But immediately, when Pompeius, contrary to the compact, was enlisting runaway slaves, he was treated as a public enemy. Mena, a freedman of Pompeius, defected to Caesar with a fleet of sixty ships, and he himself, by Caesar's command, was put in charge of that same fleet. And straightway, together with Statilius Taurus, he waged a naval war against Menecrates, a Pompeian commander. Then Caesar himself brought to an end a most bloody naval war against these same Pompeians; but immediately he lost almost his whole victorious fleet by shipwreck off Scylaceum. Ventidius routed the Persians and Parthians as they burst into Syria in three very great battles and slew their king Pacorus in the line of battle—on that very day, namely, on which Crassus had been slain by the Parthians.
Antonius, having scarcely stormed a single fortress, made peace with Antiochus, so that he himself might seem to have accomplished some great thing. He set Ventidius over Syria and ordered him to make war upon Antigonus, who had then by chance subdued the Jews, and, Jerusalem having been captured, had despoiled the temple and given the kingdom to Herod; Ventidius straightway received him in surrender after defeating him. The freedman Mena returned with six ships to Pompeius, and, mercifully received by him, set fire to Caesar's fleet—although Caesar had lately lost another fleet in a second shipwreck. And this same Mena afterward, surrounded by Agrippa in a naval engagement, crossed over to Caesar with six triremes. But Caesar, granting him only his life, left this thrice-turned deserter to inactivity.
Then Agrippa waged a naval engagement between Mylae and Lipara against Demochares and Pompeius and won; and there at that time he either sank or captured thirty ships, the rest being shattered. Pompeius fled to Messana. Caesar meanwhile had crossed over to Tauromenium; him Pompeius struck down by a sudden onset, whereby, with many of his ships sunk and a great multitude of his soldiers lost, Caesar fled into Italy; and without any intervening delay he returned into Sicily; and there he found Lepidus coming up to meet him from Africa, claiming the chief role for himself with terror, threats, and arrogance. After a few days Agrippa, by Caesar's command, while Caesar watched from the shore with the battle line drawn up, fought a most savage naval engagement against Pompeius and won.
For he either sank or captured one hundred and sixty-three ships. Pompeius scarcely slipped away and escaped with seventeen ships. Lepidus, swelling with the great insolence of twenty legions, when he had given over Messana to be plundered by his soldiers, scorned Caesar himself once and again as he came to him, and rather ordered him to be assailed with weapons. Caesar, by warding them off with the cloak gathered on his left arm, avoided these; then, putting his horse to the gallop, he returned to his own men, and, his army drawn up, coming against Lepidus, he compelled very many of Lepidus's legions, a few being killed, to cross over to his side.
Lepidus, at last understanding whither his vanity was tending, laid aside his general's cloak and put on dark mourning garb, and, becoming a suppliant to Caesar, obtained his life and his goods—though banished into perpetual exile. Taurus, Caesar's prefect, having tried and terrified almost all Sicily with the sword, received it into allegiance. Forty-four legions were then under the single command of Caesar; the soldiers, more ferocious by reason of their multitude, stirred up certain tumults over the receiving of lands; but Caesar, great of soul, discharged twenty thousand soldiers, restored thirty thousand slaves to their masters, and crucified six thousand whose masters did not survive. Entering the City in ovation, it was decreed by the senate that he should hold the tribunician power in perpetuity.
In these days, across the Tiber, from a wayside tavern a spring of oil gushed out of the ground and flowed in a most copious stream throughout the whole day. But Antonius, after he had crossed the Araxes, surrounded on every side by all manner of evils, scarcely at last returned to Antioch with a few men. For although he had always escaped, defeated by the multitude of cavalry and archers, from all the battles which he attempted in great number, then besides, hindered by the uncertain and unknown places of the region, he was driven by most grievous famine to abominable food; and very many of his soldiers gave themselves up to the enemy. Thence he crossed over into Greece and ordered Pompeius—who, defeated by Caesar, was rebuilding his army and the war—to come to him with a few men.
Pompeius, fleeing, was often defeated by Titius and Furnius, the commanders of Antonius, in land and naval war, and was captured and shortly afterward killed. Caesar subdued and tamed Illyricum, Pannonia, and a part of Italy by wars; Antonius captured Artabanes, king of Armenia, by treachery and guile; him, bound with a silver chain, he forced to a confession of the royal treasures, and, having stormed the town in which he had revealed them to be stored, carried off a great quantity of gold and silver. Elated by this money, he ordered war to be declared against Caesar, a divorce to be announced to Octavia, Caesar's sister and his own wife, and commanded Cleopatra to come to meet him from Alexandria.
He himself set out for Actium, where he had stationed his fleet; and when he had found that nearly a third part of the rowers had been carried off by famine, he said, untroubled: 'Let only the oars be safe; for rowers will not be lacking, so long as Greece shall have men.' Caesar set out from Brundisium into Epirus with two hundred and thirty beaked ships. But Agrippa, sent ahead by Caesar, captured many freighters heavy with grain and arms coming from Egypt, Syria, and Asia as a reinforcement for Antonius, and, having traversed the gulf of the Peloponnesians, stormed the city of Mothone, fortified with a very strong Antonian garrison. Thence he captured Corcyra; pursuing the fugitives in a naval engagement he routed them, and, after very many things had been most bloodily accomplished, he came to Caesar.
Antonius, alarmed by the defection and famine of his soldiers, resolved to hasten the war, and, his forces suddenly drawn up, advanced to Caesar's camp and was defeated. On the third day after the battle Antonius moved his camp to Actium, prepared to decide the matter in a naval engagement. Caesar's ships were two hundred and thirty beaked vessels and thirty without beaks, triremes equal in speed to the Liburnian ships, and eight legions set aboard the fleet, besides five praetorian cohorts. The fleet of Antonius was of one hundred and seventy ships, as much surpassing in size as it yielded in number, for they stood ten feet in height above the sea. Famous and great was this war at Actium.
From the fifth hour until the seventh, with the hope of victory uncertain, most grievous slaughter was done on both sides; the rest of the day, with the following night, inclined to the victory of Caesar. First the queen Cleopatra fled with sixty of the swiftest ships; Antonius too, having stripped off the ensign of his admiral's ship, followed his fleeing wife. As the day was now dawning, Caesar completed the victory. Of the vanquished it is reported that twelve thousand fell, six thousand were wounded, of whom a thousand died during their treatment. Antonius and Cleopatra resolved to send their common children ahead with part of the royal treasure to the Red Sea; they themselves, with garrisons disposed about the two horns of Egypt, Pelusium and Paraetonium, made ready their fleet and forces to renew the war.
Caesar, hailed imperator for the sixth time and consul for the fourth time, himself with Marcus Licinius Crassus, came to Brundisium; there he arranged the garrisons of the whole world, the legions being divided; thence, setting out into Syria, he soon reached Pelusium, where he was readily received by the Antonian garrisons. Meanwhile Cornelius Gallus, sent ahead by Caesar, received into allegiance four legions which Antonius had stationed near Cyrene as a garrison, and thence, having defeated Antonius, captured Paraetonium, the first city of Egypt from the side of Libya, and straightway defeated Antonius himself near Pharos. He, in turn, entered upon a cavalry war against Caesar; in this too, miserably defeated, he fled.
On the Kalends of Sextilis, at first light, when Antonius had gone down into the harbor to draw up his fleet, suddenly all the ships went over to Caesar; and when he had been stripped of his sole protection, he, trembling, withdrew with a few men into the palace. Then, with Caesar pressing on and the city in turmoil, this same Antonius ran himself through with the sword, and, half-alive, was carried to Cleopatra in the monument in which she, resolved to die, had concealed herself. Cleopatra, after she understood that she was being kept for the triumph, seeking a voluntary death, was found lifeless, touched (as is supposed) by the bite of a serpent on her left arm, though Caesar in vain even brought up the Psylli, who are wont to recall and suck out the poisons of serpents from the wounds of men by drawing them off.
Caesar, as victor, gained possession of Alexandria, a city by far the most wealthy and the greatest of all. For Rome too was so increased by his resources that, because of the abundance of money, the prices of properties and of other things for sale were fixed at double what they had been up to that time. By Caesar's command were slain the elder son of Antonius and Publius Canidius—indeed always most hostile to Caesar, yet also faithless to Antonius—and Cassius of Parma, the last victim of the violated father Caesar, and Quintus Ovinius, chiefly on account of that disgrace, that he, a senator of the Roman people, had not blushed most obscenely to preside over the queen's wool-working and weaving.
Thereupon Caesar came with his land forces into Syria, then withdrew into Asia to winter quarters, and afterward, passing through Greece, was conveyed to Brundisium. In the year 725 from the founding of the City, when the emperor Caesar Augustus himself for the fifth time and Lucius Apuleius were consuls, Caesar, returning victorious from the East, entered the City on the eighth day before the Ides of January in a triple triumph; and then for the first time he himself closed the gates of Janus, all civil wars being lulled and ended. On this day Augustus was first hailed by that title; which name, before inviolate to all and even to this day not ventured upon by any other lords, declares only the lawfully assumed summit of empire over the world; and from that same day the sum of affairs and powers began to be in the hands of one man and so remained—which the Greeks call monarchy.
Moreover, that this is the very same day—that is, the eighth before the Ides of January—on which we observe the Epiphany, that is, the appearing or manifestation of the Lord's sacrament, no one of the believers nor even of those who contradict the faith is ignorant. Concerning the sacrament of this our most faithful observance, neither reason nor place now demands that we speak more fully; so that we may seem both to have reserved it for those who seek and not to have forced it upon those who neglect it. But it was fitting to have recalled this faithfully for this reason: that through all things the empire of Caesar may be proved to have been prepared by the grace of the Christ who was to come. For when first, his great-uncle Gaius
Caesar having been killed, as Octavian was returning from Apollonia and entering the City, at about the third hour, suddenly, the sky being clear and pure and serene, a circle in the likeness of a heavenly rainbow encompassed the orb of the sun, as though it pointed him out as the one and most powerful man in this world and the only most illustrious one upon the earth—in whose time He was about to come who alone both had made and would govern that very sun and the whole world. Then, when for the second time, the legions in Sicily having been received from Pompeius and Lepidus, he had restored thirty thousand slaves to their masters and alone had distributed forty-four legions under his own command for the protection of the world, and, entering the City in ovation, had decreed that all the former debts of the Roman people be forgiven, the records also in the documents being abolished:
in those very days a most copious spring of oil, as I expressed above, flowed from a wayside tavern throughout the whole day—by which sign what could be more evidently declared than the coming birth of Christ in the days of Caesar reigning over the whole world? For 'Christ,' in the tongue of the nation in which and from which He was born, is interpreted 'anointed.' And so, since at that time, when the perpetual tribunician power was decreed to Caesar, a spring of oil flowed at Rome throughout the whole day: under the principate of Caesar and the Roman empire, throughout the whole day—that is, throughout all the time of the Roman empire—Christ and from Him the Christians, that is, the anointed,
and from that One the anointed ones, from the wayside tavern—that is, from the hospitable and bountiful Church—would proceed abundantly and unceasingly; and through Caesar all slaves would be restored who nevertheless acknowledged their master, while the rest, who should be found without a master, were to be given over to death and punishment; and under Caesar the debts of sins would be remitted in that city in which oil had flowed of its own accord—most evident signs in heaven and prodigies on earth disclosed these things to those who would not hear the voices of the Prophets.
But for the third time, when he entered the City in triumph as consul for the fifth time—namely on that day which we named above—when both he himself first closed Janus after two hundred years and assumed that most illustrious name of Augustus: what can be believed or known more faithfully and more truly, when there concurred toward so great a manifestation peace, a name, and a day—than that this day was, by a hidden order of events indeed, predestined for the service of His preparation, who on that very day, on which He was a little later to be manifested to the world, both displayed the sign of peace and assumed the name of power? But what in the fourth return, when the Cantabrian war had been finished,
and all the nations having been pacified, Caesar sought the City again, what was done toward the attestation of the faith which we set forth, will better be brought out in its own order. In the year 726 from the founding of the City, when the emperor Augustus Caesar for the sixth time and twice Marcus Agrippa were consuls, Caesar, understanding that little had been accomplished in Spain in the course of two hundred years if he should allow the Cantabri and the Astures, two most valiant nations of Spain, to use their own laws, opened the gates of Janus and himself set out into the Spains with an army. The Cantabri and the Astures are a portion of the province of Gallaecia, where the extended ridge of the Pyrenees is drawn down not far from the second Ocean under the north.
These, not only prepared to defend their own liberty but daring also to snatch away that of their neighbors, were ravaging the Vaccaei, the Turmogi, and the Autrigones with constant raids. Therefore Caesar pitched camp near Segisama, embracing almost the whole of Cantabria with three columns. After his army had long been wearied in vain and often led into danger, at last he ordered that a fleet be brought up from the Aquitanian gulf through the Ocean and his forces be landed while the enemy was off their guard. Then at last the Cantabri, having engaged in a very great battle beneath the walls of Attica and being defeated, fled to Mount Vinnius, most secure by nature, where they were almost utterly consumed to the last by the famine of the siege. Then the town of Racilium, resisting with great force and for a long time, was at last captured and demolished.
Besides, the legates Antistius and Firmius thoroughly subdued the farther parts of Gallaecia, which, planted thick with mountains and forests, are bounded by the Ocean, in great and grievous wars. For they also girt with a siege Mount Medullius, overhanging the river Minius, on which a great multitude of men was defending itself, having enclosed it round with a trench for fifteen miles. And so, when that race of men, savage and fierce by nature, perceived itself neither equal to enduring the siege nor a match for undertaking the war, it rushed of its own accord to a voluntary death out of fear of slavery. For almost all of them slew themselves vying with one another by fire, sword, and poison. But the Astures, having pitched camp by the river Astura, would have overwhelmed the Romans with great plans and forces, had they not been betrayed and forestalled.
Having endeavored suddenly to overwhelm three legates with their legions, divided into three camps, with three columns likewise, they were detected by the betrayal of their own men. These men afterward Carisius, taking them in war, overcame, with no small disaster also of the Romans. Part of them, slipping out of the battle, fled to Lancia. And when the soldiers were preparing to assail the surrounded city with fire, the commander Carisius both obtained from his own men a ceasing of the burning and exacted from the barbarians a willingness to surrender. For he strove earnestly to leave the city whole and unharmed as a witness of his victory. Caesar conferred this honor upon the Cantabrian victory, that he then too ordered the gates of war to be held shut with the bolt. So then for the second time through Caesar, the fourth time since the founding of the City, Janus was closed.
After this Claudius Drusus, the stepson of Caesar, having been allotted Gaul and Raetia, subdued by arms the greatest and most valiant nations of Germany. For then, as though they were hastening to an appointed day of peace, so all the nations were stirred up wave upon wave to the trial of war or the decision of a treaty, either to accept terms of peace if they should be conquered, or to enjoy quiet liberty if they should conquer. The Norici, Illyrii, Pannonii, Dalmatae, Moesi, Thraces and Daci, the Sarmatae, and very many and very great peoples of Germany, through various commanders, were either overcome or repressed or even shut off by the barrier of the greatest rivers, the Rhine and the Danube. Drusus in Germany subdued first the Usipetes, then the Tencteri and the Catti. The Marcomanni he cut down almost to annihilation.
Afterward he overcame in a single war the most valiant nations, to whom nature gave strength and habit gave experience of their strength—the Cherusci, the Suebi, and the Sygambri together—a war harsh even to his own men. Their valor and ferocity can be estimated from this, that their women too, whenever, forestalled by the Romans, they were shut up among their wagons, when their weapons or whatever thing fury could use as a weapon failed them, would dash their little sons to the ground and hurl them into the faces of the enemy, twice parricides in the several slayings of their sons. Then too in Africa, Cossus, a commander of Caesar, confined within narrowed bounds the Musolani and the Gaetuli, who roamed more widely, and compelled them by fear to keep away from the Roman frontiers.
Meanwhile, at Tarraco, a city of Hither Spain, envoys of the Indians and of the Scythians, having traversed the whole world, at last found Caesar there—beyond which they could no longer seek—and they poured back upon Caesar the glory of Alexander the Great: for just as an embassy of Spaniards and Gauls had approached Alexander in the middle of the East, at Babylon, in contemplation of peace, so the eastern Indian and the northern Scythian, as suppliants with their native gift, entreated this man in Spain, at the farthest end of the West. The Cantabrian war having been waged for five years, and the whole of Spain, with a certain respite of weariness, reclined and laid to rest in eternal peace, Caesar returned to Rome. In these days too he waged many wars by himself and many through his commanders and legates.
For among others Piso too was sent against the Vindelici; and when these had been subdued, he came as victor to Caesar at Lugdunum. Tiberius, the stepson of Caesar, destroyed with most bloody slaughter the Pannonians, swelling up in a new uprising. And immediately he set upon the Germans in war, from whom as victor he led away forty thousand captives. This indeed was a very great and most fearful war, waged with fifteen legions over three years, nor was there almost any greater war, as Suetonius attests, since the Punic War. But under that same time Quintilius Varus, with three legions, conducting himself with marvelous arrogance and avarice toward the subject peoples, was utterly destroyed by the rebelling Germans.
This disaster to the commonwealth Caesar Augustus bore so grievously that he would often, through the force of grief, dash his head against the wall, crying out: 'Quintilius Varus, give back the legions!' Agrippa, moreover, overcame the Bosporani and, the Roman standards which they had once carried off under Mithridates having been recovered by war, compelled the vanquished to surrender. The Parthians—as though, the whole world being either subdued or pacified, they alone were marked out by the eyes of all, and the whole vigor of the Roman empire were to be turned against them only, since indeed the long-standing consciousness of avenging the Crassian slaughter gnawed at them—of their own accord sent back to Caesar the standards which they had carried off when Crassus was slain, and, royal hostages having been handed over, earned a firm treaty by faithful supplication.
And so in the year 752 from the founding of the City, Caesar Augustus, all nations from east to west, from north to south, and throughout the whole circuit of the Ocean having been composed in one peace, then for the third time himself closed the gates of Janus. These, from that time barred for nearly twelve years in ever most tranquil ease, even rust itself sealed; nor were they ever opened before, except under the extreme old age of Augustus, struck by the sedition of the Athenians and the commotion of the Dacians. The gates of Janus being therefore closed, Caesar, eager to nourish and enlarge by peace the commonwealth which he had sought by war, established very many laws through which the human race might keep good order by a free reverence for discipline. The title of 'lord' he, as a man, declined.
For when, as he himself was watching the games, the line 'O just and good lord!' had been spoken in a mime, and the whole people, exulting as though it had been said of him, had applauded their approval, he at once checked their unseemly flatteries by gesture and look, and on the following day rebuked them by a most severe edict; and thereafter he would not suffer himself to be called 'lord' even by his own children or grandchildren, whether in earnest or in jest. Therefore at that time, that is, in that very year in which Caesar by the ordinance of God established the firmest and truest peace, Christ was born, to whose coming this peace ministered, and at whose rising the exulting angels sang in the hearing of men: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.'
And at that same time this man, to whom the supreme command of all things had passed, did not suffer—nay, did not dare—to be called lord of men, at the very moment when the true Lord of the whole human race was born among men. In that same year also, this Caesar, whom God had foreordained for these great mysteries, for the first time ordered a census to be taken of every several province throughout the world, and all men to be registered, at the time when God deigned both to be seen as a man and to be a man. Then, therefore, Christ was born, and immediately at his birth was enrolled in the Roman census.
This is that first and most illustrious enrollment, which marked Caesar, prince of all, and the Romans, lords of the world, by a registration that took in one by one all mankind; in which He too, who made all men, willed to be found a man and to be enrolled among men. This was something never granted in any wise from the foundation of the world and from the beginning of the human race—not even to the Babylonian or the Macedonian empire, to say nothing of any lesser realm. Nor is there any doubt—indeed it lies open to the knowledge, faith, and scrutiny of all—that our Lord Jesus Christ raised this city, by his own nod increased and defended, to this summit of power, since he willed it above all to be his when he came, being himself to be reckoned a Roman citizen by the registration of the Roman census.
Wherefore, since we have now come to that point in time at which the Lord Christ both first illumined this world by his coming and gave to Caesar a most tranquil reign, let me here bring this sixth book also to a close with this ending:
In the seventh book, if with the Lord's help I shall be able, I will set forth the Christian ages as they sprang up and grew the more amid hands that strove to suppress them, and which—still placed in their advance—are bitten by the carping of those very men whom we are now compelled to answer. For since from the beginning I have not been silent that men both sin and are punished for their sins, so now too I will explain what persecutions of the Christians have taken place and what vengeances have followed—apart from the fact that all are generally prone to sinning and therefore are chastised one by one. THE SEVENTH BOOK OF THE HISTORIES AGAINST THE PAGANS.
Sufficient proofs, I think, have been gathered together, by which—apart from any mystery, which belongs only to a few of the faithful—it can be plainly demonstrated that that one and true God, whom the Christian faith proclaims, both founded the world and its creation when he willed, and ordered it through many things while through many he was unknown, and confirmed it unto one when through one he was made manifest; and that at the same time his power and his patience have shone forth by manifold arguments. In which matter I perceive that narrow and downcast minds are for a little while offended, because with so great a power so great a patience is mingled.
For if he had the power, they say, to create the world, to compose the peace of the world, to instill into the world the worship and knowledge of himself, what need was there of such great—or, as they themselves judge it, such pernicious—patience, that things should at the last come to the errors, disasters, and toils of men, when from the very beginning, by the power of that God whom you proclaim, they could rather have begun thus?
To these I could truthfully reply: that the human race was created and established from the beginning for this end, that, living under religion with peace and without toil, it might earn eternity by its obedience; but that, abusing the goodness of the Creator, it turned the liberty granted by his indulgence into defiance, and slid from contempt into oblivion; and that God's patience is now a just thing, and just toward both sides—so that neither does contempt utterly destroy the one on whom he wills to have mercy, nor, being able by his power to crush contempt, does he prevent it from being afflicted with toils so long as he wills; and further, that it follows that he ever justly applies his governance even to the ignorant, to whom one day, in mercy, he will restore to the penitent the means of the ancient grace.
But since these things, though they be said most truly and most forcefully, nevertheless require a hearer who is faithful and obedient—while as for me, I shall see whether men will one day come to believe, but certainly now my dealing is with the unbelieving—I will more readily bring forward those things which they themselves, even if they refuse to approve them, cannot disprove. And so, as far as concerns the conscience of human minds, both we and they live under a reverence for religion and a confession and worship of the supernal power, differing only in faith; for it is our part to confess that all things consist of one God and through one God, but theirs to suppose that there are as many gods as there are many things.
'If,' they say, 'it belonged to the power of the God whom you proclaim, that the Roman empire should become so vast and so exalted, why then did his patience stand in the way, so that it did not become so earlier?' To these the answer shall be given in the very same words: If it belonged to the power of the gods whom you proclaim, that the Roman empire should become so vast and so exalted, why then did the patience of those same gods stand in the way, so that it did not become so earlier? Or did those gods not yet exist? Or did Rome itself not yet exist? Or were they not yet worshipped? Or did she not yet seem fit for empire? If the gods did not yet exist, the objection falls; for to what end do I now discuss any delay of theirs there, where I cannot find even their very nature? But if the gods did exist, then either their power—as they themselves declare—or their patience is at fault: