Now the customary showers and rains, the season being wintry, withheld their accustomed bounty upon the earth, and an unexpected famine fell upon us, and on top of this a pestilence, and besides the outbreak of another kind of disease—it was an ulcer, named from its fiery character 「anthrax,」 the carbuncle—which, creeping over the whole body, wrought perilous dangers upon those afflicted, but moreover, occurring especially and most extensively in the region of the eyes, rendered countless numbers of men, together with women and children, blind.
In addition to these things, there rose up against the tyrant the war with the Armenians, men who from of old had been friends and allies of the Romans, and whom—being themselves Christians and earnestly maintaining their piety toward the Deity—this God-hated man, having attempted to compel to sacrifice to idols and to demons, made enemies instead of friends and foes instead of allies.
All these things, then, flowing together suddenly at one and the same time, refuted the rashness of the tyrant's vaunting against the Deity, because he had boasted that, on account of his zeal for the idols and his besieging of us, neither famine nor pestilence nor indeed war had befallen in his times. These things, therefore, coming on together and at the same moment, encompassed also the prelude of his own overthrow.
He himself, then, together with his armies, was being worn down in the war against the Armenians; while as for the rest of those who inhabited the cities under his rule, both famine and pestilence together grievously wasted them, so that a single measure of wheat was exchanged for two thousand five hundred Attic drachmae.
Countless, then, were those who were dying throughout the cities, but more than these were those throughout the fields and villages, so that the registers of the country folk, formerly numbering many men, now suffered well-nigh complete obliteration, almost all at once perishing through lack of food and through the pestilential disease.
Some, then, thought fit to barter away their dearest possessions to the wealthier for the scantiest morsel of food; others, selling off their belongings little by little, were driven to the extremest destitution of want; and some, already chewing small shreds of hay, and eating without restraint certain destructive herbs, ruined the constitution of their bodies and perished.
And some of the well-born women in the cities, driven by want to a shameless necessity, had gone forth to beg in the market-places, showing a token of their former free-born station by the modesty of their countenance and the decorousness of their attire.
And some, shrivelled up like dead phantoms, gasping out their lives here and there, reeling and slipping from inability to stand, fell down in the midst of the open streets; and, stretched out prone, they kept entreating that some little crumb of bread might be held out to them, and, having their soul at its last gasps, they cried out that they were starving, growing strong only for this one most piteous cry.
But others, dismayed at the multitude of those who begged—as many as seemed to be of the wealthier sort—after they had bestowed countless gifts, henceforth passed over into a harsh and pitiless disposition, expecting that they themselves before long would suffer the same things as those who begged; so that already in the midst of the market-places and lanes dead and naked bodies, cast out unburied for many days, presented a most pitiable sight to those who beheld them.
Indeed, some were already becoming food for dogs; and for this cause especially the living turned to the slaying of dogs, for fear lest, having gone mad, they should work the eating of human flesh.
And not least did the pestilence also feed upon all households and families, but especially those whom the famine, by reason of their abundance of food, was not able to wipe out. At all events, those in affluence—rulers and governors and countless of those in office—as though purposely left by the famine to the pestilential disease, underwent a swift and most rapid end. Everything, then, was full of lamentations, and throughout all the lanes, the market-places and the broad streets, there was nothing else to behold than dirges, together with the flutes and beatings of breasts that customarily accompanied them.
In this manner, then, death, having waged war with the two weapons aforesaid, pestilence together with famine, devoured whole families in a short time, so that one might now see the bodies of two and three dead being borne forth under a single funeral.
Such were the wages of Maximin's vaunting and of the decrees of the cities against us, at the very time when the proofs of the Christians' zeal and piety in all things became manifest to all the nations.
For they alone, in so great a crisis of evils, by their very deeds displayed compassion and love toward man: throughout every day some of them devoted themselves to the care and burial of the dying (and the multitude of those for whom there was none to take care was beyond counting); while others gathered together into one assembly the multitude of those throughout the whole city who were being worn down by the famine, and distributed bread to all, so that the matter became noised abroad among all men, and they glorified the God of the Christians, and confessed that these alone were truly pious and reverent toward God, being convicted of it by the very facts.
Upon these things being thus accomplished, the great and heavenly Champion of the Christians, God, having displayed through the aforesaid events His threat and indignation against all men in return for the things they had excessively done against us, once more restored to us the kindly and radiant beam of His providence concerning us, so that, as in deep darkness, He caused most marvellously a light of peace to shine upon us from Himself, and made manifest to all that God Himself had throughout been the overseer of our affairs—at times scourging and through afflictions in season turning back His own people, and again, after sufficient chastening, showing Himself merciful and kindly toward those who set their hopes upon Him.