History of the Vandal Persecution 1 part 6/7

You may behold some without hands, others without eyes, others without feet, others with their noses and ears cut off; and you may see others, by excessive suspension on stakes, with their heads—which used to project—plucked out and sunk into the midst of their shoulder blades, while those who tortured them by continuous suspension in lofty buildings, by the thrust of their hands setting the ropes in motion, made the hanging man wander to and fro through empty air. These men, sometimes when the ropes broke, falling with a violent stroke from that height of suspension, very many lost the crown of their brain together with their eyes; others, their bones broken, immediately rendered up the spirit; others after a little while breathed their last.

But whoever thinks this fabulous, let him question Uranius, the envoy of Zeno, in whose presence especially these things were done—for this reason, namely, that, coming to Carthage, he boasted that he had come for the defense of the Catholic churches. And, that the tyrant might show him that he feared no one, he stationed more and crueler torturers in those streets and quarters through which it is the custom for envoys to pass, going up to the palace and coming down: to the reproach, namely, of the commonwealth itself, and to the dregs of our now-failing age.

(V, 8) Then too a certain wife of a steward of the king, Dagila by name, who in the times of Geiseric had already many times been a confessor, a noble and delicate matron, utterly enfeebled by lashes and cudgels, is banished to a dry and trackless exile, where no human being might perhaps have access for coming for the grace of consolation, leaving with joy her home, her husband together with her children. To her it is afterward said to have been offered that, transferred to a lesser wilderness, she might enjoy, if she wished, the solace of companions. But she, believing that an immense joy was present to her where there should be no human affection of one consoling, besought that this should not be done.

(V, 9) Then too, when Eugenius the shepherd was already established in exile, the whole clergy of the church of Carthage as well, worn down by slaughter and by the middle of it, nearly five hundred or more, among whom were very many infant lectors, rejoicing in the Lord, are handed over far away to a cruel exile. But I ought not to keep silent about the liberty, freer than the rest, of the deacon Muritta, while they were being cut down in the midst of the city. There was a certain man, Elpidoforus by name, exceedingly cruel and fierce, to whom it had been entrusted to mangle the members of the confessors of Christ with raging torments. For this man had long ago been baptized among us in the church of Faustus, whom the venerable deacon Muritta had received, new-born, from the basin of the font.

But afterward, when he apostatized, he became of such ferocity against the church of God that he was found the chief executor of the persecution above all others. What need of many words? While the presbyters first were being summoned in order to be racked with torments, after the archdeacon Salutaris the aforesaid Muritta is hemmed in with punishments; for he was second in the office of the ministers. When the honorable elder had begun to be stretched out, while Elpidoforus sat and raged, before he was stripped, secretly, by chance, with all unknowing, he was carrying those linen cloths with which, receiving him long ago from the font, he had covered him. When these were waved and at the same time stretched out in the sight of all, he is said by these words to have moved the whole city to weeping and tears:

'These are the linen cloths, Elpidoforus, minister of error, which will accuse you when the Majesty of the Judge shall come; they shall be kept by my diligence as a testimony of your perdition, to plunge you into the abyss of the sulphurous pit: these girded you, unstained, as you rose from the font; these shall more sharply pursue you, blazing in Gehenna, when you begin to possess it, because you have put on cursing like a garment, rending and casting away the sacrament of true baptism and faith. What will you do, wretch, when the servants of the householder begin to gather the invited to the royal supper? Then, at length called, the King, terribly indignant, will behold you stripped of the wedding robe, and will say to you:'

'Friend, how did you come in here not having a wedding garment? I do not see what I conferred, I do not recognize what I gave. You have lost the cloak of the warfare which I wove in the loom of virginal members during ten months, and, stretching it on the little crosspieces of the cross, cleansed it with water and adorned it with the purple of my blood. I do not behold the adornment of my seal, I do not see the mark of the Trinity: such a one will not be able to be present at my banquet. Bind him hand and foot with his own little cords, because he willed of his own accord to separate himself from his brethren the Catholics. He himself stretched out continuous ropes into a noose, with which he both bound his own self, and hindered others, lest they should come to this banquet.'

