians were kept; there too he captured Mago, Hannibal's brother, and sent him with the rest to Rome. The consul Laevinus, returning from Macedonia, stormed Agrigentum, a city of Sicily, and there captured Hanno, the leader of the Africans; he received forty cities into surrender and stormed twenty-six. Hannibal in Italy killed the proconsul Gnaeus Fulvius, eleven tribunes besides, and seventeen thousand soldiers. The consul Marcellus fought with Hannibal for three continuous days.

On the first day they parted with the battle even; on the next the consul was defeated; on the third, victorious, he slew eight thousand of the enemy and forced Hannibal himself with the remainder to flee into his camp. The consul Fabius Maximus stormed and took Tarentum, which had revolted from the Romans, a second time, and there destroyed the great forces of Hannibal together with their commander Carthalo himself; he sold thirty thousand captives and brought the price into the treasury. In the following year, in Italy, the consul Claudius Marcellus was slain together with his army by Hannibal. Scipio in Spain conquered Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian leader, and stripped him of his camp; besides, he brought eighty cities into his power, whether by surrender or by war; the Africans he sold under the crown, but he dismissed the Spaniards without ransom.

Hannibal slew both consuls, Marcellus and Crispinus, surrounded by ambushes. In the consulship of Claudius Nero and Marcus Livius Salinator, when Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother, was coming from Spain through Gaul to Italy, having been ordered by the Carthaginians to join his brother with his forces and to bring with him great auxiliaries of Spaniards and Gauls — when by his hastened arrival he had already come down from the Alps and had been betrayed to the consuls — he was forestalled by the Roman army, while Hannibal was unaware, and was killed with his whole army. For a long time indeed the outcome of the battle was uncertain, the elephants chiefly harassing the Roman line:

but these elephants — by the Roman soldiers whom from their darting about they call velites (a kind of soldiery devised a little before, that young men chosen for their agility might, with their arms, sit behind the backs of the cavalry, and presently, when they came to the enemy, leap down from the horses and at once on foot, while the cavalry by whom they had been carried fought on the other side, drive back the enemy) — by these velites, then, the elephants, driven back when they could no longer be controlled by their own keepers, were killed by a workman's chisel driven in between their ears. This method of killing the beast, when there was need, the same commander Hasdrubal had first devised. In this battle the river Metaurus, where Hasdrubal was conquered, was for the Carthaginians like Lake Trasimene, and Cesena, a city of Picenum, like that village of Cannae;

for fifty-eight thousand of Hasdrubal's army were slain there, five thousand four hundred were taken; and four thousand Roman citizens were found among them and recovered: which was a consolation to the victorious consuls. For of their army too eight thousand fell. The head of his brother Hasdrubal was thrown before Hannibal's camp. When he saw it, and at the same time learned of the disaster of the Carthaginians, in the thirteenth year after he had come into Italy, he fled back into the land of the Bruttii. After this, for a whole year, a respite from the tumult of wars seemed to have come between Hannibal and the Romans, because there was the disquiet of disease in the camps and both armies were driven by a most grievous pestilence.

Meanwhile Scipio, having reduced all Spain from the Pyrenees to the Ocean into a province, came to Rome; created consul with Licinius Crassus, he crossed over into Africa, killed Hanno the son of Hamilcar, leader of the Carthaginians, and destroyed his army partly by slaughter, partly by captivity: for he killed eleven thousand Carthaginians in that battle. The consul Sempronius, having engaged with Hannibal and been defeated, fled back to Rome. Scipio in Africa, attacking the winter quarters of the Carthaginians and others of the Numidians, both of which were not far from Utica, caused them to be set on fire in the dead of night. The Carthaginians, panic-stricken, supposing that the fire had happened by chance, ran out unarmed to extinguish it: wherefore they were easily overwhelmed by the armed men.

In both camps forty thousand men were consumed by fire and sword, five thousand were captured, and the leaders themselves, pitiably scorched, scarcely escaped. Hasdrubal the commander came to Carthage as a fugitive; and so Syphax and Hasdrubal soon repaired their army to a very great extent and again engaged with Scipio, but, set in motion, they fled. Laelius and Masinissa captured Syphax as he fled; the rest of the multitude took refuge in Cirta, which Masinissa, having stormed it, received into surrender, and led Syphax bound in chains to Scipio; and Scipio handed him over to Laelius to be conducted, with vast spoils and very many captives.