either their patience, if it was present, or their power, if it was lacking. Or, if it seems more plausible that the gods who could have advanced Rome did indeed exist at that time, but that there did not yet exist Romans who could by right be advanced—then it is power, the author of things, that we seek, not a craftsman's skill. For the question is about the great gods, as they suppose, not about the meanest of artisans, whose art lies idle unless material be supplied to it. For if it was ever ready to their hand both to foreknow and to will—nay rather, with foreknowledge underlying all (since with the Omnipotent, at least concerning his own works, to foreknow is the same as to will)—then whatever was foreknown, and to which his will gave assent, ought not to have been awaited, but to have been created;
especially since they relate that their own Jupiter was wont in sport to turn heaps of ants into peoples of men. Moreover, concerning the care of their ceremonies, I think it need not even be reviewed, since amid the unceasing rites there was, with incessant disasters, no end and no rest, until the Saviour of the world, Christ, shone forth; and although I think I have already sufficiently shown that the peace of the Roman empire had been foreordained for his coming, yet I will endeavor to add a few things further. At the beginning of the second book, when I was sketching in the course of my pen the times of Rome's foundation, I wrote down many things fittingly compared between Babylon, then the chief city of the Assyrians and of the nations, and Rome, now likewise ruling over the nations: that the former was the first empire, this the last;
that the one was gradually giving way, while this was slowly gathering strength; that the former's last king passed away at the very time when this empire's first king came to be; that the former, then captured by the invading Cyrus, fell as it were into death, while this one, rising up with confidence after the expulsion of its kings, began to make use of free counsels; and especially that, when Rome was vindicating her own liberty, then too the people of the Jews, who at Babylon had been in servitude under kings, regained their liberty and returned to holy Jerusalem and restored the temple of the Lord, just as had been foretold by the prophets.
Moreover I had said that between the Babylonian kingdom, which had been in the East, and the Roman, which rising in the West was being nurtured for the inheritance of the East, there had intervened the Macedonian and the African kingdoms, that is, as if from the south and the north, holding for brief turns the roles of guardian and steward. That the Babylonian and the Roman are rightly named the kingdom of the East and of the West, I know no one has ever doubted; that the Macedonian kingdom lies under the north is shown both by the very tract of sky and by the altars of Alexander the Great, set up even to this day beneath the Riphaean mountains;
that Carthage, moreover, excelled over all Africa and extended the bounds of her dominion not only into Sicily, Sardinia, and the other adjacent islands, but even into Spain—this the monuments of histories and of cities alike declare. It has been said also that the years which ran their course matched closely in number, between the devastation of Babylonia by the Medes and the breaking-in upon Rome by the Goths. But now I add to these the following, that it may shine forth the more clearly that God is the one arbiter of all ages, kingdoms, and places. The Carthaginian kingdom, from its founding to its overthrow, stood for a little more than seven hundred years; the Macedonian kingdom likewise, from Caranus to Perseus, for a little less than seven hundred;
yet both that sevenfold number, by which all things are judged, brought to an end. Rome herself too, although she was being advanced to a perfected empire by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, nevertheless she too, for a little while, struck against the meeting of this number. For in the seven-hundredth year of her foundation, a fire, rising up from no one knows where, consumed fourteen of her districts, nor was she ever, as Livy says, laid waste by a greater conflagration; so much so that, some years afterward, Caesar Augustus, for the rebuilding of what had then been burned, bestowed a great sum of money from the public treasury.
I could also show that the same number, doubled, held good for Babylonia, which at last, after a thousand four hundred years and more, was captured by King Cyrus—were I not recalled by the contemplation of present matters. This, however, I gladly add: that in the forty-third year after the first of all those kings, Ninus, had begun to reign—although his father Belus too is obscurely reported to have reigned first—in that forty-third year of Ninus, then, was born that holy Abraham, to whom the promises were spoken, from whose seed Christ was promised;
and then now, in the forty-second year, all but completed, after this first of all emperors, Augustus Caesar—although his father Caesar too existed rather as a layer-out of the empire than as its emperor—in that year, then, of this Caesar, after he had begun to rule, Christ was born, who had been promised to Abraham under Ninus the first king. And he was born on the eighth day before the Kalends of January, when first all the increments of the coming year begin. So it came to pass that, whereas Abraham was born in the forty-third year, the nativity of Christ fell at the close of the forty-second, so that now not he himself fell within a portion of the third year, but rather within him the third year itself was beginning to rise.