'Beside the path he set a stumbling-block for many, whom now, with perpetual shame and everlasting dishonor, I have cast out of my banquet.' While Muritta said these and other things, Elpidoforus was scorched before the eternal fire by the fire of conscience, falling silent. (V, 10) And so, all of them readily offering their backs to the lashes, they proceed eagerly to exile. To these, while they were still on the way of the longer journey, by the suggestion of the Arian bishops, merciless and violent men were dispatched, so that whatever Christian compassion had perhaps conferred upon them for their sustenance, to be of profit, should be cruelly taken away. Whereupon each of them perhaps sang more gladly: 'Naked I came forth from my mother's womb;'

'naked it behooves me to go to exile, for the Lord knows how to hold out food to the hungry and to clothe in the desert.' For two Vandals also, often confessors under Geiseric, accompanied by their mother, despising all their riches, went forth to exile together with these same clerics. But concerning the multitude of confessors proceeding, that is, of the clerics of the church of Carthage, at the suggestion of a certain lost lector, Teucharius, those whom he had known to be tuneful, vigorous, and apt for the measures of song, he says by his own designation that twelve infants ought to be separated, whom he himself, while he was Catholic, then had as disciples.

Immediately, at his suggestion, post-riders are sent in haste, and by the force of barbarian fury the number of twelve boys is recalled from the journey. They are separated in body, not in spirit, from the flock of the saints; and they, fearing the headlong fall, with sighs of tears, lest they be torn away, gripped with their hands the knees of their companions: yet heretical violence, separating them with menacing swords, recalled them to Carthage. But when matters were not handled with them by blandishments, as if with those of such an age, they were found older than their years, and, lest they should fall asleep into death, they kindled for themselves the lamp of the evangelical light. The Arians are gravely indignant at this, and blush to be overcome by boys;

Whereupon, inflamed with rage, they ordered them to be subjected continually to cudgels — the very same whom, only a very few days before, they had broken with various beatings. Wounds were heaped upon wounds, and the punishment, renewed again, grew ever more savage. Yet it came to pass, by the strengthening of the Lord, that their tender years did not fail under the pain, but rather their spirit grew, made strong in the faith. These now Carthage cherishes with wondrous affection, beholding, as it were, in these boys a choir of the twelve apostles. They dwell together, they eat together, they sing the psalms in unison, together they glory in the Lord. In those days also two merchants, Frumentius and another Frumentius of that same city, were crowned with an illustrious martyrdom.

Then too seven brothers — brothers not by nature but by grace — who dwelt together in a monastery, having completed the contest of confession, attained the unfading crown (that is, Liberatus the abbot, Bonifatius the deacon, Rusticus the subdeacon, Rogatus the monk, the seventh a monk, and Maximus the monk). For at that time the cruel Arian bishops, priests, and clergy raged together with the king and the Vandals. Indeed, to carry out the persecution, they themselves with their clergy ran about everywhere girt with swords — as did a certain bishop among them, crueller than the rest, Antonius by name, who practiced upon our people things so wicked and incredible that they cannot be told. This man was in a certain city near the desert, which borders on the province of Tripolitania:

who, like an insatiable beast, thirsting for the blood of the catholics, ran about roaring hither and thither to seize his prey. For the impious Huneric, knowing Antonius's ferocity, willed to banish the holy Eugenius into those very desert regions. When Antonius received him to be kept under guard, he hemmed him in with so close a confinement that he allowed no one to come in to him, and moreover plotted to destroy him by various tortures of snares and punishments. But the holy Eugenius, while he endured the hardships of our persecution and wore down his aged body by the harshness of a hair-shirt, and lying upon the bare ground watered the bed of his sackcloth with showers of tears, at length felt the hostile onset of the disease of paralysis.

At this news the Arian, turning to joy, hastened in haste to the cell of exile of the man of God; and when he saw the true bishop, pressed by his suffering, uttering stammering words, he resolved at the same moment to destroy the one whom he was unwilling should survive. He gave orders that sharp and exceedingly bitter vinegar be sought; and when it had been brought, he forced it into the throat of the venerable old man, who refused and resisted. For if the common Lord, who had come for this very purpose that He might drink, when He had tasted it would not drink, how much more would this servant and faithful confessor have utterly refused it, had not the heretical savagery forced it upon him! From this vinegar, especially harmful to that affliction, the disease took increase; but the mercy of Christ, mercifully coming to his aid, afterward made him whole.

