And when he was contriving incredible evils for the disturbing—nay, the overthrowing—of the commonwealth, having been declared a public enemy by the Senate and fleeing most ignominiously, he killed himself at the fourth milestone from the City, and in him the whole family of the Caesars was consumed. In the year 824 from the founding of the City, Galba usurped the imperial power in the Spains. He, as soon as he learned of Nero's death, came to Rome; and since he offended everyone by his avarice, savagery, and sloth, he adopted Piso, a noble and industrious young man, as his son and into the kingship—together with whom, in the seventh month of his reign, he was murdered by Otho.
Rome paid, by the slaughter of her princes and the civil wars stirred up, for the recent injuries done to the Christian religion; and those standards of the legions, which at the coming of the apostle Peter into the City had been divinely restrained and could in no way be torn up to kindle the civil war that was being prepared through Scribonianus, now—after Peter had been killed in the City and the Christians had been mangled by a variety of punishments—loosed themselves throughout the whole world. For from Spain Galba had at once risen up; and when he was soon crushed, Otho at Rome, Vitellius in Germany, Vespasian in Syria, seized at once both the imperial power and arms. Let them indeed, even unwilling, acknowledge both the power and the clemency of God—they who are offended by Christian times.
With what swiftness the conflagrations of such great wars were both kindled and quenched! For whereas in earlier times great and long-lasting disasters used to be stirred up by the slightest causes, now the mightiest crashes of great evils, resounding on every side, were lulled to rest with the least trouble. For there was now at Rome a Church—however much harassed by persecution—which prayed to Christ, the judge of all, even on behalf of its enemies and persecutors.
Therefore Otho, when, after Galba and Piso had been killed at Rome, he had seized the imperial power amid riots and slaughters, and had soon learned that Vitellius had been made emperor in Gaul by the German legions, set about a civil war. At first, in three minor engagements—one at the Alps, another near Placentia, the third near the place which they call Castores—he came forth victor against the Vitellian commanders; but in a fourth battle, near Bedriacum, when he perceived that his own men were being defeated, in the third month after he had begun to rule he killed himself. Vitellius came to Rome as victor.
There, while he did many things cruelly and wickedly, and even, with an incredible appetite of voracity, burdened human life with abominations, after he learned about Vespasian, he first set about laying down the imperial power; then, encouraged by certain persons, he drove Sabinus, Vespasian's brother—who then suspected no evil—together with the rest of the Flavians, into the Capitol; and, the temple having been set on fire, with flame and ruin mingled together, he consigned them all alike to one and the same destruction and tomb.
Afterward, his own army falling away to the name of Vespasian, deserted and trembling as the enemy now drew near, he thrust himself into a certain little chamber close to the palace; from there he was dragged out most shamefully, and as he was led naked through the Sacred Way, with everyone hurling dung at his face, he was brought down into the Forum; in the eighth month after he had presumed to take the kingship, at the Gemonian Stairs he was tortured to death by the frequent prickings of countless tiny blows, and then dragged off by a hook and plunged into the Tiber—deprived even of common burial. Moreover, for many days and in countless wicked ways, the soldiers of Vespasian raged against the Senate and people of Rome with indiscriminate slaughter.
In the year 825 from the founding of the City, that brief but turbulent tempest of tyrants having been dispelled, a tranquil calm returned under the leadership of Vespasian. For—to go back a little further—the Jews, after the Passion of Christ, being utterly forsaken by the grace of God and beset on every side by all manner of evils, were misled by certain oracles on Mount Carmel which foretold that leaders arisen from Judaea would come to gain mastery of affairs; and, applying this prediction to themselves, they blazed up into rebellion. Having destroyed the Roman garrisons, they also put to flight the legate of Syria, who was bringing aid, after seizing an eagle and cutting down his troops. Against these Vespasian, sent by Nero, had his elder son Titus among his legates; for he led many strong legions with him across into Syria.
