Thus the Spartans, shut in and terrified by the din of enemies resounding on every side, wasted away in almost utter despair. But Conon, after he was sated with the vast devastation of the hostile soil, proceeded to Athens — himself sorrowful amid the greatest joy of the citizens, since he saw the city, once most adorned in population and culture, now wasted by the wretched squalor of ruins and desolation. And so he wrought a great monument of piety and compassion in its restoration. For he filled again with the spoils of the Lacedaemonians that city which had been emptied by the Lacedaemonians, and he rebuilt with Persians the city which had been burned down by Persians setting it ablaze.
Meanwhile Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, as was said at the outset, commanded all the peoples of Greece through envoys to depart from arms and to acquiesce in peace: not because he mercifully took thought for the weary, but lest, while he was occupied with wars in Egypt, some irruption should be attempted into his own kingdom. Therefore, with all the Greeks relaxed in a most longed-for quiet and grown torpid in domestic leisure, the Lacedaemonians — restless rather than energetic, and intolerable through frenzy rather than valor — after wars had been laid aside, attempted stealths of war. For, having spied out the absence of the Arcadians, they broke through their stronghold by a sudden irruption. But the Arcadians, roused by the wrong, with the aid of the Thebans joined to them, reclaimed by war what had been lost by stealth.
In that battle Archidamus, leader of the Lacedaemonians, was wounded; and when he now saw his own men being cut down as conquered, he demanded through a herald the bodies of the slain for burial — which is wont to be held among the Greeks as a sign of victory conceded. The Thebans, however, content with this confession, having given the signal to spare, put an end to the contest. Then, with a few days of truce intervening, while the Lacedaemonians were turned to other wars, the Thebans, with their leader Epaminondas, conceived confidence about invading Sparta as though secure and undefended. Silently, in the dead of night, they came to Sparta; but they found it not so unwary or undefended as they had supposed:
for the old men, armed together with the remaining throng of unwarlike age, having foreknown the coming of the enemy, threw themselves into the very narrows of the gates, and against fifteen thousand soldiers scarcely a hundred men, worn out by age, burst forth. And so, while these were sustaining so great a weight of war, the youth coming up resolved without hesitation to engage against the Thebans in open battle. When battle was joined and the Lacedaemonians were being conquered, suddenly Epaminondas, leader of the Thebans, fighting too incautiously, was wounded. Wherefore, while fear was born in the one side from grief, and stupor in the other from joy, as though by tacit consent both sides withdrew.
But Epaminondas, gravely wounded, when he had learned of the victory of his own men and had kissed his shield, removing the hand with which he had stanched the wound, laid open the exit of his blood and the entrance of death: whose death the destruction of the Thebans so followed that they seemed not to have lost a leader but themselves to have perished with him then. I have woven together the inextricable lattice of a disordered history and, following step by step with words the uncertain orbs of wars driven hither and thither by frenzied madness, I have entangled them, since, as I see, I have written the more disorderly the more I have kept the order.
How great peoples, what manner of cities, what provinces, what motions of hatreds, what causes of contests the wicked lust for domination of the Lacedaemonians stirred up — who could set them in order, whether by number, or by sequence, or by reason? Since they themselves too are reported to have been afflicted no more by wars than by the confusion of wars: inasmuch as, with this war dragged on continuously through several ages, the Athenians, Lacedaemonians, Arcadians, Boeotians, Thebans, and finally Greece, Asia, Persia, and Egypt, together with Libya and the islands, waged the greatest naval and land conflicts at once in indiscriminate skirmishings. I could not report the thousands of men slain, even if I were to count the wars.
But now let him rail at these times and praise those, whoever does not know that all these peoples of those cities and provinces now grow old amid games and theaters alone, just as then they wasted away above all in camps and battles. That most flourishing city of the Lacedaemonians, then aspiring to the empire of the whole East, could scarcely have a hundred old men: so beset by incessant evils, it wretchedly spent its unripe ages: and do men now complain, whose cities, crammed with boys and old men, are enriched by the secure travels of their young men, and acquire by peaceful exercises the wages of domestic pleasure?
unless perhaps — as it is wont for all present things to grow loathsome to human mutability — life itself even becomes a weariness to those itching for novelties of events in the doing and the hearing. In the year 376 from the founding of the City, all Achaia was shaken by a most savage earthquake, and two cities then — that is, Ebora and Helice — were swallowed up by the gaping clefts of the ground.
But I now, on the contrary, could relate things similar in our own days at Constantinople — likewise now the chief among the nations — things foretold and indeed begun but not completed: when, after a terrible warning and a conscience prescient of its own evil, the earth, stirred from its very foundations beneath, trembled, and from above a flame poured down from heaven hung overhead, until, by the prayers of the emperor Arcadius and of the Christian people, God, entreated, averted the present destruction, proving Himself to be alone both the preserver of the humble and the punisher of the evil.
But I would concede these things to modesty, that they be commemorated rather than fully unfolded, so that he who knows may recall and he who does not know may inquire. Meanwhile the Romans, who for seventy years had been subdued and worn down by continual wars with the city of the Volsci, and besides with the Falisci, the Aequi, and the Sutrini, were being consumed; at last, in the days written above, under the leadership of Camillus, they captured those same cities and put an end to the revived conflict. The Praenestines too, at the same time, who by waging war and slaughter had come up to the very gate of Rome, were conquered at the river Allia, with T. Quintius fighting. In the year 384 from the founding of the City, when L. Genucius and Q. Servilius were consuls, an immense pestilence seized all of Rome:
not, as is wont, a temperature of the seasons disturbed somewhat more or less than usual — that is, either an untimely drought of winter, or a sudden heat of spring, or an incongruous moisture of summer, or the undigested allurement of a rich autumn, and besides a corrupting breeze breathed forth from the Calabrian glades — bringing on sudden, fleeting attacks of acute infirmities; but a grave and long-lasting wasting, unequal in no sex, dissimilar at no age, wore down all generally through two continuous years with a consumption, so that even those whom it did not drive to death it dismissed emptied and afflicted with a shameful leanness. The detractors of Christian times would complain at this point, I suppose, if perchance I should pass over in silence by what ceremonies the Romans then appeased their gods and allayed the diseases.
When the plague grew more cruel day by day, the pontiffs as its authors advised that scenic games be staged at the demand of the gods. Thus, in order to drive off a temporary pestilence of bodies, a perpetual disease of souls was summoned. This is indeed for me now a rich occasion for grief and rebuke; but in a matter wherein your reverence has already exercised its zeal for wisdom and truth, it is not lawful for me to venture beyond it: let it suffice that I have given a reminder, and that, whatever my intention, I have referred the reader back to the fullness of that reading. There follows, hard upon this wretched plague and the still more wretched expiation of it, in the next year a sufficiently mournful prodigy. For suddenly in the midst of the City the earth split apart, and through a vast, gaping chasm the regions of the underworld lay open.
Long did that shameless cavern remain, a spectacle and a terror to all with its gaping abyss, and it demanded, at the bidding of the gods as interpreters, the abominable burial of a living man. Marcus Curtius, an armed knight, satisfied those wicked jaws by hurling himself down, and gave to the cruel earth an unlooked-for satiety, for which it was too little that from so great a pestilence it received the dead through their graves, unless it also swallowed the living through its cleft. In the 388th year from the founding of the City, a fearful flood of Gauls again settled near the river Anio at the fourth milestone from the City, and would surely have seized the city, thrown into confusion by the mere weight of their multitude and the eagerness of their valour, had it not grown torpid through idleness and sloth.
There Manlius Torquatus single-handedly began a most savage battle, and Titus Quintius the dictator brought it to a close with a most bloody engagement. Very many Gauls were put to flight in this battle, and when, having renewed their forces, they rushed again into war, they were overcome by the dictator Gaius Sulpicius. A little later too a battle with the Etruscans followed under Gaius Marcius the consul, where one may conjecture how great a number of men was slain, since eight thousand of the Etruscans were taken captive. A third time in those same days the Gauls poured themselves out for plunder through the coastal places and the plains lying beneath the Alban hills; against whom, a new levy of soldiers being held and ten legions enrolled, sixty thousand Romans, the aid of the Latins being refused them, advanced. This battle was brought to an end by M.