(V, 12) The matter itself shows how greatly Antonius was able to harass another of our bishops, Habetdeus, who had been likewise banished to the city of Tamallum, in which Antonius was. For when he afflicted him with various persecutions and yet could not make him an Arian, and saw the soldier of Christ ever steadfast in his confession — for he had promised his own people, saying: 'Unless I make him of our religion, let Antonius be no more' — but when he was found to fall short of his promise, with the devil prompting him he devised another plan. With his feet and hands bound with massive chains he constrained the bishop, and with his mouth stopped up, lest his tongue cry out, he sprinkled water upon his body, supposing it to be re-baptism:

as though water could bind the conscience together with the body, or as though there were not present One who hears the groans of the fettered and searches the secrets of the heart, or as though false water could overcome the resolve of so great a will — a will which the man of God, with tears running down, had already sent ahead as his envoy into heaven. At once he loosed the man from his chains and, as if rejoicing, addressed him with words like these: 'Behold now, brother Habetdeus, you have been made our Christian; what more can you do, save consent to the will of the king?' To him Habetdeus replied: 'That, impious Antonius, is the condemnation of death — where the assent of the will is held captive. I, holding fast to my faith, confessing with frequent voice what I believe and have believed, have defended it by crying aloud.

But even after you bound me with chains and stopped up the door of my mouth, in the praetorium of my heart, with angels writing down my violence, I have set the deed in order and sent it to be read before my Emperor.' (V, 13) Indeed this violence of the tyrants was general. For the Vandals had been everywhere appointed for this purpose, that they might bring those passing along the roads to their priests to be slaughtered. And when they had murdered them with the sword of deceitful water, they handed them a token of their perdition, with a written attestation, lest elsewhere they be dragged off by like violence; for it was not permitted, whether to private persons or to merchants, to pass anywhere unless the wretches displayed their own death, marked by the sign of a brand — that death which Christ had once already shown by revelation to His servant John, where He says:

'No one shall be allowed to buy or sell, save he who has the mark of the beast on his forehead and on his hand.' For their bishops and priests too, with a band of armed men, would go round the villages or towns by night, and thus, scorning the doorposts of the doors, carrying water and a sword, these plunderers of souls would enter; and those whom they found at home — some perhaps asleep in their little beds — sprinkling them with a fiery and thunderous shower, with demonic shouting they themselves likewise called them their Christians, so as to show their whole proceeding to be the sport of their heresy rather than any religion.

In this matter the less capable and the faint-hearted reckoned the sacrilege of defilement as fulfilled in themselves, but the wiser rejoiced that nothing forced upon them while unwilling and asleep could harm them. For many at that very hour cast ashes upon their heads; others, simply because the deed had been done, covered themselves with mournful sackcloth; some smeared themselves with stinking mud, and tearing apart thread by thread the linens violently laid upon them, cast them with the hand of faith into latrines and foul places. (V, 14) Amid such violence — while we ourselves looked on there at Carthage — the son of a certain nobleman, about seven years old, was separated from his parents by order of Cyrila, his mother running through the whole city with loosened hair, without matronly shame, after the abductors, while the little child cried out as best he could:

'I am a Christian, I am a Christian; by holy Stephen, I am a Christian!' But stopping his mouth, they plunged his innocent infancy into their whirlpool. It is proved to have happened thus also with the sons of the venerable physician Liberatus. For when he was ordered by command of the king to be sent into exile with his wife and children, the Arian impiety devised to separate the little sons from their parents, lest through the bond of affection they might overthrow even the parents' resolve. The tender pledges of his sons are torn apart. When he wished to let his tears flow, rebuked by his wife's authority, in the very passage of their departure his tears straightway dried up. For his wife said: 'And for the sake of the children, Liberatus, will you lose your soul? Count them as though they had never been born;

for Christ will assuredly avenge these very ones. Do you not see them crying out and saying: We are Christians?' But what this woman did in the sight of the judges must not be passed over in silence. For while she herself or her husband, though apart, were nevertheless held in the custody of prison, so that they could not see one another at all, word was sent to the woman and it was said to her: 'Loose now your stubbornness; behold, your husband has obeyed the king's command and has been made our Christian.' And she said: 'Let me see him, and I too will do what God wills.'

Therefore, led out from prison, she found her husband standing in chains with an immense multitude before the tribunals; and, supposing true what the enemies had feigned, she laid her hand on him, gripped the edges of his garments nearest his throat, and in the sight of all began to throttle him, saying: 'You lost and reprobate man, unworthy of God's grace and His mercy, why have you wished to glory for a little while and perish forever? What will gold profit you, what silver? Will they free you from the furnace of hell?' And she said many other things. To her the husband replied: 'What ails you, woman? What seems to you, or what perhaps could you have heard about me? I remain catholic in the name of Christ, nor can I ever lose what I hold.'

At this the heretics, conscious of their lie and exposed, could in no way colour over their deceit. (V, 15) And since we have briefly spoken above of the violence of their savagery, very many, dreading this, shut themselves away — some in caves, some in desert places, men and women, with no one privy to it — and there, with no sustenance of food coming to their aid, overcome by hunger or cold, breathed out a contrite and humbled spirit, amid these hardships of affliction bearing the unviolated security of their faith. Thus indeed Cresconius, priest of the city of Mizeita, was found in a cave on Mount Ziques, his corpse already moldering, dissolved in death.

(V, 16) And since we have already spoken above of holy Habetdeus, he then proceeded to Carthage and resolved to approach the wicked king, that he might make manifest even to men the conscience which the Trinity had ever held familiar and dear; nor could Antonius hold him back, on account of his own shame. He offered to the most impious king a petition in words of this kind: 'What, pray, have you now to do with the outcast? Why do you daily contend with those whom you have banished into exile? You have taken away our substance, you have deprived us of our churches, our homeland, our homes; the soul alone remains, which you strive to take captive. O the times, O the morals! The whole world understands these things, and he himself who persecutes sees them.

If what you hold is called faith, why do you harass the members of the true faith with such great persecutions? What have you to do with our exile, what with the needy in this world, whose life is ever in Christ? Let it at least be permitted to those whom you have cast away from the face of all peoples to rejoice in the fellowship of the beasts.' When the bishop of God had said these and like things, the wicked tyrant is reported to have charged him thus: 'Go to our bishops, and follow whatever they shall tell you, for they are known to have full authority in this matter.' But not even this could call Antonius back from his madness, for he knew that on this account he could the more please the impious king. The bishop Habetdeus, however, rejoicing in the good of his own conscience, chose rather to return to his place of exile.

(V, 17) In that storm there came an unbelievable famine, and it began to lay waste all Africa in a single devastation. No rain then came; not a drop at all flowed down from heaven — and not without cause, but by the true and just judgment of God, that there, where in the persecuting Arians water of a miry pool seethed with fire and brimstone, the rain of heavenly indulgence, which had always been present in abundance, should be denied. The whole face of the earth remained ghastly pale.

The vine was not in summer overshadowed with leafy shoots; the standing crops, sprinkled with no dew, did not green the surface of the turf; the olive, ever green and filled with pleasant leaves, did not have the wonted covering of its own beauty; the orchards of fruit-trees, in the wedded earth, had not brought forth the buds of blossoms, and afterward fruit, as they are wont to yield. All things were sad and dismal, and a disaster equal to pestilence had thrown all Africa into confusion. The earth had brought forth no greenness of sprouting grass at all, neither for men nor for cattle. The riverbeds, which once ran with headlong rush, had long since dried up, and the rippling veins of the springs, their perennial flow withdrawn, had likewise dried out.

Sheep and oxen everywhere, and besides them the herds of the field and likewise the beasts of the forests, consumed by starvation, were nowhere at all to be seen. And where perhaps a grassy turf, placed then in a moist valley, had begun to put forth the colour of the rising hay — pale rather than green — at once a burning and fiery blast was there, parching and drying up the whole, for the dusty storm, scorching all things in the arid air, had befogged the whole place. No trade was carried on in that time; no plough, with bullocks drawing, cut and turned over any turf of the earth, for neither were there oxen present nor had any farmsteads at all remained. Moreover, one band of the country-folk had perished, and presently what perhaps survived was already seeking burial.

And since, the hardship of famine pressing, neither trade was carried on as we have said, according to custom, nor was the due cultivation rendered to the land, throngs of young men, old men, youths and maidens, boys and even girls — at once both crowds and funerals — were scattered everywhere where they could, as they could, going around the towns, villages, and the several cities. For, turned aside into a perverse bow and provoking God to the water of contradiction, they suffered hunger like dogs — not that they might eat bread, but that they might feel hostile that Trinity which they had denied. Some, scattered through the fields; others sought the recesses of the forests, seeking out ancient roots of herbs or other refuse.

Many, when they strove to go out from home, collapsing on the very threshold, fell in heaps with hunger overpowering them; the streets and paths, filled with corpses, by the stench of the exhaling dead denied passage to the living on every side. Nor were there lacking, daily and everywhere, the funerals of the dying, and there was no strength to bestow the burial of compassion; for the living did not suffice for burying, with famine reigning and they themselves about to die after a little while. Each one longed to consign his own liberty and that of his children to perpetual servitude, and they could find no taker. The mountains and hills, the squares of the cities, the roads and paths had made one sepulchre everywhere for all whom starvation, feeding upon them, had denied sustenance.

But the Vandals themselves, whom the frequent spoils of many provinces and the holding of Africa had at first made rich, were tormented by an even greater want; and as much as they seemed proud in the heaping up of slaves, so much the more did they fail, worn down by tormenting hunger. No one kept his son, no one his wife, no one his own slave; but each, going out not where he wished but where he was able, either at once perished or never at all returned. The unhappy multitude was driven to gather itself to the very city of Carthage:

and while corpses, scarcely yet animate, flowed thither in throngs, when the king saw the slaughter of those carried in to die, he at once ordered all to be driven out of the city, lest the contagion of the dying should prepare a common sepulchre for his army as well. He therefore commanded each to be recalled to his own provinces and homes; but there were none who might return, since both bore their own burial in their faces. And on this account perhaps a greater perdition of the re-baptized was able to come about, because, while a passing-over of the present life was promised by the Arians, neither did that come to pass, and a second death, following the first, supervened.

To such a degree did famine, laying all waste, claim dominion for itself, that not a few places, even very populous ones, with their inhabitants extinguished, now lie at rest in deep silence, only the walls standing. (V, 18) But why do I linger now upon this, which I am unable to set forth? For if those men now survived, and it were permitted them to speak of such things, both the river of Tullian eloquence would be dried up and Sallust would remain in every way tongueless. And — to pass over outsiders unworthy of so great a matter — if Eusebius of Caesarea should rise up, equal to this task, or his translator Rufinus, adorned with Greek eloquence and Latin flowers — and why say much? — neither Ambrose, nor Jerome, nor our own Augustine himself would suffice.

Hear this, all you peoples; give ear, all you who dwell in the world, both you that are earth-born and you sons of men, rich and poor together. Some of you who love the barbarians and at times praise them to your own condemnation: examine the name and understand the character. Could they be called by any other proper name than that they should be called barbarians — possessing surely the very word of ferocity, of cruelty, and of terror? However much you cherish them with gifts, however much you soothe them with deferences, they know nothing else but to envy the Romans. And as far as concerns their own will, they ever long to cloud over the splendour and the lineage of the Roman name;

they desire that no Roman at all should live; and where they are still known to spare the subjected, they spare them for the using of their services — for they have never loved any Roman. If barbarian ferocity strove to dispute with us about the faith, and the Arian heresy disputed reasonably — but when did it hold to reason, which separates from God the Father God the Son the Saviour? — why did they act with deceits and slanders, and, like the squall of a storm-spirit, will to overturn everything in their fury? If an episcopal disputation had been necessary, why the hangings, why the fires, why the hooks together with the crosses? Why did the serpentine offspring of the Arians invent against the innocent such kinds of torments as not even Mezentius himself sought out?

The greed of fury and the avarice of cruelty fought against innocence, that they might both destroy souls and plunder substance. If a conference was desired, why the plundering of others' goods — not only of priests, but indeed of all the laity? But those who were despoiled rejoiced, and received the plunder of their goods with joy. (V, 19) Let now, I pray, every age, every sex and every condition be present; let, I beseech, the whole throng of the catholic name be present, which is borne in the maternal bosom throughout the whole world, because it alone knows how to lend a true affection, having learned from Paul its master both to rejoice with those who rejoice and to lament with those who mourn.

Let them come together to the house of our grief, and with equal eyes let us pour out rivers of tears, since there is one cause and one concern of our faith. I want no heretic to come to grieve with me, who perhaps desires to add to the pain of my wounds and rejoices daily at my evils. I want not — no, I want not — the stranger, but I seek the brotherly affection; I want not the children of aliens, whose mouth has spoken vanity and whose right hand is a right hand of iniquity, because the alien children have always lied to me, who have grown old and have halted from their paths. These say to me daily: 'Where is your God?' while the people, purchased with the precious blood of the Lamb, is afflicted.

Amid their reproaches I, made ready for the scourges, cease not to sing to the Lord who scourges me: 'Remove your scourges from me, for I have failed — not from the strength of your hand, but from the persecution of the Arian heresy.' Let all come who tread the way of the narrow road with me and for the sake of the words of God's lips keep the hard ways, and let them see whether there is any sorrow like my sorrow, for I have been gathered as a vintage in the day of the Lord's wrath. All my enemies have opened their mouth upon me; they have hissed and gnashed with their teeth; they have said: 'We have devoured her; for this is the day we were waiting for: we have found it, we have seen it.'

Be present, angels of my God, who are never absent, appointed in your ministry for the sake of those who are to obtain the inheritance of eternal salvation, and behold all Africa, lately upheld by the squadrons of so many churches, now made desolate by all; adorned with so many ranks of priests, now sitting a widow and cast down. Her priests and her elders have failed in desert places and on islands, seeking food for themselves to eat, and they find none. Consider and see, you words of Zion: the city of our God has become vile, made as it were polluted with menstrual uncleanness among her enemies.