And so, when he had besieged and shut in the Jews—after capturing many of their towns—who had gathered especially in the city of Jerusalem on account of the festival day, learning of Nero's death, by the urging of very many kings and commanders—and above all by the opinion of Josephus, leader of the Jews, who, when captured and being cast into chains, had most steadfastly declared, as Suetonius reports, that he would presently be released by that same man, but as emperor—he was adopted into the imperial power; and leaving in the camp, for the conduct of the siege of Jerusalem, his son Titus, he set out for Rome by way of Alexandria. But upon learning of the killing of Vitellius, he halted for a little while at Alexandria.
But Titus, pressing the Jews with a great and long siege, at last broke through the walls of the city by means of engines and all manner of military works, not without much blood of his own men. Yet for the storming of the inner fortification of the Temple, which the enclosed multitude of priests and chiefs was guarding, greater force and delay were needed. When at length this too had been reduced to his power, he gazed up at it on account of its workmanship and antiquity, and long deliberated whether to burn it as an incitement to the enemy, or to preserve it as a testimony of victory. But since the Church of God was now sprouting most abundantly throughout the whole world, this thing—as though worn out and empty and of no good use—had by the judgment of God to be taken away.
And so Titus, proclaimed emperor by the army, burned and razed the Temple at Jerusalem, which had stood from the day of its first founding to the day of its final destruction for one thousand one hundred and two years. He leveled all the walls of the city to the ground. Cornelius and Suetonius report that six hundred thousand Jews were killed in that war; but Josephus the Jew, who himself had charge of that war and had earned pardon and favor with Vespasian on account of his foretelling of the imperial power, writes that eleven hundred thousand perished by sword and famine, and that the remnant of the Jews, driven into various conditions, were scattered throughout the whole world—of whom the number is said to have been ninety thousand persons.
The emperors Vespasian and Titus, celebrating a magnificent triumph over the Jews, entered the City. Among the three hundred and twenty triumphs which had been celebrated from the founding of the City down to that time, this was a spectacle beautiful and before then unknown to all mortals: that father and son, borne in one triumphal chariot, brought back a most glorious victory over those who had offended the Father and the Son. And at once, all wars and tumults at home and abroad having been suppressed, they proclaimed peace for the whole world, and they themselves were the sixth, finally, since the founding of the City, to decree that the twin-gated temple of Janus be held shut with its bars fastened. For rightly was the same honor bestowed upon the avenging of the Lord's Passion that had been assigned also to His Nativity.
Then thereafter, without any tumults of wars, the Roman commonwealth was advanced to an immense extent: indeed Achaia, Lycia, Rhodes, Byzantium, Samos, Thrace, Cilicia, and Commagene were then for the first time reduced into provinces and obeyed Roman judges and laws. But in the ninth year of his reign three cities of Cyprus collapsed in an earthquake, and there was a great pestilence at Rome. Vespasian, moreover, died of a flux of the bowels in his own villa near the Sabines, in the ninth year of his principate. In the year 828 from the founding of the City, Titus—Otho and Vitellius being set apart from the number of the princes, the eighth from Augustus—reigned for two years after Vespasian.
So great was his tranquillity in the empire that he is reported to have shed no one's blood at all in the administration of the commonwealth. And yet at that time, a fire suddenly breaking out at Rome, very many public buildings were burned up. They say that at that time also the summit of Mount Vesuvius, torn open, poured forth great fires, and with torrents of flames destroyed the neighboring region together with its cities and inhabitants. Titus, amid the immense grief of all, was carried off by disease in the same villa in which his father had died. In the year 830 from the founding of the City, Domitian, the brother of Titus, the ninth from Augustus, succeeded his brother in the kingship.
quiperannosxvadhocpaulatimperomnesscelerumgraduscreuit, utconfirmatissimamtotoOrbeChristiEcclesiamdatisubiquecrudelissimaepersecutionisedictisconuellereauderet. isintantamsuperbiamprolapsusfuit, utdominumseseacdeumuocariscribicoliqueiusserit. nobilissimosesenatuinuidiaesimulacpraedaecausaaliospalaminterfecit, aliosinexiliumtrusitibiquetrucidariimperauit. libidinisintemperantiaquidquidcogitaripotest, fecit. plurimasVrbisaedesdestructispopuliRomanirebusextruxit.