How greatly, with how new and how unwonted blessings, that year abounded, I think is well enough known even without my setting it forth: throughout the whole world there was one peace of all—not by a ceasing but by an abolition of wars—the twin gates of Janus closed, the roots of wars torn out, not merely held in check; and that first and greatest census, when into this one name of Caesar the whole creature of the great nations swore allegiance, and at the same time, through the partnership of the census, was made into a single society. Therefore in the seven-hundred-and-fifty-second year from the founding of the City, Christ was born, bringing to the world a saving faith—truly a rock set in the midst of things, where whoever struck against it should be shattered, but whoever believed should be saved; truly a burning fire, by which whoever follows it is illumined, whoever tries it is consumed;
He himself is Christ, the head of Christians, the saviour of the good, the punisher of the wicked, the judge of all; who, establishing by word and deed a pattern for those who should follow, that he might the more teach them that they must be patient in the persecutions which they should undergo for the sake of eternal life, as soon as, brought forth by a virgin's child-bearing, he appeared to the world, began with his own sufferings. For Herod, king of Judaea, as soon as he learned that he was born, resolved to slay him, and then killed very many little ones while pursuing one. Hence there is a fitting punishment for the malicious who wickedly assail;
hence, in so far as the world is conducted peacefully, it is the grace shown to believers; in so far as it is disturbed destructively, it is the punishment of blasphemers—the faithful Christians being secure in all things, for whom there is either the rest of eternal life kept in safety, or even the gain of this present life. And this I will show by the very facts, when I shall relate it in order more readily. After the redeemer of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ, came upon the earth and was enrolled as a Roman citizen by Caesar's census, while for twelve years, as I have said, the gates of war were shut and held back by the most blessed tranquillity of peace, Caesar Augustus sent his grandson Gaius to set in order the provinces of Egypt and Syria.
He, passing from Egypt by the borders of Palestine, scorned to worship at Jerusalem in the temple of God, then holy and renowned, as Suetonius Tranquillus relates. When Augustus learned of this through him, with perverse judgment he praised him for having acted prudently. And so in the forty-eighth year of Caesar's reign so dire a famine followed upon the Romans, that Caesar ordered the households of the gladiator-trainers, and all foreigners, and the very largest bodies of slaves as well—physicians and teachers excepted—to be thrust out of the City. Thus, when the prince had sinned against what was holy to God, and the people had been chastised by famine, the magnitude of the offense was shown by the character of the vengeance.
Then, to speak in the words of Cornelius Tacitus, 'with Augustus now an old man, Janus was thrown open, while at the farthest bounds of the earth new nations were sought, often to advantage and sometimes with loss, and it remained open down to the reign of Vespasian.' Thus far Cornelius. But then too, when the city of Jerusalem had been captured and overthrown, as the prophets had foretold, and the Jews exterminated, Titus, who by the judgment of God had been appointed to avenge the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, triumphing as victor together with his father Vespasian, closed Janus. Therefore, although under the last days of Caesar Janus was opened, yet for a long while from that time, even though the army was under arms, no wars resounded.
Whence also the Lord Jesus Christ himself, in the Gospels—when in those times the whole world was passing its life in the utmost tranquillity, and one peace veiled all the nations, and he had been asked by his disciples about the conclusion of the ages to follow—among other things speaks thus: 'And you shall hear of battles and rumours of battles. See that you be not troubled; for these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be pestilences and famines and earthquakes in divers places. But all these are the beginnings of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to tribulation, and shall kill you; and you shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.'
And by this, teaching with divine providence, he both strengthened believers by forewarning them, and confounded the unbelieving by foretelling. In the seven-hundred-and-sixty-seventh year from the founding of the City, after the death of Augustus Caesar, Tiberius Caesar obtained the empire and remained in it twenty-three years. He waged no wars by himself, nor indeed any of great moment through his legates, save only that in certain places swellings of the nations, detected beforehand, were quickly crushed. In the fourth year, however, of his reign, Germanicus, son of Drusus and father of Caligula, triumphed over the Germans, against whom he had been sent by the aged Augustus.
But Tiberius himself, for the greatest part of his reign, presided over the commonwealth with great and grave moderation, so much so that, when certain governors urged that the tributes of the provinces ought to be increased, he wrote back that it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not to flay it. But after the Lord Christ had suffered and risen from the dead and sent forth his disciples to preach, Pilate, governor of the province of Palestine, reported to the emperor Tiberius and to the senate concerning the passion and resurrection of Christ and the miracles that followed—which had either been done openly through Christ himself or were being done through his disciples in his name—and concerning the fact that, with the faith of very many vyingly increasing, he was believed to be God.