Valerius brought it to an end, with the help of a raven, a bird, whence he was afterwards called Corvinus. For when the Gallic challenger had been slain, the enemy, terror-struck and fleeing in scattered bands, were heavily butchered. I judge that there must also be reckoned among the evils that first struck treaty with the Carthaginians, which belonged to those same times; especially since from it such grave evils arose that they seem to have taken their beginning therefrom. For in the 402nd year from the founding of the City, envoys were sent from Carthage to Rome and struck a treaty. That the Carthaginians' entry into Italy would be followed by a hailstorm of evils and by the unbroken darkness of continual miseries, the faithfulness of the histories, the ill repute of the places, and the abomination of the days on which these things were done bear witness.
At that time too the night was seen to stretch on into the greater part of the day, and a stony hail descending from the clouds beat the earth with real stones. In those days too Alexander the Great was born—truly that gulf of miseries and most savage whirlwind of the whole East. At that time too Ochus, who is also called Artaxerxes, after the conclusion of a very great and long-drawn war in Egypt, drove very many of the Jews into deportation and ordered them to dwell in Hyrcania by the Caspian Sea; and the opinion is that there, even to the present day, they abide with the most ample increase of their stock, and will one day break forth from there.
In the storm of that same war he, passing through, both destroyed Sidon, the most opulent city of the province of Phoenicia, and subjected Egypt—though previously conquered, yet now subdued and crushed by the sword of the Persians—to his empire. Now straightway from this point wars were undertaken by the Romans against the Samnites, a people strong in resources and arms, on behalf of the Campanians and the Sidicini; the Samnite war, waged with doubtful issue, Pyrrhus, the very greatest enemy of the Roman name, took up; the war of Pyrrhus was soon followed by the Punic war. And although the gates of Janus, always standing open, show that there was never any cessation from the disasters of wars after the death of Numa, yet from that time, as though pressed by the noonday with the whole sky upon it, the fever of evils blazed white-hot.
Furthermore, once the Punic war had been begun, whether wars, slaughters, ruins, and every kind of unspeakable deaths ever ceased except under the rule of Caesar Augustus—let whoever thinks the Christian times deserving of reproach inquire, find out, and make it known. Yet apart from him, amid the Punic wars, in the brief course of a single year, like a goose flying past, the Romans, on account of the closed gates of Janus, amid the fevers and diseases of the commonwealth, were enticed by this very brief sign of peace as by the slenderest draught of cold water, only to be afflicted far more gravely and violently when they grew hot again with worse.
But truly, if it stands most indubitably established that under Augustus, the first Caesar, after the Parthian peace the whole circle of the lands, with arms laid down and discords abolished, was composed in a general peace and a new tranquillity and obeyed Roman laws; that they preferred Roman justice to their own arms, and, spurning their own leaders, chose Roman judges; and finally that among all nations, all provinces, countless cities, infinite peoples, and whole lands there was one single will to serve peace with a free and honourable devotion and to take counsel for the common good—a thing which before not even a single city nor one people of citizens, nor, what is greater, one household of brothers, could ever continuously have held;
and if moreover, when these things came to pass under Caesar's rule, it is made manifest by the clearest proof that in that very reign of Caesar there shone forth in this world the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ: then, however they may lean upon it, those whom envy was driving into blasphemy will be compelled to acknowledge and confess that this peace of the whole world and most serene tranquillity arose not by the greatness of Caesar but by the power of the Son of God, who appeared in the days of Caesar; and that not to the emperor of a single city, but to the Creator of the whole world the world itself yielded by a general recognition—who, just as the rising sun floods the day with light, so coming with mercy clothed the world in outstretched peace. This will be set forth more fully when, the Lord himself bringing it about, we come to that very point.