He, over the course of fifteen years, grew by degrees through every grade of crime to such a point that he dared, by issuing edicts of most cruel persecution everywhere, to seek to tear down the Church of Christ, now most firmly established throughout the whole world. He fell into such great arrogance that he ordered himself to be called, written of, and worshipped as lord and god. The noblest men of the Senate, for the sake at once of his envy and of plunder, he killed some openly, others he thrust into exile and there commanded to be slaughtered. Whatever can be conceived of unbridled lust, he did. He erected very many buildings of the City out of the destroyed possessions of the Roman people.
He waged war against the Germans and Dacians through his legates, to the equal ruin of the commonwealth, since both within the City he himself mangled the Senate and people, and abroad the enemy destroyed his ill-managed army with constant slaughter. For how great were the battles of Diurpaneus, king of the Dacians, with the commander Fuscus, and how great the disasters of the Romans, I would unfold in a long account, were it not that Cornelius Tacitus, who composed this history most carefully, declared that both Sallustius Crispus and very many other authors had sanctioned the keeping silent of the number of the slain, and that he himself had chosen the same course by preference. Domitian nevertheless, puffed up with most depraved boastfulness, triumphed over destroyed legions under the name of conquered enemies.
And the same man, made savage by the arrogance with which he wished to be worshipped as a god, commanded a persecution to be carried on against the Christians—the second after Nero. At that time also the most blessed apostle John was banished to the island of Patmos. Among the Jews too, by the bitterness of tortures and a most bloody inquisition, it was ordered that the line of David be searched out and put to death, since the holy prophets are at once envied and believed, as though there were still to come from the seed of David one who could attain the kingdom. Yet immediately Domitian was cruelly killed in the Palace by his own people; his corpse was carried out on a common bier by the undertakers and most ignominiously buried.
In the year 846 from the founding of the City—although Eutropius wrote that this was the fiftieth year—Nerva, quite an old man, having been made emperor, the tenth from Augustus, by Petronius the praetorian prefect and the eunuch Parthenius, the slayer of Domitian, adopted Trajan into the kingship, through whom he indeed provided for the afflicted commonwealth by divine foresight. By his first edict he recalled all the exiles—whence also the apostle John, freed by this general indulgence, returned to Ephesus—and, the year of his rule being completed, Nerva, worn out by illness, met his death. In the year 850 from the founding of the City, Trajan, a Spaniard by birth, the eleventh from Augustus, took up the helm of the commonwealth as Nerva handed it over, and held it for nineteen years.
At Agrippina, a city of Gaul, he assumed the insignia of imperial power; soon he restored Germany beyond the Rhine to its former condition; beyond the Danube he subdued many peoples; and he made provinces of the regions situated beyond the Euphrates and the Tigris.
He occupied Seleucia, Ctesiphon, and Babylon. But in persecuting the Christians, deceived by error, he was the third after Nero: when he had commanded that those found everywhere be compelled to sacrifice to idols, and that those who refused be put to death, and very many were being killed, he was admonished by the report of Pliny the Younger—who among the other judges had been appointed a persecutor—that these men, apart from the confession of Christ and their honorable assemblies, did nothing contrary to the Roman laws, and that, indeed, by the assurance of an innocent confession, death seemed to none of them grievous or fearful; and at once, by milder rescripts, he tempered the edict.
Nevertheless, immediately at Rome the Golden House, built by Nero at the expense of all private and public resources, was set ablaze by a sudden fire, so that it might be understood that even the persecution sent forth by another was punished especially in the monuments of him from whom it had first arisen, and in its very author. By an earthquake four cities of Asia were overturned—Elaea, Myrina, Pitane, Cyme—and two cities of Greece, those of the Opuntians and of the Oriti; three cities of Galatia were demolished by the same earthquake; the Pantheon at Rome was burned by lightning; and an earthquake at Antioch almost overthrew the entire city.
Then, by an incredible commotion, the Jews at one and the same time, as though maddened with frenzy, blazed up throughout the various parts of the earth; for throughout all Libya they waged most atrocious wars against the inhabitants, which land was then so desolated by the slaying of its cultivators that, had not the emperor Hadrian afterward led in colonies gathered there from elsewhere, the land would have remained utterly empty, its inhabitants wiped away. All Egypt, too, and Cyrene and the Thebaid they threw into turmoil with bloody seditions. At Alexandria, however, a battle being joined, they were defeated and crushed. In Mesopotamia also war was brought against them as they rebelled, by order of the emperor. And so many thousands of them were destroyed in vast slaughter. They also destroyed the city of Salamis in Cyprus, killing all its inhabitants.
Trajan, as some report, was carried off by a flux of the bowels at Seleucia, a city of Isauria. In the year 867 from the founding of the City, Hadrian, the son of Trajan's cousin, having obtained the principate as the twelfth from Augustus, ruled for twenty-one years. He, instructed and educated through Quadratus, a disciple of the apostles, and through Aristides the Athenian, a man full of faith and wisdom, and through Serenus Granius the legate, by books composed concerning the Christian religion, ordered, by a letter given to Minucius Fundanus the proconsul of Asia, that it be lawful for no one to condemn the Christians without the laying of a charge or proof; and at once he was called Father of his Country in the Senate beyond the custom of his forebears, and his wife Augusta.
Hadrian ordered the commonwealth with most just laws; he waged war against the Sarmatians and conquered. The Jews indeed, agitated by the disturbance of their own crimes and ravaging the province of Palestine which had once been their own, he subdued with a final slaughter, and he avenged the Christians whom they, under their leader Cocheba, were torturing because they would not side with them against the Romans; and he commanded that no Jew be granted license to enter Jerusalem, the city being permitted to the Christians only—a city which he himself restored to the best condition by the building of its walls, and ordered to be called Aelia after his own forename.
In the year 888 from the founding of the City, Antoninus, surnamed Pius, was made the thirteenth emperor from Augustus, together with his sons Aurelius and Lucius, for twenty-two not quite full years. He governed the commonwealth so peacefully and uprightly that he was deservedly named Pius and Father of his Country. In his times, however, Valentinus the heresiarch and Cerdo, the teacher of Marcion, came to Rome. But Justin the philosopher delivered to Antoninus a book composed in defense of the Christian religion, and made him kindly disposed toward Christian men. Antoninus was seized by illness at the twelfth milestone from the City and died.
In the year 911 from the founding of the City, Marcus Antoninus Verus, the fourteenth from Augustus, took up the kingship together with his brother Aurelius Commodus, and remained in it for nineteen years. These were the first to safeguard the commonwealth with equal authority. Then they waged war against the Parthians with admirable valor and good fortune. Annius Antoninus Verus set out for that war. For Vologesus, king of the Parthians, was laying waste Armenia, Cappadocia, and Syria with a grievous incursion. But Antoninus, through most energetic commanders and after great deeds had been done, captured Seleucia, a city of Assyria situated upon the river Hydaspes, with four hundred thousand men, and together with his brother triumphed over the Parthian victory.
And not long after, while he was sitting in a carriage with his brother, he was suffocated by a sudden attack of the disease which the Greeks call apoplexy, and died. When he had perished, Marcus Antoninus alone presided over the commonwealth. But in the days of the Parthian war, persecutions of the Christians—now for the fourth time after Nero—broke out grievously in Asia and in Gaul by his command, and many of the saints were crowned with martyrdom. There followed a plague poured upon very many provinces, and so great a pestilence laid waste all Italy that everywhere villas, fields, and towns, deserted without cultivator or inhabitant, fell into ruins and woodlands.
Indeed they report that the Roman army and all the legions, scattered far and wide through distant winter quarters, were so consumed that the Marcomannic war, which broke out immediately afterward, is said to have been waged only by a new levy of soldiers, which Marcus Antoninus continuously held for three years at Carnuntum. That this war was administered by the providence of God was most clearly declared, both by very many proofs and especially by a letter of that most grave and most temperate emperor.
For when there had risen up peoples barbarous in their savagery and innumerable in their multitude—that is, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Vandals, the Sarmatians, the Suebi, and almost all Germany—and the army, having advanced even to the borders of the Quadi and being surrounded by the enemy, was suffering, on account of a scarcity of water, a more imminent peril of thirst than of the enemy: at the invocation of the name of Christ, which certain soldiers, pouring out in prayer, suddenly with great constancy of faith made openly, so great a force of rain was poured forth that it refreshed the Romans most abundantly and without harm, but drove the barbarians—terrified by frequent strokes of lightning, especially since very many of them were being slain—into flight.
Cutting down their backs even to utter destruction, the Romans brought back a most glorious victory, to be preferred to almost all the titles of the ancients—with a raw and small number of soldiers, but by the most powerful aid of Christ. It is said that even now, among very many people, there exist letters of the emperor Antoninus, in which he confesses that, by the invocation of the name of Christ through the Christian soldiers, both that thirst was driven off and the victory bestowed. And the same Antoninus took his son Commodus into the kingship; he also remitted the tributes of past time throughout all the provinces, and ordered all the slanderous records of fiscal matters to be heaped together in the Forum and burned, and he tempered the harsher laws with new ordinances.
At last, while stationed in Pannonia, he met his death by a sudden illness. In the year 930 from the founding of the City, Lucius Antoninus Commodus, the fifteenth from Augustus, succeeded his father in the kingship and remained in it for thirteen years. He waged war against the Germans successfully. But in all things corrupted by the disgrace of extravagance and obscenity, he very often fought in the school with gladiatorial arms, and in the amphitheatre frequently exposed himself to wild beasts; he also killed very many senators, especially those whom he perceived to excel in nobility and industry. The punishment of the City follows hard upon the outrages of its king.
For the Capitol was struck by lightning, and the conflagration that arose from it consumed in its rapacious whirlwind that library, assembled by the care and zeal of our ancestors, together with the other buildings situated nearby. Then afterward another fire that broke out at Rome levelled to the ground the temple of Vesta and the Palatine and a very great part of the City. Commodus, troublesome to all, is said to have perished strangled in the house of Vestilianus, having been judged an enemy of the human race by his own single judgement. After him the aged Helvius Pertinax, the sixteenth from Augustus, was made emperor by the senate; he, in the sixth month after he had begun to reign, was slain in the palace through the wickedness of Julianus, an expert in the law.
Julianus, after Pertinax was slain, seized the imperial power; but soon, defeated in civil war by Severus at the Mulvian Bridge, he was killed in the seventh month after he had begun to rule. Thus between Pertinax and Julianus a single year was consumed. In the 944th year from the founding of the City, Severus, an African of Tripoli by birth, from the town of Leptis, who refused to be called Pertinax after the name of the emperor whose death he had avenged, having obtained the vacant empire as the seventeenth from Augustus, held it for eighteen years. He, savage by nature and ever harassed by many wars, governed the commonwealth most bravely indeed, but most laboriously. Pescennius Niger, who in Egypt and Syria had aspired to tyranny, he conquered and slew near Cyzicus.
The Jews and Samaritans, who attempted to rebel, he restrained by the sword. The Parthians, Arabs, and Adiabeni he overcame. In the fifth persecution after Nero he tortured the Christians, and very many of the saints throughout the various provinces were crowned with martyrdom. This profane presumption of Severus against the Christians and the Church of God the vengeance of heaven, executed forthwith, followed close upon its track. For at once Severus was hurried, or rather dragged back, from Syria into Gaul to a third civil war; for he had already waged one at Rome against Julianus, another in Syria against Pescennius, and now a third Clodius Albinus was stirring up—Julianus's accomplice in the murder of Pertinax, who had made himself Caesar in Gaul; in whose war much Roman blood was shed on both sides.
Albinus, however, was overwhelmed at Lugdunum and slain. Severus the victor was drawn into Britain by the defection of almost all his allies. There, after waging many great and grievous battles, he judged that the portion of the island he had recovered should be marked off from the other unsubdued peoples by a rampart. And so he drew a great ditch and a most strongly fortified rampart, further strengthened with frequent towers, for one hundred and thirty-two miles from sea to sea. And there at the town of Eboracum he died of illness. He left two sons, Bassianus and Geta: of whom Geta, declared a public enemy, perished, while Bassianus, having taken the surname of Antoninus, gained the kingdom.
