駁異教徒史 第 1 章 第 11/24 段

Hannibal, ordered to return into Africa to come to the aid of the wearied Carthaginians, left Italy weeping, after slaying all the soldiers of Italian stock who were unwilling to follow him. As he drew near to the African shore, a certain one of the sailors, ordered to climb the ship's mast and from there to look out what region they held, answered that he had spied a ruined tomb; Hannibal, abhorring the word, turned his course and landed his forces at the town of Leptis. He, having immediately refreshed his host, came to Carthage, and then sought a conference with Scipio. There, when the two most illustrious commanders had for a long while gazed at each other, astounded with mutual admiration, the negotiation for peace being broken off, battle was joined:

which, long arranged by great arts of command, waged with great masses of forces, and accomplished by the great might of the soldiers, conferred victory on the Romans. There eighty elephants were either captured or killed; of the Carthaginians twenty thousand five hundred were slain. Hannibal, having tried everything both before the battle and in the battle, slipped away amid the tumult with a few — that is, scarcely four horsemen — and fled to Hadrumetum. Afterward he came to Carthage, thirty-six years after he had left it as a small boy with his father, and persuaded the deliberating senate that there was no hope left except in suing for peace. In the consulship of Gaius Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Aelius Paetus, peace was granted to the Carthaginians through Scipio, by the will of the senate and people.

Nevertheless more than five hundred ships were brought out to the deep and burned in sight of the city. Scipio, now already with the surname Africanus, entered the City in triumph; and Terentius, who was afterward the comic poet, one of the noble Carthaginian captives, wearing the cap of freedom — which was the badge of the liberty granted to him — followed the triumphing general behind his chariot. In the year five hundred and forty-six from the founding of the City, the Second Punic War was finished, which had been waged for seventeen years. Upon it the Macedonian war immediately followed, which the consul Quintius Flamininus, having obtained it by lot, after many and most grievous battles in which the Macedonians were conquered, ended by granting peace to Philip.

Then he fought with the Lacedaemonians, and when Nabis their leader was conquered, he led before his chariot their noblest hostages, Demetrius the son of Philip and Armenes the son of Nabis. The Roman captives, who under Hannibal had been sold throughout Greece, were all recovered, and with shaven heads, in token of slavery wiped away, followed the chariot of the triumphing general. At the same time the Insubres, Boii, and Cenomani, having gathered their forces into one under the Carthaginian leader Hamilcar, who had remained in Italy, while laying waste Cremona and Placentia, were overcome in a most difficult war by the praetor Lucius Fulvius. Afterward Flamininus the proconsul subdued in war king Philip, and with him the Thracians, Macedonians, Illyrians, and many other peoples besides who had come to his aid.

The conquered Macedonians lost their camp; Polybius writes that eight thousand of the enemy were cut down that day and five thousand captured; Valerius says forty thousand were slaughtered; Claudius indeed records that thirty-two thousand were killed. But this variety of writers is altogether deception; and the cause of the deception is assuredly flattery, while they strive to heap up the praises of the victor and to exalt the valor of their country either for those present or for posterity: otherwise, if the number had not been investigated, neither would any number at all have been stated. But if it is glorious for a general and a country to have slain very many of the enemy, how much more joyful for a country and blessed for a general may it seem to have lost either none or very few of their own.

Thus it is most clearly evident that, by a like shamelessness of lying with which the number of slain enemies is added to, the losses of allies too that have been lost are diminished, or even altogether passed over in silence. Therefore Sempronius Tuditanus, crushed in war in Hither Spain, was killed together with his whole Roman army; the consul Marcellus, overwhelmed by the Boii in Etruria, lost a great part of his army; afterward the other consul Furius came to his aid: and so, laying waste the whole nation of the Boii with fire and sword, they all but destroyed it down to nothing. In the consulship of Lucius Valerius Flaccus and Marcus Porcius Cato, Antiochus king of Syria, contriving a war against the Roman people, crossed over from Asia into Europe.

Then also Hannibal, on account of the rumors of war being stirred up which were spread about him among the Romans, ordered by the senate to be produced at Rome, secretly departed from Africa and went over to Antiochus: and when he found him hesitating at Ephesus, he soon drove him into war. Then too the law, which had been brought forward by Oppius the tribune of the plebs — that no woman should have more than half an ounce of gold, nor use a garment of varied color, nor a carriage within the City — was abrogated after twenty years. In the consulship of Publius Scipio Africanus for the second time and Titus Sempronius Longus, at Mediolanum ten thousand Gauls were cut down, but in the following battle eleven thousand Gauls and five thousand of the Romans were killed.

Publius Digitius the praetor in Hither Spain lost almost his whole army. Marcus Fulvius the praetor conquered the Celtiberians together with the neighboring peoples and captured their king. Minucius, brought into the utmost peril by the Ligurians and surrounded by the enemy's ambushes, was scarcely freed by the diligence of the Numidian cavalry. Scipio Africanus, sent among the other envoys to Antiochus, even held a friendly conference with Hannibal. But the negotiation for peace being unfinished, he departed from Antiochus. In both the Spains, through the praetors Flaminius and Fulvius, very dreadful and bloody wars were waged for both peoples. In the consulship of Publius Cornelius Scipio and Marcus

Acilius Glabrio being consuls, Antiochus, although he had occupied Thermopylae — by whose fortification he might become the safer because of the doubtful outcomes of war — was nevertheless, when battle was joined, overcome by the consul Glabrio and scarcely fled from the battle with a few men and reached Ephesus. He is reported to have had sixty thousand armed men, of whom forty thousand were said to have been cut down and more than five thousand captured. The other consul, Scipio, clashed with the nation of the Boii, in which battle he killed twenty thousand of the enemy. In the following year Scipio Africanus, having as his ally Eumenes the son of Attalus, waged a naval war against Hannibal, who was then in command of Antiochus's fleet;

Antiochus, when Hannibal had been conquered and put to flight and his whole fleet had likewise been lost, sued for peace and of his own accord sent back the son of Africanus, whom it is uncertain whether he had captured while reconnoitering or in battle. In Farther Spain Lucius Aemilius the proconsul was cut down and perished with his entire army by the Lusitanians. Lucius Baebius, setting out into Spain, was surrounded by the Ligurians and killed with his whole army; whence it is established that not even a messenger survived, so that the Massilians took care to announce the very massacre at Rome.

The consul Fulvius, having crossed over from Greece into Gallograecia, which is now Galatia, came to Mount Olympus, to which all the Gallograecians had fled with their wives and children, and there waged a most bitter war; for the Romans, from the higher ground grievously battered by arrows, slingshot, stones, and other missiles, at length broke through right up to close quarters with the enemy: forty thousand of the Gallograecians are reported to have been killed in that battle. The consul Marcius, having set out against the Ligurians and been defeated, lost four thousand soldiers, and, had he not, when conquered, swiftly fled back into his camp, he would have suffered the same disaster of annihilation which Baebius had a short while before received from the same enemies. In the consulship of Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Quintus

Fabius Labeo being consuls, king Philip, who had killed the envoys of the Roman people, obtained pardon on account of the most respectful entreaties of his son Demetrius, whom he had sent as an envoy; and immediately he killed by poison that same son, as though a friend of the Romans and a betrayer of himself — his brother too being an accomplice in the murder of his father — though he suspected nothing wretched of evil concerning either. In the same year Scipio Africanus, long an exile from a City ungrateful to him, died of disease at the town of Amiternum. In those same days too Hannibal, at the court of Prusias king of Bithynia, when he was being demanded back by the Romans, killed himself by poison; Philopoemen, leader of the Achaeans, was captured by the Messenians and slain.

At that time in Sicily the island of Vulcan, which had not existed before, suddenly rose up from the sea, to the wonder of all, and remains to this day. Quintus Fulvius Flaccus the praetor in Hither Spain routed twenty-three thousand men in a very great battle and captured four thousand. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in Farther Spain forced one hundred and five towns, emptied and shattered by wars, into surrender. In the same summer too Lucius Postumius in Hither Spain killed forty thousand of the enemy in war. The praetor Gracchus in the same place again stormed and took two hundred towns.

In the consulship of Lepidus and Mucius, the most ferocious nation of the Bastarnae, instigated by Perseus the son of Philip and lured by the hope of plunder and by the opportunity of crossing the river Hister, was destroyed without any battle or any enemy. For then the Danube, which is also the Hister, happening to be covered over with thick ice, easily allowed a passage on foot. And so, when an incalculable multitude of men and horses crossed imprudently in one vast column all at once, the ice, cracking from the enormity of the weight and the shock of those treading on it, and the icy crust burst asunder, and abandoned the whole column — which it had long sustained — at last overcome and shattered in the midst of the waters, and, drawn over them again with the obstructing fragments, submerged it.

Few out of the whole people, with their bodies barely cut to pieces, escaped along either bank. In the consulship of Publius Licinius Crassus and Gaius Cassius Longinus the Macedonian war was waged, deservedly to be reckoned among the greatest wars. For in aid of the Romans there were first all Italy, then Ptolemy king of Egypt, and Ariarathes of Cappadocia, Eumenes of Asia, Masinissa of Numidia. Perseus and the Macedonians were followed by the Thracians with king Cotys and all the Illyrians with king Gentius. And so, as the consul Crassus was approaching, Perseus met him, and battle being joined, the Romans, pitiably conquered, fled. In the following engagement, with almost equal disaster to each side, they parted into winter quarters.

Then Perseus, having routed the Roman army in many battles, crossed over into Illyricum and by fighting took the town of Sulcamum, defended by Roman garrisons: there he killed a great multitude of the Roman garrisons in part, sold part under the crown, and led part with him into Macedonia. Afterward the consul Lucius Aemilius Paulus fought with him and conquered: for he killed twenty thousand foot-soldiers in that war; the king escaped with his cavalry, but was immediately captured and driven before the chariot in the triumph with his sons, and afterward died in custody at Alba. His younger son, in order to endure poverty, learned the craft of bronze-working at Rome and was consumed there.

Besides this, very many wars of many peoples everywhere, with quite varied outcomes, were waged, which for the sake of brevity I have passed over. In the year six hundred from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Lucius Licinius Lucullus and Aulus Postumius Albinus, when a huge fear of the Celtiberians had invaded all the Romans, and out of them all there was no one who dared to go into Spain either as a soldier or as a legate, Publius Scipio, who would afterward be Africanus, of his own accord offered himself to serve as a soldier in Spain, although he had already by lot been assigned to Macedonia. And so, having set out into Spain, he wrought great slaughters of the peoples, more often even performing the office of a soldier than of a commander; for he also engaged in single combat with a barbarian who challenged him, and slew him.

But Sergius Galba the praetor was defeated by the Lusitanians in a great battle, and having lost his whole army, he himself with a few men barely slipped away and escaped. At the same time the censors decreed that a stone theater be built in the City. But Scipio Nasica, lest it be done even then, opposed it with a most weighty speech, saying that this would be a contrivance most hostile to a warlike people for nourishing idleness and wantonness, and he so moved the senate that it ordered not only all the things prepared for the theater to be sold, but even forbade benches to be set out at the games.

Wherefore let our people understand — those for whom anything that crosses their path beyond the pleasure of lust is an offense — that for this very reason, namely that they themselves feel and confess that they are weaker than their enemies, it is the theaters that ought to be accused, not the times, and that the true God is not to be blasphemed, who has forbidden these things even down to the present, but rather their own gods or demons are to be abhorred, who demanded such things, when by a proof deep enough of their own malice they exacted a sacrifice of this kind, since they were fed not so much by the shed blood of cattle as by the ruined virtue of men. For surely at that time neither enemies nor famine nor diseases nor portents were lacking; nay, at that time they were most abundant; yet there were no theaters, in which — a thing incredible to relate — at the altar of debauchery the victims that are virtues are slaughtered.

The Carthaginians once thought it right to sacrifice human beings, but that ill-conceived persuasion was soon abandoned; among the Romans, however, it was carried so far that they spent their very selves upon destruction. It was done, it is done, it is loved, and there is a clamor that it be done: those who would perhaps be offended at the slaughter of a beast of their own flock rejoice at the killing of the virtue of their own heart. Nay rather let the followers of Nasica blush, who think the Christians should be reproached, and let them complain — not to us about the enemies whom they always had, but to that man about the theater whose holding he had forbidden. Therefore in Spain the praetor Sergius Galba, when he had received into surrender as volunteers the Lusitanians dwelling on this side of the river Tagus, slew them through treachery;

for pretending that he would act for their advantage, he stationed soldiers around them and struck down all of them, unarmed and unwary. This affair afterward became, on account of the Romans' perfidy, the cause of the greatest uprising for the whole of Spain. In the year 602 from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Lucius Censorinus and Marcus Manilius, the Third Punic War broke out. So when the senate had decreed that Carthage must be destroyed, the consuls set out for Africa, and Scipio, then a military tribune, held the camp of the elder Africanus near Utica. There the Carthaginians were summoned and ordered to hand over their arms and ships, and when they did not delay, so great a quantity of arms was suddenly handed over that all Africa could easily have been armed from them.

But after the Carthaginians had handed over their arms, and were ordered to leave the city and withdraw far from the sea, ten thousand paces inland, they turned their grief into desperation, resolved either to defend their city or to be buried by it and along with it; and they appointed for themselves two leaders, both named Hasdrubal. Setting first to making arms, they supplied the scarcity of bronze and iron from mines of gold and silver. The consuls resolved to assault Carthage, whose situation is said to have been of this kind: a wall embracing twenty-two thousand paces, almost wholly girdled by the sea except at a neck which opened over three thousand paces. That place had a wall thirty feet wide, of squared stone, forty cubits in height.

The citadel, whose name was Byrsa, occupied a little more than two thousand paces. On one side the wall was common to the city and to Byrsa, overhanging the sea which they call the Pool (Stagnum), since it is calmed by the obstruction of an outstretched tongue of land. The consuls, therefore, although they had battered down with engines a considerable part of the wall, were nevertheless overcome and driven back by the Carthaginians; and as they fled, Scipio, having driven the enemy back within the walls, protected them. Censorinus returned to the City. Manilius, leaving Carthage aside, turned his arms against Hasdrubal. Scipio, after Masinissa died, divided the kingdom of Numidia among Masinissa's three sons. When he had thereupon returned to Carthage, Manilius stormed and plundered the city of Tezaga; twelve thousand of the Africans were slain there, six thousand taken captive.

Hasdrubal, commander of the Carthaginians, the grandson of Masinissa, was killed in the senate-house by his own people with the fragments of the benches, on suspicion of treason. The praetor Iuventius, having engaged in Macedonia against the Pseudo-Philip, was slain together with a very great slaughter of the whole Roman army. In the year 606 from the founding of the City — that is, in the fiftieth year after the Second Punic War — in the consulship of Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Lucius Mummius, Publius Scipio, consul of the previous year, striving to destroy Carthage by its final doom, entered Cothon. There, while the fighting went on for six continuous days and nights, utter desperation drew the Carthaginians to surrender, begging that those whom the calamity of war had left over might at least be allowed to live as slaves.

First came down a column of women, pitiable enough, then a yet more wretched and unsightly one of men. For it has been handed down to memory that there were twenty-five thousand women and thirty thousand men. King Hasdrubal gave himself up of his own accord. The deserters who had seized the temple of Aesculapius, casting themselves down in a voluntary fall, were consumed by fire; the wife of Hasdrubal, with manly grief and feminine fury, threw herself and her two sons with her into the midst of the conflagration, the last queen of Carthage now making the same exit in death which the first queen had once made. The city itself burned for seventeen continuous days, and offered to its own conquerors a wretched spectacle of the changefulness of the human condition.

Carthage was utterly destroyed, every stone of its walls being ground to dust, in the seven-hundredth year after it had been founded. The whole multitude of captives, except for a few chief men, was sold. Thus in the fourth year from when it had begun, the Third Punic War was brought to an end. But to me — though I seek with all diligence, yet being a man of duller wit — nowhere at all has the cause of the Third Punic War shone forth, by which Carthage so inflamed Rome that it was justly decreed to be overthrown; and this above all moves me, that if, as in the earlier wars, an evident cause and grievance kindled them against a rising rival, there would have been no need of deliberation.

But in truth, since some of the Romans decreed that it must be destroyed for the sake of Rome's perpetual security, while others held that, for the sake of perpetual care for Roman valor — which they always reckoned to themselves out of suspicion of a rival city — Carthage should be left standing in its own state, lest Roman vigor, ever exercised by wars, should be dissolved by security and ease into a feeble sloth: I find that the cause arose not from any injury of provoking Carthaginians, but from the inconstancy of torpid Romans. And since this is so, why do they impute to Christian times their own dullness and rust, by which they are coarse without and eaten away within?

They, moreover, nearly six hundred years ago, as their own prudent and fearful men had foretold, lost that great whetstone of their splendor and keenness — Carthage. And so I shall make an end of this volume, lest perchance, by striking too violently to shake off for a time the rust where I cannot draw out the needful edge, I should find a superfluous roughness. Yet I would by no means dread the roughness that meets me, if I could find hope of an inner keenness. I know that some, after these things, may further be moved by the fact that Roman victories grow frequent amid the slaughter of many nations and cities. And yet, if they weigh it carefully, they will find that more loss befell than gain.

For not lightly to be reckoned are so many wars — servile, allied, civil, of runaways — yielding no fruits at all and yet bringing great miseries. But I yield, that it may seem to have been as they wish; whence I suppose they will say: What was happier than these times, in which continual triumphs, thronged victories, rich spoils, noble processions, great kings before the chariot, and conquered nations led in long array were displayed? To these it will be briefly answered both that they themselves are wont to find fault with the times, and that we have framed our discourse on behalf of those very times — times which, it is agreed, were not assigned to one city alone, but are common to the whole world. Behold, how happily Rome conquers — just so unhappily is whatever lies outside Rome conquered.

Of how much account, then, is this drop of toilsome felicity, to which the blessedness of one city is ascribed amid so great a mass of unhappiness, through which the overthrow of the whole world is wrought? Or if those things are deemed happy because the wealth of a single city was increased, why are they not rather judged most unhappy, in which by pitiable devastation of many well-ordered nations the mightiest kingdoms fell? Or did it perhaps seem otherwise then to Carthage, when after a hundred and twenty years, dreading now the disasters of wars, now the conditions of peace, now with rebellious intent, now in supplication, she exchanged peace for war and war for peace, and at last, with her wretched citizens hurling themselves everywhere into the fire in final desperation, the whole city became one funeral pyre?

For her, even now, small in site, stripped of walls, it is part of her miseries to hear what she once was. Let Spain utter her own verdict: when for two hundred years she watered her fields everywhere with her own blood, and could neither repel nor endure the relentless enemy who unbidden harassed her door to door; when in her various cities and places, broken by the carnage of wars, emptied by the famine of sieges, having killed their own wives and children, they cut one another's throats in wretched concourse and mutual slaughter as a remedy for their miseries — what then did she feel about her own times? Let Italy herself at last speak:

why for four hundred years did she gainsay, oppose, and resist the Romans, her very own people, if their felicity was not her own unhappiness, and if the Romans becoming masters of the world did not stand in the way of common goods? I make no inquiry concerning the countless peoples of various nations, long free before, then conquered in war, led away from their homeland, sold for a price, scattered in slavery — what they then preferred for themselves, what they thought of the Romans, how they judged the times. I pass over the kings of great wealth, great strength, great glory, long most powerful, at last taken captive, fettered like slaves, sent under the yoke, driven before the chariot, slaughtered in prison: of whom it is as foolish to seek out the opinion as it is hard not to grieve at their misery.

Let us, us I say, take counsel about ourselves and about the choice of our own life, in which we have found rest. Our forefathers waged wars; wearied by wars, seeking peace, they offered tributes: tribute is the price of peace. We pay tributes that we may not suffer wars, and by this very means we stand and abide in the harbor to which they at last fled for the sake of escaping the storms of evils. Therefore let me look whether our times are happy; certainly we deem them happier than theirs, since what they at last chose, we continually possess. For the restlessness of wars, by which they were worn down, is unknown to us. But in the ease which they, after the empire of Caesar and the birth of Christ, tasted but thinly, we are born and grow old;

what for them was the owed payment of servitude is for us the free contribution of defense, and so great is the difference between past and present times that what Rome wrenched out by the sword from our forefathers for the use of her own luxury, she now contributes herself, together with us, for the use of the common commonwealth. Or if it is said by anyone that the Romans were more tolerable enemies to our fathers than the Goths are to us, let him hear and understand how differently it seems to him to be done in his own case than it really is. Of old, when wars raged throughout the whole world, and each province used its own kings, its own laws, and its own customs, and there was no fellowship of affections where the diversity of powers was at variance;

in short, what would have brought to fellowship those unbound and barbarous nations, whom, established in diverse rites of worship, even religion kept apart? If, then, anyone at that time, overcome by the bitterness of evils, forsook his homeland together with the enemy, what unknown place did he, a stranger, approach? What nation, generally a foe, did a foe entreat? To whom did he entrust himself at the first encounter, invited by no fellowship of name, drawn by no community of law, made secure by no unity of religion? Or did Busiris in Egypt give too little an example — that most impious sacrificer of strangers who unluckily fell in his way; or the shores of Tauric Diana, most cruel toward foreigners, but whose cruelty was rather sacred rite; or Thrace, with its Polymestor, wicked even toward kindred guests?

And lest I seem to linger over antiquities, Rome is a witness concerning the murdered Pompey, Egypt a witness concerning Ptolemy the murderer. But for me, fleeing at the first disturbance of whatever upheaval, since I am secure about the station of refuge, everywhere is my homeland, everywhere my law and my religion. Now Africa has received me as gladly as I confidently approached; now, I say, this Africa has received me with a simple peace, with its own bosom, with a common law — Africa of which it was once said, and truly said: 'We are forbidden the hospitality of the sand; they raise wars and forbid us to set foot on the first land.' Now of her own accord she opens wide her kindly lap to receive the partners of her religion and her peace, and of her own accord invites the weary, that she may cherish them.

The breadth of the East, the abundance of the North, the wide expanse of the South, the most ample and safest seats of great islands are of my law and my name, because as a Roman and a Christian I approach Romans and Christians. I do not fear the gods of my host, I do not fear his religion as my death; I have no such place to dread, where it is permitted to the possessor to perpetrate what he wills and not permitted to the stranger to apply what is fitting — where there is a law of the host which is not mine. One God, who in the times in which He Himself willed to be made known established this unity of empire, is both loved and feared by all; the same laws, which are subject to the one God, hold sway everywhere;

wherever I, a stranger, shall come, I do not dread sudden violence as one abandoned. Among Romans, as I said, a Roman; among Christians, a Christian; among men, a man — by the laws I appeal to the commonwealth, by religion to conscience, by fellowship to nature. I use every land for the time being as my homeland, because that which is the true homeland, and the one I love, is not on earth at all. I have lost nothing where I have loved nothing, and I have everything when He whom I love is with me — most of all because He is the same among all, who makes me not only known to all but even near to them, nor forsakes me in my need, because His is the earth and the fullness thereof, out of which He commanded all things to be common to all. These are the goods of our times: