After a span of three years, during which the war was waged, he assumed the surname Isauricus. Cosconius, having drawn Illyricum by lot as proconsul, when Dalmatia had been crushed and subdued, at last after two years stormed and took Salonae, a most flourishing city. In the six hundred and seventy-ninth year from the founding of the City, when Lucullus and Cassius were consuls, seventy-four gladiators fled from the school of Gnaeus Lentulus at Capua; who at once, under the leadership of the Gauls Crixus and Oenomaus and the Thracian Spartacus, seized Mount Vesuvius; and bursting forth from there, they stormed the camp of the praetor Clodius, who had encircled them with a siege, and, putting him to flight, turned everything to plunder. Then, led around through Consentia and Metapontum, they gathered huge columns in a short time.
For it is reported that the multitude under Crixus was ten thousand, while under Spartacus the number was then three times as great. For Oenomaus had already been killed in the earlier fighting. And so, when they were confounding all things with slaughters, fires, plunderings, and rapes, at the funeral rites of a captive matron who had killed herself from grief at her violated chastity, they put on a gladiatorial show out of four hundred captives—men, namely, who, having been meant to be watched, were now to do the watching, inasmuch as they were leaders of trainers of gladiators rather than of soldiers. Then the consuls Gellius and Lentulus, sent against them with an army, of whom Gellius overwhelmed in battle Crixus as he fought most fiercely, while Lentulus, overcome by Spartacus, fled. Afterward, when both consuls had in vain combined their forces, they were beaten with grievous loss and fled. Thereupon Gaius
Cassius, the proconsul, the same Spartacus overwhelmed in war and killed. And so, the State being terrified with scarcely less dread than when under Hannibal it had trembled with the foe raging about its gates, the senate sent Crassus with the legions of the consuls and a new reinforcement of soldiers. He, as soon as he entered upon battle with the fugitives, killed six thousand of them and captured nine hundred. Then, before he attacked Spartacus himself in war, as he was pitching camp at the source of the river Silarus, he overcame his Gallic and German auxiliaries, of whom he killed thirty thousand men together with their leaders. Finally he struck down Spartacus himself, who had drawn up his line and engaged, together with very great forces of the fugitives.
For sixty thousand of them are reported to have been slain, six thousand captured, and three thousand Roman citizens recovered. The rest, who had slipped away from this war and were wandering about, were ground down by many commanders through frequent searching. But I again and yet more often repeat: do then even these times have any need of some comparison? Who, I ask, does not shudder to hear—I will not say such wars, but even the mere names of so many wars—foreign, servile, social, civil, of fugitives? Wars which do not even follow one another thus, as the waves of a troubled sea follow with however great masses, but, stirred up and heaped together from every side by diverse causes, names, forms, and evils, clash all at once.
To take an instance from close at hand, and to pass over that infamous servile war: the Jugurthine war had not yet ceased thundering from the African quarter when already the Cimbric war was flashing lightning from the northwest. From those Cimbric clouds the foul and vast torrents of shed blood were still being driven, when already wretched Italy was breathing out the mists of the Social War, soon to gather into great storm-clouds of woe. And indeed even after the boundless and frequent tempest of the Italian war, one could by no means travel safely through Italy, so that all things—apart from those most perilous chasms of hostile cities—were tottering in a dissolved and slippery peace;
already Rome was bringing to birth for herself the Marian and Cinnan destruction, and another, rising from the opposite, the east and north—that is, the Mithridatic war—was threatening, a Mithridatic war which, indeed begun by these earlier events, stretched on into still further ones. From the Marian torch the pyre of the Sullan slaughter was kindled; from that most deadly pyre of the Sullan and civil war, burning brands were scattered through very many parts of the earth, and they spread many conflagrations from one kindling. For Lepidus and Scipio in Italy, Brutus in Gaul, Domitius the son-in-law of Cinna in Africa, Carbo in Cossyra and Sicily, Perpenna in Liguria and afterward with Sertorius in Spain, and most savage of all, Sertorius in that same Spain—these men, stirring up wars then to be called civil, or by whatever other name
to be called by, made many wars out of one, great wars out of a great one; apart from those three most devastating wars which were then called foreign—that is, the Pamphylian, the Macedonian, and the Dalmatian—while passing over too that great Mithridatic war, by far the longest, most hostile, and most fearful of all. Then, with the Spanish war of Sertorius not yet ended—nay, with Sertorius himself still living—this war of fugitives, or, to speak more truly, of gladiators, bristled up, now not to be watched by a few but to be feared everywhere. And because it is called a war of fugitives, let it be held cheap by no one because of the name: often in it single consuls, and sometimes both together with their columns joined in vain, were defeated, and very many nobles were butchered;
but the fugitives themselves who were slain were more than one hundred thousand. By which we admonish Italy to console herself concerning the harassment of present foreign foes by recalling the past—those of her own who, out of herself and against herself, mangled her incomparably more cruelly. Wherefore I would now make an end to this fifth book, so that the civil wars everywhere intermingled with foreign ones—whether those that have been told or also those that follow—since they have thus clung together in a sequence of times and with consequent evils, may at least be separated by the boundary of a book. HERE BEGINS THE SIXTH BOOK OF THE HISTORIES OF PAULUS OROSIUS AGAINST THE PAGANS.
All men, of whatever sect or way of life or fatherland, are ever so raised up toward the prospect of prudence by a natural good, that even if they do not in practice prefer the rational part of the mind to the gratification of the body, they nevertheless know by judgment that it ought to be preferred. This mind, illumined with reason as its guide, in the midst of the virtues to which it rises by inborn favor—though it be inclined toward vices—descries the knowledge of God as it were a citadel. For any man whatever can despise God for a time, but cannot wholly be ignorant of Him. Hence certain men, while in many ways they believe in God, have fashioned many gods out of an undiscerning fear. But from this point men have already, above all, departed—both by the authority of truth at work, and by reason itself sifting the matter.
For indeed even their philosophers—to say nothing of our own saints—while with intent study of mind they sought and searched out all things, found one God as the Author of all, to whom alone all things should be referred; whence even now the pagans, whom the truth already made plain convicts of obstinacy rather than of ignorance, when they are sifted by us, confess that they do not follow many gods, but venerate many ministers under one great god. There remains, therefore, concerning the understanding of the true God, a confused dissension through many surmises of understanding, since concerning one God there is among nearly all almost one opinion. Thus far human inquiry has been able to reach, even if with labor. But where reasoning fails, faith comes to the aid. For unless we shall have believed, we shall not understand:
you must hear from Him and believe Him, even God, whatever true thing you would know concerning God. And so this same one and true God—unto whom every sect, as we have said, runs together, even out of diverse opinions—changing kingdoms and disposing the times, punishing sins also, chose the weak things of the world, that He might confound the strong, and founded the Roman empire by taking up a shepherd of the poorest estate.
This empire, long advanced through kings and consuls, after it had gained possession of Asia, Africa, and Europe, He gathered together, by His own ordering, into one emperor—and that one the most valiant and the most clement of all. Under this emperor, whom nearly all nations honored justly with a mingled love and fear, the true God, who was being worshiped by the ignorant with anxious superstition, opened that great fountain of His understanding; and, about to teach men more readily through a man, He sent His Son, working mighty deeds which should surpass man, and convicting the demons whom some had supposed to be gods—so that those who had not believed Him as a man might believe by His works as God;
next, that in a great silence and the widest peace, without hindrance and swiftly, the glory of a new name and the rapid report of the announced salvation might run through; or also that, as His disciples went through the diverse nations and freely offered to all the gifts of salvation, there might be safe liberty for them, being Roman citizens among Roman citizens, to go about and to discourse. This I thought worthy of mention, because this sixth little book extends down to Caesar Augustus, of whom these things are spoken.