Tiberius, with the support of his great favour, reported to the senate that Christ should be held to be God. The senate, moved by indignation that the matter had not first been referred to itself according to custom, so that it might first decide concerning the worship to be received, refused the consecration of Christ, and by an edict decreed that the Christians were to be banished from the City—especially since Sejanus also, Tiberius's prefect, most obstinately opposed the receiving of the religion. Tiberius, however, by an edict threatened death to the accusers of the Christians. And so, little by little, that most praised moderation of Tiberius Caesar was changed into the punishment of the senate that had opposed him; for to a king whatever he did by his own will was pleasure, and from a most gentle prince he blazed up into a most savage beast.
For he proscribed very many of the senators and forced them to death; he had chosen for himself twenty patrician men for the sake of counsel: of these he left scarcely two unharmed, and slew the rest on various pretexts. He killed Sejanus, his own prefect, while he was contriving revolutionary designs; he destroyed his sons Drusus and Germanicus—of whom Drusus was his natural son, Germanicus his adopted—by manifest signs of poison; he killed the sons of his son Germanicus. To relate his deeds one by one is a thing of horror and shame; he boiled over with so great a frenzy of lust and cruelty that those who had scorned to be saved under Christ the king were punished under Caesar the king. Yet in the twelfth year of his reign, a strange and incredible disaster happened at the town of Fidenae:
the seating-tiers of an amphitheatre collapsed while the people were watching a gladiatorial spectacle, and killed more than twenty thousand men. A worthy example indeed of so great a chastisement for posterity: that men, eager to watch the deaths of men, had then assembled, at the very time when, for the providing of men's salvation, God had willed to be man. Then, in the seventeenth year of the same reign, when the Lord Jesus Christ—voluntarily indeed surrendering himself to his passion, yet impiously seized by the Jews and fastened to the cross—a most great earthquake occurred throughout the world; the rocks in the mountains were split, and very many parts of the greatest cities fell down with a more-than-usual shaking.
On the same day too, at the sixth hour of the day, the sun was wholly darkened, and a foul night was suddenly drawn over the lands, and, as it has been said, 'And the impious ages feared an everlasting night.' Now it is manifest that neither the moon stood in the way of the sun's light, nor the clouds, since on that day the moon, being in its fourteenth day, with the whole region of the sky lying between, was very far from the sight of the sun; and the stars then shone in the daylight hours—or rather, in that dreadful night—throughout the whole heaven, as is reported. And this not only the faith of the holy Gospels, but even certain books of the Greeks attest.
From this point on, after the passion of the Lord—whom the Jews, as far as in them lay, persecuted—continual disasters of the Jews resound without cease, until, emptied out and dispersed, they fail. For Tiberius relegated their youth, under the guise of military service, into provinces of a harsher climate; the rest of that same nation, or those pursuing similar practices, he removed from the City under penalty of perpetual slavery, unless they should comply. He did, however, exempt from tribute the cities of Asia that had been ruined by that earthquake, and even endowed them by his own liberality. He himself died amid ambiguous signs of poison.
In the seven-hundred-and-ninetieth year from the founding of the City, Gaius Caligula, the third from Augustus, began to reign, and remained in power not quite four years—a man more flagitious than all before him, and one who might truly seem to have been appointed as a fitting punisher for the blaspheming Romans and the persecuting Jews. This man—to set forth briefly the magnitude of his cruelty—is reported to have exclaimed: 'Would that the Roman people had but a single neck!' Often too he complained of the condition of his own times, that they were marked by no public calamities. O blessed shoots of the Christian era, how greatly you prevailed in human affairs, that even a man's cruelty was able rather to desire disasters than to find them!
Behold, hungry savagery complains of the general tranquillity; 'impious Fury within, seated upon savage arms and bound behind with a hundred knots of bronze, roars frightful with bloody mouth.' Rebel slaves and runaway gladiators once terrified Rome, overthrew Italy, devastated Sicily, becoming at last a thing of dread to almost the whole human race throughout the world; but in the days of salvation, that is, in Christian times, not even a hostile Caesar can wrench away the quiet. For this man indeed, having set out with great and incredible apparatus to seek an enemy with idle forces, racing through Germany and Gaul, came to a halt on the shore of the Ocean, within sight of Britain.
And when there he had received into surrender Minocynobelinus, son of the king of the Britons, who, driven out by his father, was wandering about with a few followers, then, the material for war failing him, he returned to Rome. In those same days the Jews, who even then, on account of the passion of Christ, were everywhere harassed by deserved disasters, having stirred up sedition at Alexandria, were overthrown by slaughter and driven from the city, and for the purpose of setting forth their complaints, sent as envoy to Caesar a certain Philo, a man indeed among the most learned.
But Caligula, most hostile to all men and then chiefly to the Jews, having scorned Philo's embassy, commanded that all the sacred seats of the Jews, and in the first place that ancient sanctuary at Jerusalem, should be profaned with the sacrifices of the heathen and filled with statues and images, and ordered that he himself should there be worshipped as a god. Pilate moreover the governor, who had pronounced the sentence of condemnation upon Christ, after he had endured and provoked very many seditions at Jerusalem, was so straitened by such anguish, with Gaius bringing it upon him, that, running himself through with his own hand, he sought by speed of death the shortening of his ills. Gaius Caligula added even this crime to his lusts, that he first defiled his sisters by debauchery, then condemned them to exile.
And afterward he ordered all the exiles together to be killed. He himself, however, was slain by his own bodyguards. Two little books were found among his secret papers, on one of which 'Dagger,' on the other 'Sword,' had been inscribed as a sign of its title: both contained the names and marks of the choicest men of either order, the senatorial and the equestrian, destined for death. There was found also a huge chest of various poisons, by which, soon afterward, at the command of Claudius Caesar being sunk in the sea, the waters are reported to have been infected, not without a great destruction of the fish, which, killed off, the tide cast up here and there along the neighbouring shores.
A great token indeed of the mercy of God: both on account of the favour of grace toward the people that would presently in part come to believe, and on account of the tempering of his wrath toward the people then unbelievingly obstinate—so that, by how great a multitude of fish was killed, men might learn how great a multitude of men had escaped a death prepared for them, and it might become known to all what so great a mass of poison, increased by art, could have done in the wretched City, when, carelessly poured out, it corrupted even the seas. In the seven-hundred-and-ninety-fifth year from the founding of the City, Tiberius Claudius, the fourth from Augustus, obtained the kingdom and remained in it fourteen years.
At the beginning of his reign Peter, the apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, came to Rome, and taught with faithful word the saving faith to all believers, and approved it by most mighty miracles; and thenceforth there began to be Christians at Rome. Rome perceived this benefit conferred upon her faith. For when, Caligula having been killed, the senate and consuls had decreed many things concerning the abolishing of the empire and the restoring of the commonwealth to its ancient order, and the utter sweeping away of the whole family of the Caesars:
Claudius, as soon as he had secured the empire, employing a great clemency hitherto unknown at Rome—lest vengeance, if once begun, should rage against so great a multitude of nobles—blotted from memory those two days on which there had been an unhappy deliberating and acting concerning the condition of the commonwealth, and ratified for ever the pardon and oblivion of all things done or said therein. Thus that renowned and famous amnesty of the Athenians—which indeed the senate, at Cicero's urging, had attempted to introduce at Rome after the killing of Julius Caesar, but which had come to nothing because Antony and Octavian broke in upon it for the avenging of the slain Caesar:
this amnesty Claudius, although he was being goaded by a far more savage cause toward the slaughter of the conspirators, of his own accord and with no one demanding it, established by an unsolicited clemency. There happened also at that same time a great miracle of God's present grace: for Furius Camillus Scribonianus, legate of Dalmatia, contriving civil war, had enticed many and most valiant legions to a change of their military oath. And so, on the appointed day, when from every side they were to assemble in one place to the new emperor, neither could the eagles be adorned, nor the standards be plucked up or moved or stirred in any way whatever. The army, moved and converted to repentance by so great and so unwonted a miracle of faith, on the fifth day forthwith killed Scribonianus, now abandoned, and held itself to the oath of its former service.
It is well enough known that nothing was ever more grievous or more destructive to the city of Rome than civil wars. Therefore, in view of the coming of the apostle Peter and the tender shoots of the Christians—at that time still few, scarcely yet bursting forth into the profession of the holy faith—let no one deny that this rising tyranny and the civil war then swelling up were divinely checked, provided he can prove from past ages a like example of the restraining of civil wars. Claudius, in the fourth year of his rule, desiring to show himself a prince useful to the commonwealth, sought war on every side and victory from any quarter. And so he set in motion an expedition into Britain, which seemed to have been stirred into commotion because deserters had not been given back.
He crossed over to the island, which neither before Julius Caesar nor after him had anyone dared to approach, and there—to use the words of Suetonius Tranquillus—'without any battle or bloodshed, within a very few days he received the greater part of the island into surrender.' He also added to the Roman Empire the Orkney Islands, lying in the Ocean beyond Britain, and in the sixth month after he had set out he returned to Rome.
Let there now be compared, if anyone pleases, with respect to one and the same island, time with time, war with war, Caesar with Caesar—for as to the outcome I make no comparison, since the one was a most fortunate victory, the other a most bitter disaster—and so at last let Rome recognize that, through God's hidden providence in the conduct of affairs, she had even before possessed a share of good fortune; and now, having accepted the recognition of this, she enjoys the fullest felicity, in so far, however, as she is not corrupted by the stumbling-blocks of her blasphemies. In the same year of his reign a most severe famine occurred throughout Syria, which the prophets too had foretold; but Helena, queen of the Adiabeni, who had been converted to the faith of Christ, most generously ministered to the needs of the Christians at Jerusalem, having grain conveyed from Egypt.
In the fifth year of his reign an island shot up from the deep between Thera and Therasia, extending over a space of thirty stades. In his seventh year, under Cumanus the procurator of Judaea, so great a sedition arose at Jerusalem during the days of Unleavened Bread that, the people being crowded together at the exit of the gates, thirty thousand of the Jews are reported to have been laid low by slaughter and choked to death by the crush. In the ninth year of the same reign, Josephus relates that the Jews were expelled from the City by Claudius; but Suetonius moves me more, who speaks thus: 'Claudius expelled from Rome the Jews, who were continually rioting at the instigation of Christ.'
But whether he ordered the Jews who were rioting against Christ to be restrained and suppressed, or whether he also wished the Christians, as men of a kindred religion, to be expelled along with them, is in no way distinguished. Nevertheless, in the following year there was so great a famine at Rome that, in the middle of the Forum, the emperor was seized by the populace, most shamefully assailed with abuse and fragments of bread, and, scarcely escaping into the Palace through a back door, he barely got away from the fury of the aroused mob. And after a short interval of time, on the slightest pretexts, he put to death thirty-five senators and three hundred Roman knights at once; he himself, however, died with manifest signs of poison.
In the year 808 from the founding of the City, Nero Caesar, the fifth ruler from Augustus, obtained the principate and remained in it for not quite fourteen years. A follower—nay, an outdoer—of his uncle Gaius Caligula in every vice and crime, he exercised wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice, and cruelty in no enterprise without wickedness; for, driven by wantonness, he wandered through almost all the theatres of Italy and Greece, and, even putting on the disgrace of varied costumes, he often imagined that he had surpassed heralds, lyre-players, tragic actors, and charioteers. Moreover, he was so agitated by such great lusts that he is reported to have refrained from no reverence of kinship, neither toward his mother nor his sister; he took a man to wife as if a husband, and was himself received by a man as if a wife.
Indeed, he was of such unbridled extravagance that he fished with golden nets, which were drawn out by purple ropes, and bathed in cold and warm perfumes. He is also said never to have made a journey with fewer than a thousand carriages. Finally, he made the burning of the city of Rome a spectacle for his own pleasure; for six days and seven nights the blazing city fed the royal gaze. The granaries built of squared stone, and those famous ancient blocks of buildings which the flame, ranging about, could not reach, were battered down and set ablaze by great engines once prepared for foreign wars; while the unhappy populace was driven for refuge to the shelter of tombs and burial-mounds.
And he himself, looking out from that lofty Maecenatian tower and delighting, as he said, in the beauty of the flame, chanted the Iliad in tragic costume. His avarice, moreover, became so headlong that after this burning of the City—which Augustus had boasted he had transformed from brick to marble—he allowed no one to approach the remnants of his own property; everything that had in any way survived the flames he himself carried off; he commanded that ten million sesterces a year be contributed to him by the Senate for his expenses; he deprived very many senators of their goods with no cause existing; and on a single day, with tortures also applied, he wiped out utterly the entire fortune of all the merchants.
And he was so wild with the frenzy of cruelty that he killed the greater part of the Senate and almost destroyed the equestrian order. Nor did he even refrain from parricide: his mother, brother, sister, wife, and all his other kinsmen and relations he struck down without hesitation. The rashness of his impiety toward God increased this mass of crimes. For he was the first at Rome to afflict the Christians with tortures and deaths, and he commanded that throughout all the provinces they be tormented with an equal persecution; and, attempting to extirpate the very name, he slew the most blessed apostles of Christ—Peter by the cross, Paul by the sword. Soon disasters arising on every side overwhelmed the wretched city in heaps.
For in the following autumn so great a pestilence settled upon the City that thirty thousand funerals came into the account of Libitina. Then immediately a British disaster occurred, in which two principal towns were sacked with great slaughter and carnage of citizens and allies. Moreover, in the East, after the great provinces of Armenia had been lost, the Roman legions were sent under the Parthian yoke, and Syria was retained only with difficulty. In Asia three cities—namely, Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colossae—collapsed in an earthquake. But Nero, after he learned that Galba had been made emperor in Spain by the army, collapsed utterly in mind and hope.