In the 962nd year from the founding of the City, Aurelius Antoninus Bassianus, also called Caracalla, the eighteenth from Augustus, attained the principate and remained in it for not quite seven years. He lived harsher than his father, and more unrestrained in lust than all other men, for he even took his stepmother Julia to wife. He, undertaking a war against the Parthians, was surrounded and killed by the enemy between Edessa and Carrhae. After him, the nineteenth from Augustus, Opilius Macrinus, who was praetorian prefect, together with his son Diadumenus seized the empire; but after a year had passed he was at once slain in a military mutiny at Archelais. In the 970th year from the founding of the City, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the twentieth from Augustus, attained the empire and held it for four years.
This man, a priest of the temple of Heliogabalus, left no memory of himself save one infamous for debaucheries, outrages, and every kind of obscenity. And when a military tumult broke out, he was killed at Rome together with his mother. In the 974th year from the founding of the City, Aurelius Alexander, the twenty-first from Augustus, created emperor by the will of the senate and the soldiers, reigned thirteen years with a worthy reputation for fairness: his mother Mamaea, a Christian, took care to hear the presbyter Origen; for, an expedition having at once been made against the Persians, he overcame in a very great battle and crushed their king Xerxes. Employing Ulpian as his assessor, he showed the utmost moderation toward the commonwealth; but in a military tumult he was slain at Mogontiacum.
In the 987th year from the founding of the City, Maximinus, the twenty-second from Augustus, created emperor by the army with no will of the senate—after he had successfully waged war in Germany—carried out the sixth persecution against the Christians since Nero. But at once, that is, in the third year of his reign, he was slain by Pupienus at Aquileia and made an end both of the persecution and of his life. He had sent forth this persecution against the priests and clergy, that is, the teachers, chiefly on account of the Christian household of Alexander, whom he had succeeded, and of Mamaea his mother, and especially on account of the presbyter Origen. In the 991st year from the founding of the City, Gordian, the twenty-third from Augustus, was created emperor and remained in it for six years.
For Pupienus, the slayer of Maximinus, and his brother Balbinus, who had usurped the empire, were soon killed in the palace. Gordian, while still quite a boy, about to set out for the East to the Parthian war, opened—as Eutropius writes—the gates of Janus: which, whether anyone closed after Vespasian and Titus, I do not remember that anyone has written, although Cornelius Tacitus records that they were opened by Vespasian himself a year later. So then Gordian, after huge battles had been successfully waged against the Parthians, was killed by the treachery of his own men not far from Circesium upon the Euphrates. In the 997th year from the founding of the City, Philip, the twenty-fourth from Augustus, was created emperor; he made his son Philip his colleague in the kingdom and remained in it for seven years.
This man was the first of all emperors to be a Christian, and after the third year of his reign the thousandth year from the foundation of Rome was completed. Thus with magnificent games this birthday year, the most august of all that had gone before, was celebrated by a Christian emperor. Nor is there any doubt that Philip referred the grace and honor of so great a devotion to Christ and the Church, since no author shows that he went up to the Capitol or that victims were sacrificed in the customary manner. Both, however, though in different places, were slain in a military tumult and by the treachery of Decius.
In the 1004th year from the founding of the City, Decius, both kindler and queller of civil war, having slain the Philips, seized the empire as the twenty-fifth from Augustus and held it for three years. At once he—by which very act he showed that he had killed the Philips on this account—scattered abroad his deadly edicts for the seventh time after Nero, to persecute and put to death the Christians, and sent very many of the saints from his crosses to the crowns of Christ. He also chose his own son as Caesar: along with whom he was at once slain in the very midst of the barbarians' fastness. In the 1007th year from the founding of the City, Gallus Hostilianus, the twenty-sixth from Augustus, having obtained the throne, held it with his son Volusianus for scarcely two years.