But if some think this most luminous reasoning void, and rather assign it to their own gods—whom they first chose by prudence and then invited by special worship, so that this most ample and most beautiful empire might be founded for them through those gods (for so they boast, because by their excellent kind of sacred rites they have earned the special favor of the gods, upon whose removal or neglect all the gods departed, leaving their shrines and altars, the gods by whom this empire had stood)—then, although the reverence of your holiness has discoursed many things most valiantly and most truly, nevertheless there is room for me too to add a few. If the Romans, by worshiping the gods, earned the favor of the gods, and by not worshiping lost it:
by whose worship did it come about that Romulus himself, the father of Rome, was kept safe amid so many evils threatening him from his very birth? Was it Amulius, his great-uncle, who exposed him to death? Or his father, who was uncertain? Or Rhea his mother, guilty of fornication? Or his Alban kinsmen, who from the very beginning persecuted the very seeds of the Roman name? Or all Italy, which for four hundred years, as long as it dared, gaped for his destruction? No, they say, but the gods themselves, because they knew that they were to be worshiped, preserved their future worshipers. Therefore they were foreknowing.
If they were foreknowing, why did they bring this empire, amid so many ages of years, to the highest pinnacle of power precisely at that time in which He willed to be born among men and to be acknowledged as man—after whose name they themselves were despised as nothing, and, together with the whole world, even those whom they had advanced rushed to ruin? But, they say, He crept in humbly and entered secretly. Whence, for one secret and humble, came so celebrated a fame, so undoubted a faith, so manifest a power? By certain signs and mighty works He took and held the minds of men troubled by superstition. But if a man could do this, the gods ought to have been the more able.
Or was it because He proclaimed that this power had been handed down to Him from the Father, that men at length came through to the understanding of that God both known and unknown, whom, as I said, no one can apprehend except through Him? Nor can anyone, except he who, having fully examined and despised himself, being turned to the wisdom of God, has transferred all the reasoning of seeking to the faith of believing. Yet briefly I press the point: those gods of theirs, whom they extol as so great that they seem both, when propitious, to have advanced the Roman commonwealth, and, when averse, to have afflicted it—at that very time, which plainly stands established, in which Christ willed to be born and began to be announced to the nations, were being most devotedly and most intently worshiped.
Did they then, taking counsel both for themselves and for their worshipers, fail either to repress or to repel His superstition, on account of which they saw themselves bound to be spurned and their worshipers to be forsaken? And yet, if it was by men unwilling, pardon should be granted and they ought not to have been deserted; if by men willing, their foreknowledge should have been kept, and they ought not to have been aided beforehand. This has come to pass, they say: for we have stirred up nations, we have inflamed kings, we have established laws, we have appointed judges, we have prepared penalties with tortures and crosses, we have searched the whole world over, to see if in any way the Christian name and worship could be scraped away from the entire earth.
This was done up to the point that fruitful cruelty so far advanced amid tortures and through tortures, as long as it should seize that very royal summit, through which alone it could have been checked. And what followed afterward? The emperors, they say, being Christians, ordered the sacred rites to cease and the temples to be shut, and therefore 'All the gods departed, leaving their shrines and altars, the gods by whom this empire had stood.' O how great and how unoffending is the light of truth, if only feeble eyes did not unhappily close themselves against it as it offers itself unbidden!
If the Christian faith, through many ages back, with nations, kings, laws, slaughters, crosses, and deaths raging on every side against it, could in no way be repressed—nay rather, as I said, amid these things and through these things it grew—while the worship of idols, already in a manner failing of itself and ashamed of itself, ceased at a single most clement command without any penal terror: to whom is it doubtful that this has at last been made known to the creature, through the demonstration of that understanding concerning its Creator, which the creature had hitherto, through various reasonings of a mind however intent, sought while obscured by other things, and through this has at once cleaved to the love of Him whom it had loved even while not knowing Him?
It is no wonder, therefore, if in a great household there are found some slaves who, habituated by the custom and wantonness of seducers, abuse the patience of their master to the contempt of him: whence God deservedly reproves with various corrections those who are ungrateful, or unbelieving, or even obstinate; which assuredly must always be confessed, yet then especially, when as yet throughout the whole world there was no Church which, by the intervention of the faithful's prayers, having entreated His own clemency, might temper the deserved punishments of the world and the just judgment of God: whence also these things which seem evils to men, of whatever sort they are, were without doubt all heavier of old—as will be proved by the very order in which they were begun.
The Mithridatic war—or, to speak more truly, the disaster of the Mithridatic war, involving many provinces at once—was drawn out and protracted through forty years. For it broke out, as I said, in the six hundred and sixty-fifth year from the founding of the City, in which the first civil war too had begun, blazing up; but it was scarcely finished, in the consulship of Cicero and Antonius, by barbarian poison, to use the words of the best poet. Yet in these times there are found thirty years of waging war. But how forty have been said by very many is not easily discerned.
Now Mithridates, king of Pontus and Armenia, after he had striven to deprive of his kingdom Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, a friend of the Roman people, and had been warned by the senate that, if he attempted to do so, war would be brought against him by the Roman people, in his anger at once overran Cappadocia, and, having driven out King Ariobarzanes from it, laid waste the whole province with fire and sword. Then with like calamity he seized Bithynia. With similar issue he afflicted Paphlagonia, the kings Pylaemenes and Nicomedes having been driven out of it. Afterward, when he had come to Ephesus, he ordered by a cruel edict that whatever Roman citizens were found throughout all Asia should all be slain on one and the same day. And it was done;
nor can it in any way be set forth or comprehended in words what a multitude of Roman citizens was then slain, what mourning there was in very many provinces, what groaning there was both of those being killed and likewise of those doing the killing, when each and every man was compelled either to betray innocent guests and friends, or himself to be imperiled by the punishment due to his guests. Archelaus too, the general of Mithridates, sent ahead into Achaia with a hundred and twenty thousand foot and horse, obtained Athens and all Greece, partly by force, partly by surrender. Sulla, to whom after his consulship the Mithridatic war had fallen, long besieged Archelaus at the Piraeus, the harbor of the Athenians, fortified with a sevenfold wall, and took the city of the Athenians itself by force. Afterward he clashed with Archelaus in a pitched battle:
eleven thousand of Archelaus's army are reported to have been killed, and scarcely ten thousand to have survived. When the disaster was learned, Mithridates sent from Asia seventy thousand of his choicest soldiers to Archelaus as a reinforcement. In a second battle fifty thousand of these were killed, and there Diogenes, the son of Archelaus, was cut down. In a third engagement all the forces that Archelaus had were destroyed. For twenty thousand of his soldiers, driven into a marsh, while they implored Sulla's protection, were killed by the insatiable wrath of the victor; and as many others, forced into a river, were drowned and killed; the rest of the wretched men were butchered here and there. Furthermore, Mithridates in Asia had set his mind to kill the leading men of the noblest cities and to confiscate their goods.
And when he had already slaughtered a thousand six hundred in this way, the Ephesians, fearing his example, drove out the garrison and shut their gates against him; the men of Smyrna, Sardis, Colophon, and Tralles did likewise. Mithridates, thrown into confusion, made a peace agreement with Sulla through his commander Archelaus. Meanwhile Fimbria, an accomplice of the Marian crimes and the boldest of all men, killed the consul Flaccus, to whom he had gone as legate, at Nicomedia; and presently, seizing the army, he routed the son of Mithridates from Asia to Miletopolis, attacked the king's post, drove the king himself out of Pergamum, and pursuing him as he fled, besieged him at Pitane. He would surely have captured him, had Lucius Lucullus set the care of the commonwealth above civil discords and been willing to hem him in by sea with a blockading fleet.
Then Fimbria, enraged at the people of Ilium, by whom he seemed to have been repulsed with closed gates because of their support for Sulla's party, utterly destroyed the city of Ilium itself, that ancient mother of Rome, by slaughter and fire. But Sulla at once rebuilt it. This same Fimbria, when he was besieged at Thyatira by Sulla's army, driven to despair, killed himself by his own hand in the temple of Aesculapius. Fannius and Magius, fugitives from Fimbria's army, joined themselves to Mithridates; at their urging Mithridates struck a treaty with Sertorius through envoys sent to Spain. Sertorius sent Marcus Marius to him to confirm the treaty; the king kept him at his court and shortly made him commander in the place of Archelaus, who had taken himself, with his wife and children, over to Sulla.
Marius and Eumachus, commanders sent by Mithridates against Lucullus, having quickly assembled a large army, engaged Publius Rutilius at Chalcedon and cut him down together with a very large part of his army. Lucullus surrounded with a ditch Mithridates, who was besieging the people of Cyzicus, and compelled him to endure what he himself was doing; and to the Cyzicenes themselves, that they might be of good cheer, he sent a messenger, one of his soldiers skilled in swimming, who, buoyed up by two inflated skins and himself holding the middle bar and paddling with his feet, swam seven miles across. Mithridates, suffering from want, ordered a part of his forces, drawn up under arms, to go home; this whole body Lucullus intercepted and destroyed, for it is reported that he then slew more than fifteen thousand men.
Then too Fannius, who had joined himself to Mithridates, and Metrophanes, the royal general, defeated by Mamercus, fled with two thousand horsemen into Moesia, and from there, withdrawing into Maeonia, fell upon the Inarime hills and plains. There not only are mountains seen scorched, and rocks darkened as if by a kind of soot, but the very plains, foul with burnt soil, lie crumbling for fifty miles without any sign of fire or furnace, with ash hanging loose down into the depths; in three places too there are shown scorching chasms which the Greeks call physae (bellows). Wandering long among these, they were at last delivered from unforeseen perils and came secretly into the king's camp. Deiotarus, king of Gallograecia, slaughtered the king's prefects in war.
Meanwhile Mithridates at Cyzicus, besieged by the very delay with which he himself was besieging, confined his army to great want and pestilence. For it is said that he lost more than three hundred thousand men by famine and disease in that same siege; he himself, seizing a ship with a few followers, fled secretly from the camp. Lucullus, his soldiery unbloodied, a spectator of another's disaster, won a new kind of victory; presently, attacking Marius, he conquered and routed him: in that battle more than eleven thousand of the Marian soldiers are reported to have been slain. Lucullus afterwards, engaging this same Marius in a naval battle, either sank or captured thirty-two royal warships and many transports. There many of those whom Sulla had proscribed were killed.
Marius, dragged out the next day from the cave where he was hiding, paid the deserved penalties of his hostile spirit. In the same onset Lucullus ravaged Apamea, and at the foot of Mount Olympus he stormed, captured, and plundered the very strongly fortified city of Prusa. Mithridates, sailing with a fleet rigged against Byzantium, caught in a storm, lost eighty beaked ships; and when he himself was sinking in his already shattered vessel, he leaped across into the light boat of the pirate Seleucus, the pirate himself helping him. From there he reached Sinope, and afterwards Amisus, with great difficulty. In the same year at Rome Catiline, accused of incest because he was charged with having had relations with the Vestal virgin Fabia, escaped through the favor of Catulus. Lucullus had besieged Sinope, intending to storm it;
this city Seleucus the pirate-chief and Cleochares the eunuch, who were in command of the garrison, plundered, set on fire, and abandoned. Lucullus, moved by the internal slaughter of the wretched enemy, by a swift assault extinguished the fire that had been set. Thus the wretched city, by a reversal of roles between enemies and allies, was ruined by those who should have defended it and saved by those who should have ruined it. But Marcus Lucullus, who had succeeded Curio in Macedonia, attacked the whole nation of the Bessi in war and received them in surrender. At the same time Metellus, praetor of Sicily, finding Sicily afflicted by that most foul praetorship of Gaius Verres, especially as the pirate-chief Pirganio was tearing it apart with wicked plunderings and slaughters—who, having driven off
the Roman fleet, had seized the harbor of Syracuse—which presently, after crushing it in a naval and land battle, he compelled to withdraw from Sicily. Moreover Lucullus, having crossed the Euphrates and the Tigris, engaged Mithridates and Tigranes at the city of Tigranocerta, and with a very small band of his own men killed a great number of the enemy; for thirty thousand men are reported to have been slain in that war. Tigranes, accompanied by scarcely a hundred and fifty horsemen, fled, casting away his diadem and tiara lest he be recognized. Then envoys came as suppliants to Lucullus from almost the whole of the East; as winter drew near, returning through Armenia into Mesopotamia, he stormed and took the city of Nisibis, then renowned in those parts.
In those same days the pirates, scattered over all the seas and now not only intercepting the supply convoys of ships but also ravaging islands and provinces, were growing to an immense number, as men commonly associated themselves with them out of the impunity of crime and greed for plunder; these Gnaeus Pompey, after much devastation indeed which they had long carried on by land and sea, nevertheless crushed with marvelous speed. At the same time Metellus over the course of two years overthrew the island of Crete and, subduing it by a long war, reduced it to subjection, and exchanged the laws of Minos for the laws of Rome. Pompey afterwards, the successor of Lucullus, in Lesser Armenia hemmed in the king's camp by siege near Mount Dastracus.
The king, having made a sortie by night with all his forces, resolved moreover to repel by battle the very pursuer. Pompey set himself to pursue the fugitives. And so the battle was joined by night. The moon, then risen, was at the Romans' backs. The king's men, taking the length of the shadows for the nearness of the enemy, hurled all their weapons in vain. The Romans, attacking afterwards as though against unarmed men, conquered without effort. For of the king's army forty thousand were slain or captured, while of the Romans a thousand were wounded and scarcely forty killed.
The king, slipping away in flight amid the tumult of war, aided also by the boon of a faintly-lit night, escaped; abandoned by all his friends, philosophers, writers of histories and of verses, and physicians, alone through pathless ways, leading his horse by hand and trembling at every nocturnal noise, he turned aside into a certain stronghold and from there made his way into Armenia. Pompey, intending to pursue the king, founded the city of Nicopolis between two rivers which rise from one mountain in separate caverns—that is, the Euphrates and the Araxes—for the old men, camp-followers, and sick who were willing to settle there. To Tigranes, as he begged, he granted pardon; he thrice defeated in battle the army and prefects of Orodes, king of the Albani; afterwards he gladly accepted Orodes' letters and gifts for renewing peace with the Albani;
He defeated in war Artaces, king of Iberia, and received the whole of Iberia into surrender. Then, when he had set in order the affairs of Armenia, Colchis, Cappadocia, and Syria, advancing from Pontus into Parthia he came on the fiftieth day to the city of Ecbatana, the capital of the Parthian kingdom. In the Bosporus, while Mithridates was celebrating the Cerealian rites, so grave an earthquake suddenly arose that a great disaster to cities and fields is said to have followed from it. At the same time Castor, a prefect of Mithridates who was in command at Phanagoria, having killed the royal friends, seized the citadel and sent over four sons of Mithridates to the Roman garrisons. Mithridates, kindled with wrath, blazed up into crimes.
For he then killed several of his own friends and his son Exipodras, having already before slaughtered another son, Machares, in parricide; Pharnaces, another of his sons, terrified by his brothers' example, won over to himself the army that had been sent to pursue him, and presently led it against his father. Mithridates, having long begged his son in vain from the very top of the wall, when he saw him inexorable, on the point of dying is said to have cried out: 'Since Pharnaces,' he said, 'bids me die, I pray you, ancestral gods, if you exist, that he himself too may one day hear this same cry from his own children.' And immediately, going down, he gave poison to all his wives, concubines, and daughters.
And when he himself drank last of all, yet because of the antidotes by which he had often fortified his vital organs against noxious juices the poison could not finish him off, and he paced about in vain, hoping that somehow at last the infused bane might run through his veins, driven by the motion of his body—he summoned a certain Gallic soldier who was running about within the now-breached wall, and offered him his throat. This end of life Mithridates had, and left us the strongest proof of his own sentence: a man, as they say, of all men the most superstitious, seventy-two years of age, who always kept with him philosophers most skilled in every art. 'If you exist,' he said, 'ancestral gods.' Thus he had, by long worship and long inquiry, come to perceive that these whom men supposed to be gods were not certain gods.