This has on the east the river Malva, on the north Our Sea up to the Gaditanian strait, which is narrowed between Abena and Calpe, two promontories opposite each other, on the west Mount Atlas and the Atlantic ocean, on the south-west Mount Hesperium, on the south the peoples of the Autololi, whom they now call the Galaules, reaching up to the Hesperian ocean. This is the boundary of all Africa. Now I shall measure out the places, names, and dimensions of the islands which are in Our Sea. THE ISLAND CYPRUS is girt on the east by the Syrian sea, which they call the Issican gulf, on the west by the Pamphylian sea, on the north by the Cilician Aulon, on the south by the sea of Syria and Phoenicia. Its extent
is in length 175 miles, in breadth 125 miles. THE ISLAND CRETE is bounded on the east by the Carpathian sea, on the west and north by the Cretan sea, on the south by the Libyan sea, which they also call the Adriatic. It has in length 172 miles, in breadth 50. THE CYCLADES ISLANDS, of which the first on the east is Rhodes, on the north Tenedos, on the south Carpathos, on the west Cythera, are bounded on the east by the shores of Asia, on the west by the Icarian sea, on the north by the Aegean sea, on the south by the Carpathian sea. Now the Cyclades are all 54 in number. These extend from north to south 500 miles, from east to west 200 miles. THE ISLAND SICILY.
has three promontories: one which is called Pelorum and looks toward the north, to which the city Messana is nearest; the second which is called Pachynum, beneath which is the city of Syracuse, looks toward the south-east; the third which is called Lilybaeum, where the city of the same name is also situated, is directed toward the west. This has from Pelorum to Pachynum 159 miles, from Pachynum to Lilybaeum 187. This is girt on the east by the Adriatic sea, on the south by the African sea which is opposite the Subventani and the Lesser Syrtes, on the west and north it has the Tyrrhenian sea, on the north up to the east the Adriatic strait which divides the Tauromenitani of Sicily and the Bruttii of Italy.
THE ISLANDS SARDINIA AND CORSICA are divided by a small strait, that is, of 20 miles. Of these, Sardinia has on the south, opposite Numidia, the Caralitani; opposite the island of Corsica, that is, toward the north, it has the Ulbienses. Its extent in length is 230 miles, in breadth 80 miles. This has on the east and north the Tyrrhenian sea which faces toward the harbour of the city of Rome, on the west the Sardinian sea, on the south-west the Balearic islands set far off, on the south the Numidian gulf, on the north, as I said, Corsica. THE ISLAND CORSICA is angular with many promontories. It has on the east the Tyrrhenian sea and the harbour of the City, on the south Sardinia, on the west the Balearic islands, on the north-west and north the Ligustic gulf.
It holds in length 160 miles, in breadth 26 miles. THE BALEARIC ISLANDS are two, greater and lesser, in which are two towns apiece; the greater has opposite it, toward the north, Tarraco, a city of Spain, the lesser has Barcelona. Beneath the greater lies the island Ebusus. Then on the east they look toward Sardinia, on the north-east the Gallic sea, on the south and south-west the Mauretanian sea, on the west the Iberian sea. These are the islands set throughout the whole Great Sea from the Hellespont up to the ocean, which are held to be more celebrated both for cultivation and for memory. I have briefly reviewed, as I could, the provinces and islands of the whole world.
Now I shall set forth, in so far as I shall be able, the local miseries of the several peoples, as from the beginning they arose unceasingly, and in what manner and from what causes they arose. When, after the fashioning and adorning of this world, man — whom God had made upright and unstained — and consequently the human race, depraved by lusts, had grown foul with sins, immediately a just punishment followed the unjust license. The sentence of God the Creator and Judge, destined for sinning man and for the earth on account of man, and to endure always so long as men shall inhabit the earth, all of us, unwilling though we be, either prove by denying or, by confessing, endure; and against stubborn minds their own infirmity brands itself as a witness, to whom the Scripture has not faithfully given persuasion.
Then, when the sea had poured back over all the earth and the flood had been let loose, so that, with the whole world covered over, there was one single expanse of sky and ocean, the entire human race was destroyed, with only a few preserved in the ark by the merit of their faith to restore the lineage — this the most truthful writers teach most clearly. Yet even those men have borne witness to it who, though indeed ignorant of past ages and of the very Author of the ages, nonetheless learned of it by inference and conjecture from the stones which we are accustomed to behold on remote mountains, rough with shells and oysters, and often even hollowed out by waters.
And although still more matters of this kind, both worthy of relating and certain in their reliability, could be brought forward by me, nevertheless let these suffice as the two principal points: concerning the transgression of the first man, the condemnation of his offspring and of his life, and then concerning the destruction of the whole human race; so much only that, if pagan historians have anywhere in some order touched upon our own matters, these may be set forth more fully alongside the rest, in the very order in which they fall. In the year 1300 before the founding of the City, Ninus, king of the Assyrians, was the first — so they themselves wish to hold — to carry arms abroad out of a lust for extending his dominion, and for fifty years he waged a bloody life through wars across all of Asia.
Rising from the south and from the Red Sea, he subdued by devastation the Euxine Sea beneath the farthest north, and taught the Scythian barbarians — still then unwarlike and innocent — to rouse their sluggish savagery, to know their own strength, and now to drink not the milk of cattle but the blood of men, and at the last to conquer while themselves being conquered. Most recently he overthrew in battle and slew Zoroaster, king of the Bactrians, the same who, as they say, was the inventor of the magical art. Afterward Ninus himself, while assaulting a city that was defecting from him, was struck by an arrow and perished. To him at his death succeeded his wife Semiramis, bearing the spirit of a man under the appearance of a son; and for forty-two years she exercised in the slaughter of nations the peoples already greedy by their habit of blood.
Not content with the boundaries which she had received from her husband — then the sole warrior — acquired in fifty years, the woman added to her empire Ethiopia, crushed by war and smeared over with blood. She also made war upon the Indians, into whose land no one entered except herself and Alexander the Great. And this — to pursue and butcher peoples living in peace — was therefore at that time crueler and graver than it is now, because then among those peoples there were neither any conflagrations of wars abroad, nor so great an exercise of greed at home.
This woman, burning with lust and thirsting for blood, amid unceasing fornications and murders, after she had killed all those whom she had summoned in royal fashion, kept as harlots, and delighted in her embraces, at last covered her private disgrace with a public crime: having shamefully conceived a son, impiously exposed him, and incestuously lain with him. For she decreed that, with no reverence for nature shown between parents and children, the seeking of unions should be free to each as he pleased. In the year 1160 before the founding of the City, the region bordering Arabia, then called the Pentapolis, was utterly burned by fire from heaven, as among others even Cornelius Tacitus relates, who speaks thus: 'Not far from there are plains which they say were once fertile and inhabited by great cities, but were burned up by the stroke of lightning.'
'But the traces remain, and the very land, though solid in appearance, has lost its fruit-bearing power.' And although in this passage he expressed nothing about the cities burned on account of the sins of men, as if he were ignorant of it, a little later, as though forgetting his own design, he adds and says: 'I, just as I would grant that once-famous cities blazed with fire from heaven, so I judge that the land is infected and corrupted by the exhalation of the lake.' By which saying, although unwillingly, he openly disclosed concerning the burned cities — which beyond doubt blazed by the guilt of sins — that he had both known of it and granted it, confessing that it was not the assurance of knowledge that was lacking in him, but the will to express that assurance. Which shall now be set forth more fully by me.
On the border of Arabia and Palestine, where the mountains, dismissed on either side, are received by the plains lying below them, there were five cities: Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Zeboiim, and Zoar. But of these Zoar was small, while the others were ample and great, since they enjoyed both the fertility of the soil and the river Jordan, which, spread out over the level ground and very conveniently divided, was expended upon increases of abundance. To this whole region, ill-using its goods, the abundance of things became the cause of evils. For out of abundance grew luxury, out of luxury foul lusts, to such a degree that males, working shamefulness upon males, rushed headlong without even regard for places, conditions, or ages.
And so God in His wrath rained upon this land fire and brimstone, and condemned the whole region, together with its peoples and cities, burned up, to eternal destruction, that it might be a witness of His judgment; so that even now indeed the form of the region appears, but a region of ash is found, and the middle valley, which the Jordan had watered, is now covered by an overspreading sea. And so great was the kindling of divine indignation over matters reckoned, as is supposed, trifling, that because of this — that those people, ill-using their goods, had made the fruits of mercies into the nourishments of lusts — the very land also, which had held these cities, first burned up by fires and afterward overwhelmed by waters, perished into eternal damnation before the common sight.
And so now, if it please them, let those who hurl spittle, as far as in them lies, against Christ — whom we have shown to be the Judge of the ages — distinguish the causes and compare the punishments between Sodom and Rome; which causes are above all not to be re-examined by me, for the very reason that they are known to all. And yet how gladly would I accept their verdicts, if only they would faithfully confess as they truly feel. Although, since it is but few who murmur about the Christian times, and that in corners, I think it should not be taken so very ill, when, by the harmonious voice and equal judgment of the whole Roman people, both the sentiment and the speech are well known.
Indeed, by a certain small and slight commotion he most indubitably attested that for a little while his habit of pleasures had wavered with regard to itself, so that one cried out freely: 'If only the circus were restored, nothing would have happened to me' — that is, the swords of the Goths accomplished nothing at Rome, if the Romans be granted leave to watch the chariot-races. Unless perhaps, as is the case with very many at this particular time — who, out of long repose, count even a small anxiety that arises as an intolerable labor — they prefer these most merciful admonitions, by which we are all at some time chastised, to the punishments of others heard and read about.
These at least I admonish concerning this very outcome of the Sodomites and the Gomorraeans, that they may be able to learn and understand how God has punished sinners, how He is able to punish, and how He will punish. In the year 1070 before the founding of the City, the Telchines and Caryatii waged a stubborn battle against Phoroneus, king of the Argives, and the Parrhasians, with doubtful hope and without the fruit of victory. And those same Telchines, a little after being defeated in war, fugitives from their fatherland and ignorant of affairs, believing that they were withdrawing themselves utterly from contact with the whole of human habitation, seized the island of Rhodes — which was formerly called Ophiussa — as though it were a safe possession. In the year 1040 before the founding of the City, there was in Achaia a savage flood with very great devastation of almost the whole province.
And because this was poured forth in the times of Ogygius, who was then the founder and king of Eleusis, it gave its name to the place and the time. In the year 1008 before the founding of the City, that there was in Egypt first an unusual and even loathsome abundance, and then a continual and intolerable famine, which Joseph, a just and wise man, relieved by divine foresight — this Pompeius the historian and his abbreviator Justinus teach, who among other things speaks thus: 'Joseph was the youngest in age among his brothers; fearing his outstanding genius, his brothers intercepted him and sold him to foreign merchants. Carried by them into Egypt, when he had grasped the magical arts there by his skillful genius, in a short time he became most dear to the king himself.'
'For he was most shrewd in prodigies, and he was the first to establish the interpretation of dreams, and nothing of divine or human law seemed unknown to him; so much so that, foreseeing many years in advance even the coming sterility of the fields, he gathered together the harvests; and his proofs were so great that the responses seemed to come not from a man, but from God. The son of Joseph was Moses, whom, besides the inheritance of his father's knowledge, the beauty of his form also commended. But the Egyptians, when they suffered scab and lichen-rash, warned by an oracle, drove him out together with the sick beyond the borders of Egypt, lest the plague should creep upon a greater number.' This Justinus.
But since this same Moses — whom these men attest to have been wise and knowing — wrote down these things more fully and more truly, as deeds done by himself and his own people, first their ignorance must be supplied by his reliability and authority, which even these men approve, and then the deceitful malice of the Egyptian priests must be refuted, who either by cunning — which is the more manifest case — strove to withdraw from memory the evident wrath and mercy of the true God, by a confused and piecemeal exposition, lest, to the dishonor of their own idols, they should show that he deserved to be worshipped, by whose counsel these evils were foretold and by whose aid they were avoided, as they themselves had taught; or perhaps — that we may take it more indulgently — they simply forgot.
For by the foresight of that Joseph of ours, who was the servant of the true God and piously and earnestly solicitous on behalf of his lord's creation, they abounded in harvests as though priests; but, because they were false priests, they did not grieve while the rest were starving. Indeed, whoever is pleased forgets; whoever grieves, remembers. Yet although the histories and annals are silent about this period, the very land of Egypt proclaims itself a witness: which, then brought under royal power and restored to its cultivators, has paid out of all its produce, even down to now, an unceasing tribute of a fifth part. And so this great famine was under the king of the Egyptians, a Diopolitan, whose name was Amosis, at which time Baleus ruled the Assyrians, and Apis the Argives.
But before the seven years of famine there preceded another seven years of abundance. And the more carelessly their plenty would have perished, the more abundantly it had sprung up, our Joseph by his shrewdness collected and stored it, and preserved all Egypt. He acquired for Pharaoh the entire wealth and for God the glory, rendering by a most just stewardship to whom tribute, tribute, to whom honor, honor; and he gathered all the herds, lands, and revenues; but those very men, who had sold themselves together with their lands by a valuation for the receiving of alms, he released under a fixed agreement of a fifth part.
This Joseph, whom God appointed for the Egyptians the author of their preserved welfare, who would believe that he so fell out of their memory in a short time, that a little afterward they consigned his sons and his whole kindred to slavery, afflicted them with labors, and ravaged them with massacres? Wherefore it is no wonder, if even now there are found some who, when they have turned aside the sword hanging over their own necks by holding out the Christian name, either dissemble or defame the very name of Christ — by which alone they are saved — and assert that they are burdened by His times, by whose merits they are set free. In the year 810 before the founding of the City, Amphictyon reigned at Athens, the third from Cecrops.
In whose times an inundation of waters consumed the greater part of the peoples of Thessaly, with a few set free through the refuges of the mountains, especially on Mount Parnassus, around whose circuit Deucalion then held the kingdom; he then cherished and nourished those who fled to him in boats, taken up upon the twin ridges of Parnassus; from him, for this reason, they say the race of men was restored. Then too in Ethiopia, Plato is witness that very many plagues and dire diseases blazed up almost to the point of desolation. And lest perchance the times of God's wrath and of warlike fury be believed to be separated, at that same season Father Liber, having subdued India, soaked it with blood, filled it with slaughter, and polluted it with lusts — a nation in no way ever liable to harm any man, content only with its homely quiet.
But in the year 805 before the founding of the City, Pompeius and Cornelius attest that unspeakable evils and intolerable plagues fell upon the Egyptians; and these two, since they both propose that these things are to be referred to the Jews, have moved me somewhat by their divergence. For Pompeius, or rather Justinus, speaks in this manner: 'The Egyptians, when they suffered scab and lichen-rash, warned by an oracle, drove Moses together with the sick beyond the borders of Egypt, lest the plague should creep upon a greater number. Having therefore been made leader of the exiles, he carried off the sacred things of the Egyptians by theft; and when the Egyptians sought to recover them by arms, they were compelled by storms to return home.' But Cornelius speaks thus concerning the same matter:
'Very many authors agree that, when a wasting disease had arisen throughout Egypt which disfigured bodies, King Bocchoris, having approached the oracle of Hammon and sought a remedy, was bidden to purge the kingdom and to convey that kind of men, as hateful to the gods, away into other lands. So when the populace had been sought out and gathered together and abandoned in waste places, while the rest were torpid amid tears, Moses, one of the exiles, warned them not to expect any aid of gods or of men, but to trust in a heavenly leader of their own, by whose aid in the first place they had repelled their present miseries.' And so Cornelius says that the Jews were driven into the deserts by the Egyptians themselves compelling them, and afterward incautiously adds that it was by the help of Moses their leader that they had repelled their miseries in Egypt.
Whereby it is shown that certain things which were vigorously done through Moses had been concealed. Likewise Justinus asserts that Moses, driven out equally with the people, had stolen the sacred things of the Egyptians, which the Egyptians, endeavoring to recover by arms, were forced by storms and driven back, returned home. And here he disclosed something more, even if not the whole, of what the other concealed. Wherefore, since both bore testimony to Moses, that great leader, let the deeds and words be set forth from him, just as through him both deeds were done and words were spoken. When the Egyptians had oppressed the people of God — that is, the lineage of Joseph, by whose help they had been saved — with servitude and tortured them with toil, and moreover compelled them by cruel command to kill their own offspring, God commanded that His people be sent away, free to serve Himself, through Moses His messenger;
and being despised, He drove the obstinate with the harshest punishments: who, burdened and crushed by ten plagues, at last even compelled to hasten away those whom they had been unwilling to release.
AFTER the waters turned into blood, bringing to those burning with thirst remedies of penalties more grievous than the penalties themselves; AFTER the horrid foulness of frogs crawling through all things clean and unclean; AFTER the fiery gnats, nowhere avoidable while the whole air quivered; AFTER the dog-flies darting even through the inner parts of the limbs with horrid motions and bitterly inflicting torments as grievous as they were vile; AFTER the sudden ruin and general destruction of all the cattle and beasts of burden; AFTER the boils breaking out and the ulcers running, and — as they themselves preferred to say — the scab and lichen-rash erupting over their whole bodies; AFTER the hail mixed with fire, crushing men, herds, and trees on every side; AFTER the clouds of locusts, when all else was consumed, pursuing the very roots of the seeds themselves;
AFTER the darkness dreadful with apparitions, palpable in thickness, deadly in duration; and finally AFTER the uniform slaying of the firstborn offspring throughout all Egypt and the equal tempest of bereavement among all — those who had not yielded to God commanding yielded to Him punishing, but soon, by a most wicked repentance, daring to pursue those they had released, they paid the uttermost penalties of their unspeakable obstinacy. For their king drove the whole army of Egypt, equipped with chariots and horsemen, against the wanderers; whose number we can conjecture by this argument alone, and above all, that six hundred thousand men feared and fled from him.
But God, the protector of the oppressed and the avenger of the obstinate, suddenly divided the Red Sea, and with its margins spread apart on either side, He hung up the walls of the stiffened waves erect into the likeness of a mountain, so that, provoked by the hope of an unobstructed path, the pious might enter the way of a salvation despaired of, the impious the pit of a death unforeseen. And so, while the Hebrews walked safely over the dry ground, with the masses of standing waters poured back behind them, the whole multitude of Egypt was overwhelmed and slain together with its king, and the entire province, before tortured by plagues, was emptied by this last slaughter. There exist even now most certain monuments of these deeds.
For the tracks of the chariots and the ruts of the wheels are seen through not only on the shore but even in the deep, as far as sight is admitted; and if perchance for a time they are disturbed, whether by chance or by curiosity, they are at once divinely restored by the winds and waves to their former appearance: so that whoever is not taught the fear of God by zeal for the religion made manifest may be terrified by the example of His wrath in the vengeance once enacted. In these times also so continuous and grievous a heat blazed forth that the sun, conveyed through trackless ways, is said not to have affected the whole world with warmth but to have scorched it with fire; and the Ethiopian could not bear the impressed fervor that was greater than usual, nor the Scythian that which was unaccustomed;
from which also certain men, while not conceding to God His ineffable power, hunting after empty little reasonings, wove the ridiculous fable of Phaethon. Likewise in the year 775 before the founding of the City, among the fifty sons of the brothers Danaus and Aegyptus, parricides were committed in a single night. Then Danaus himself, the contriver of such great crimes, driven from the kingdom which he had acquired by so many outrages, withdrew to Argos, and there, having unworthily persuaded the Argives to a crime, drove from the kingdom Sthenelas — who had received him a fugitive and destitute — and reigned himself. The cruel hospitality and crueler religion of Busiris, a most bloodthirsty tyrant in Egypt, was then in vogue; who used to offer the blood of innocent guests as a drink to the gods, the partners of his crimes:
which without doubt I might have seen to be execrable to men, but whether it would have seemed execrable even to those gods themselves. Then too there was joined to the incest of Tereus the parricide of Procne and Philomela, and a banquet more execrable than both was added through unspeakable foods, when, on account of her sister's chastity snatched away and her tongue cut out, the mother slew her little son and the father ate him. In the same times Perseus was conveyed from Greece into Asia, where he subdued barbarous nations in a grievous and long war, and at last as victor gave his name to the conquered people: for from Perseus the Persians were named. But I now am compelled to confess that, for the convenience of providing an end, I pass over very many things out of so great a surrounding host of the evils of the age, and abbreviate all.
For I could by no means ever pass beyond so dense a forest, unless at times I flew up with frequent leaps. For since the kingdom of the Assyrians was conducted through 1160 years up to Sardanapalus by nearly fifty kings, and almost never rested up to that time, whether in wars to be waged or to be sustained, what end will be found, if we should attempt to commemorate them by counting — not to say by describing? Especially since the affairs of the Greeks are not to be passed over, and those of the Romans above all to be reviewed. Nor is it now necessary for me to enumerate the foul deeds of Tantalus and Pelops, fables fouler still.
Of these, Tantalus, king of the Phrygians, when he had most shamefully carried off Ganymede, son of Tros, king of the Dardanians, detained him with a greater foulness of a joined struggle, as the poet Phanocles confirms, who relates that a very great war was stirred up on this account: either because he wishes this very Tantalus, being a follower of the gods, to seem to have prepared the abducted boy for the lust of Jupiter by a procurer's familiar service — he who would not even hesitate to spend his own son Pelops upon his banquets. It is wearisome even to relate the contests, however great, of Pelops himself against Dardanus and the Trojans: which, because they are wont to be celebrated in fables, are heard more carelessly.
Those things too I pass over which are related — Palaephatus being the writer — concerning Perseus, Cadmus, the Thebans and Spartans, through the inextricable recurrences of alternating evils. I am silent about the outrages of the Lemnian women; I pass over the lamentable flight of Pandion, king of the Athenians; the hatreds, defilements, and parricides of Atreus and Thyestes, hateful even to heaven, I disguise. I omit Oedipus, slayer of his father, husband of his mother, brother of his sons, his own stepfather. I prefer that it be left in silence that Eteocles and Polynices labored in mutual onslaughts, lest either of them should fail to be a parricide. I do not wish to recall Medea, wounded by savage love and rejoicing in the slaughter of her little pledges, and whatever was perpetrated in those times: it is given to conjecture how men endured what even the stars are said to have fled.
In the year 560 before the founding of the City, there was a most atrocious conflict between the Cretans and the Athenians, where, with the peoples on both sides unhappily prostrated, the Cretans exercised the more bloody victory; they cruelly assigned the sons of noble Athenians to be devoured by the Minotaur — which I know not whether to call more aptly a wild man or a human beast — and fattened that misshapen monster with the gouged-out lights of Greece. In those same days the Lapiths and Thessalians strove in all-too-famous clashes. But Palaephatus, in the first book of his Incredible Tales, reports that the Thessalians themselves were believed and called Centaurs by the Lapiths, because, as horsemen ranging about in war, they seemed to be one single body of horses and men.
In the year 480 before the founding of the City, Vesozes, king of Egypt, eager either to mingle in war or to join to his kingdom the regions of south and north — divided as they are by well-nigh the whole sky and sea — was the first to declare war upon the Scythians, having first sent envoys who should dictate to the enemy the laws of submission. To which the Scythians reply to the envoys that a most opulent king had foolishly taken up war against the poor; that it ought rather, by the reverse turn, to be feared by himself, because of the uncertain outcomes of war there were no rewards and manifest losses. Moreover, that they would not wait until they were come against, but would go of their own accord to meet the plunder. Nor was there delay, for they followed their words with deeds.