Therefore in the 409th year from the founding of the City, the Romans waged war upon the Latins, who were in revolt, in the consulship of Manlius Torquatus and Decius Mus. In this war one consul was slain, the other proved himself a slayer of his own kin. For Manlius Torquatus put to death his own son, a young man, victor, and slayer of Metius of Tusculum, a noble knight and at that moment especially challenging and insulting the foe. The other consul, when in a renewed clash he saw the wing which he commanded being cut down and crushed, of his own accord plunged into the thickest of the enemy and fell. Manlius, though victor, did not earn the triumphal escort of the noble young men of Rome, which is lawfully accustomed to be displayed, being a slayer of his own kin.
In the year following this, Minucia, a Vestal virgin, was condemned for incest committed and buried alive in the field which is now called Accursed. But indeed, after a little time had intervened, it is horrible to relate what was done. For in the consulship of Claudius Marcellus and Valerius Flaccus, the Roman matrons blazed up with incredible madness and love of crimes. It was at all events that foul and pestilential year, and slaughters were now being everywhere borne forth in crowds; and yet all still held a simple belief that it came from corrupted air, when, a certain maidservant turning informer and proving the matter, first many matrons were forced to drink the poisons they had brewed, and then, as soon as they had drained them, they were destroyed.
So great, moreover, was the multitude of matrons privy to these crimes, that three hundred and seventy of them are reported to have been condemned at one time. In the 422nd year from the founding of the City, Alexander, king of the Epirotes, uncle of that famous Alexander the Great, having transported his forces into Italy and being engaged in preparing war against the Romans, and being busy in waging wars around the cities neighbouring upon Rome—seeking to strengthen the might of his army and either to acquire allies for himself or to withdraw them from the enemy—was defeated and killed in a very great battle in Lucania by the Samnites, who were supporting the Lucanian people.
But since I have advanced somewhat in recounting the Roman disasters, and being reminded by the mention of this Alexander, concerning Philip, king of the Macedonians—who had to wife Olympias, the sister of this Alexander of Epirus, by whom he begot Alexander the Great—I shall, going back a very few years, gather great things among small ones as far as I am able. In the 400th year from the founding of the City, Philip, son of Amyntas and father of Alexander, having obtained the kingdom of the Macedonians, held it for twenty-five years, during which he piled up all these heaps of bitterness and every mass of evils. He, first given as a hostage to the Thebans by his brother Alexander, was for three years educated under Epaminondas, a most vigorous commander and a most eminent philosopher.
But when Alexander himself had been slain by the crime of his mother Eurydice—although she, having already committed adultery, and her first-born son being slain and her daughter widowed, had bargained for marriage with her son-in-law by her husband's death—Philip, compelled by the people, took up the kingdom which he had been guarding for the little son of his slain brother. When he was wearied, abroad by the onset of enemies rising on every side, and at home by the fear of plots often detected, he first waged war with the Athenians. These being defeated, he carried his arms over to the Illyrians, and, many thousands of the enemy being slaughtered, he took Larissa, a most noble city. Thence he invaded Thessaly, not so much from love of victory as from desire to possess the Thessalian horsemen, whose strength he wished to mingle into his own army.
Thus, the Thessalians being unexpectedly forestalled and brought under his power, by joining the bravest squadrons and forces of horse and foot he made his army invincible. So, the Athenians being conquered and the Thessalians subjected, he took to wife Olympias, sister of Arybas, king of the Molossians. This Arybas, when by this means—by which he was bargaining the alliance of the Macedonians through kinship with the king—he supposed he would enlarge his own dominion, was instead deceived thereby and lost it, and, made a private man, grew old in exile. Then Philip, while besieging the city of Methone, lost an eye by the stroke of an arrow. The city itself, however, he soon stormed and took. Thence he subdued almost the whole of Greece, having forestalled it by his stratagems, by force of arms.
For while the cities of Greece each desired to rule, they all lost their dominion, and while they rushed without measure into mutual destruction, they at last perceived, when oppressed and enslaved, that all were losing what each had been giving up. While Philip, as from a watchtower, observed their insane wranglings, and—a cunning craftsman of guile—ever fostered the strifes, the kindling of wars, by always supplying aid to the weaker side, he brought both the vanquished and the victors alike into subjection to himself. But to him, for obtaining the lordship of all Greece, the immoderate...
...domination of the Thebans afforded him the opportunity. They had compelled the Lacedaemonians and Phocians—already vanquished and worn down by slaughters and plunderings—to take up arms, since they had moreover burdened them in the common council of Greece with so great a fine of money as those could in no way pay. And so the Phocians, under the leadership of Philomelus and supported by the auxiliaries of the Lacedaemonians and Athenians, joined battle, put the enemy to flight, and seized the camp of the Thebans. In the next battle, amid immense slaughters of both peoples, Philomelus was slain; in his place the Phocians created Onomarchus as leader. Furthermore, the Thebans and Thessalians, abandoning the levy of their own citizens, of their own accord sought Philip, king of Macedonia—whom they had earlier laboured to repel as an enemy—as their leader.
Battle being joined, and the Phocians being cut down almost to extermination, the victory passed to Philip. But the Athenians, on hearing the outcome of the war, lest Philip should cross over into Greece, occupied the pass of Thermopylae by the same reasoning as when the Persians had approached before. Therefore Philip, when he saw himself shut out from entering Greece by the fortification of Thermopylae, turned the war he had prepared against the enemy upon his allies:
for the cities, of which shortly before he had been the leader, lying open to congratulate and receive him, he invaded in hostile fashion, plundered cruelly, and—every sense of fellowship being utterly abolished—sold the wives and children of all 'under the crown,' overthrew and despoiled all the temples too; nor yet, through twenty-five years, was he ever conquered, as though the gods were angry. After these things he crossed over into Cappadocia and there waged war with like treachery, killed by deceit the neighbouring kings whom he had captured, and subjected all Cappadocia to the empire of Macedonia. Then, after slaughters, burnings, and depredations carried out among allied cities, he turned to parricide against his brothers, whom—begotten to his father by a stepmother—he set about killing, since he feared them as co-heirs of the kingdom.
But when he had killed one of these, two fled to Olynthus; which city Philip soon assailed in hostile fashion—a most ancient and most flourishing city—and, having filled it with slaughter and blood, emptied it of its wealth and its men, and gave even his brothers, dragged away, to torture and death. Then, elated by the destruction of his allies and the murder of his brothers, supposing that all things he had conceived were permitted to him, he seized the gold-bearing regions in Thessaly and the silver mines in Thrace; and, lest he should leave any right or law inviolate, having taken control of the sea and dispersed a fleet, he undertook to practise piracy as well.
Moreover, when two brothers, kings of Thrace, disputing about the boundaries of their kingdom, had by common consent chosen him as arbiter, Philip, after the manner of his own character, entered upon the judgement as upon a war, with an army drawn up, and deprived the unsuspecting young men of life and kingdom. But the Athenians, who had earlier repelled Philip's entry by the fortification of Thermopylae, now of their own accord seeking his peace, gave that most fraudulent enemy a reminder of the neglected guard of the entrance.
The other cities of Greece too, that they might more intently give themselves to civil wars, of their own accord subjected themselves to foreign domination under the pretext of peace and treaty; especially when the Thessalians and Boeotians demanded of Philip that he show himself the leader he had professed himself against the Phocians and wage the war undertaken, while the Phocians, calling in the Athenians and Lacedaemonians to their side, laboured by both bribe and prayer either to have the war deferred or removed. Philip secretly promised contrary things to both: confirming by oath to the Phocians that he would grant them peace and pardon, but pledging to the Thessalians that he would soon be present with an army; yet he forbade both sides to prepare for war.
Therefore Philip, with his forces drawn up, untroubled entered the pass of Thermopylae, and, having occupied it, fortified it with garrisons set in place. Then for the first time not the Phocians alone but all Greece perceived that it had been taken captive: inasmuch as first Philip, faith broken and oath trampled, gave the Phocians over to unspeakable mangling; thence, having laid waste the cities and territories of all, he wrought by his bloody presence that he should be feared even when absent. But when he returned into his kingdom, after the manner of shepherds who lead their flocks about now through the summer, now through the winter pastures, he transferred peoples and cities to his own caprice, as the various places seemed to him to be filled or to be abandoned.
Everywhere a pitiable face and the most savage kind of miseries presented itself: continual slaughter without irruption, captivity without war, exile without crime, domination without a victor. Fear, poured over the wretched amid the goads of their injuries, oppresses them, and grief grows by the very dissembling of it, sunk the deeper the less the fearful are permitted to declare it, lest even their very tears be taken for defiance. Some peoples, torn from their own dwellings, he sets down on the borders of the enemy; others he stations on the farthest limits of his kingdom; some, from rivalry of their strength—lest they should be able to do what they were believed able to do—he distributes as a supplement of exhausted cities.
Thus that once most glorious body of flourishing Greece, its liberty first extinguished, fell asunder into many mangled fragments. But when he had practised these things through a good many cities of Greece, and yet pressed all with fear, gathering from the spoil of the few a conjecture of the resources of all, judging a maritime city necessary, with useful profit, for accomplishing an equal devastation upon all, he reckoned Byzantium, a noble city, most suitable to become a refuge for himself by land and sea; and when it resisted, he straightway girt it round with a siege.
This Byzantium, once founded by Pausanias, king of the Spartans, but afterwards enlarged into something greater by Constantine, the Christian prince, and called Constantinople, is now the seat of a most glorious empire and the head of the whole East. But Philip, after a long and fruitless siege, in order to repair by plundering the money which by besieging he had exhausted, took to piracy. And so, having captured a hundred and seventy ships laden with merchandise, he sold them off and relieved his gasping poverty with a little refreshment. Thence, in order to carry on his plundering and to attend to the siege, he divided his army. He himself, setting out with his bravest men, took many cities of the Chersonese and carried off the wealth of the routed peoples. He passed over also to Scythia with his son Alexander with the intent of plundering.
Over the Scythians at that time Atheas reigned; who, when he was hard pressed by war with the Histriani, sought aid from Philip through the Apollonians; but immediately, the king of the Histriani having died and he being freed both from the dread of war and from the need of auxiliaries, he dissolved the agreement of alliance made with Philip. Philip, abandoning the siege of Byzantium, attacked the Scythian war with all his might; and battle being joined, although the Scythians excelled both in number and in valour, they were conquered by Philip's guile. In that battle twenty thousand boys and women of the Scythian race were captured, a great quantity of cattle was driven off, but of gold and silver nothing was found—for that very thing first gave credit to the report of Scythian poverty. Twenty thousand noble mares were sent into Macedonia for the propagation of the breed.
But as Philip was returning, the Triballi met him in war; in which Philip was so wounded in the thigh that his horse was killed through his body. When all thought him slain, they turned to flight and lost the spoil. Then, after a little delay while he recovered from the wound, he rested in peace; but as soon as he had recovered, he made war upon the Athenians. These, placed in so great a crisis, take to themselves the Lacedaemonians, once their enemies but now their allies, and weary the cities of all Greece with embassies, that they might seek the common enemy with common strength. And so a good many cities joined themselves to the Athenians, but some the fear of war drew over to Philip.
Battle being joined, although the Athenians far excelled in number of soldiers, they were nevertheless conquered by the valour of the Macedonians, hardened by continual wars. That this battle was far more savage than all earlier wars the very outcome of events taught: for this day put an end, throughout all Greece, to the glory of acquired dominion and to the condition of its most ancient liberty. Afterwards Philip exercised a most bloody victory upon the Thebans and Lacedaemonians: inasmuch as some of the chief men of the cities he struck with the axe, others he drove into exile, and all he deprived of their goods. Those long since expelled by their fellow-citizens he restored to their homeland: