First they compel Vesozes himself, terrified, to flee back into his kingdom; but the army he had abandoned they invade, and they seize all the apparatus of war; they would have laid waste the whole of Egypt too, had they not been impeded by marshes and driven back. Thence, returning at once, they made Asia, subdued by countless slaughters, tributary; where, having tarried for fifteen years without peace, they were at last recalled by the entreaty of their wives, who declared that, unless they returned, they would seek offspring from their neighbors. Meanwhile among the Scythians two royal youths, Plynos and Scolopetius, driven from home by the faction of the nobles, drew with them a great multitude of young men and settled on the coast of Pontic Cappadocia near the river Thermodon, the Themiscyrian plains being subjected to them;
where, having for a long time plundered all the nearby places, they are butchered by treachery through a conspiracy of their neighbors. Their wives, stirred by exile and widowhood, take up arms, and, that an equal spirit might arise in all from a like condition, they kill the men who had survived, and, inflamed against the enemy, by their own blood they obtain vengeance for their slain husbands through the destruction of their neighbors. Then, peace having been sought by arms, they enter upon unions with outsiders; the males born they soon kill, the females they zealously nourish, the right breasts of the infants being seared, lest the casting of arrows be impeded; whence they were called Amazons. Of these there were two queens, Marpesia and Lampeto, who, dividing their host into two parts, took by turns the charge of war and the guardianship of home.
Therefore, when they had subdued Europe for the greatest part, and had taken some cities of Asia, and had themselves founded Ephesus and other cities, they recalled home the chief part of their army, laden with most opulent plunder, while the rest, left behind to guard the empire of Asia, were butchered along with Queen Marpesia in an onset of the enemy. Her place her daughter Sinope took up, who crowned the singular glory of her valor with perpetual virginity.
By this report such great admiration and dread had invaded the peoples that even Hercules, when he had been ordered by his master to produce the arms of the queen, as though destined to an unavoidable peril, gathered together the chosen and noble youth of all Greece, prepared nine long ships, and yet, not content with so great a swarm of forces, preferred to attack unexpectedly and to surround them unforeseen. Two sisters then ruled the kingdom, Antiope and Orithyia. Hercules, conveyed by sea, overwhelmed them off their guard, unarmed, and slothful through their unconcern for peace. Among the very many slain and captured, two sisters of Antiope: Melanippe was retained by Hercules, Hippolyte by Theseus.
But Theseus took Hippolyte into marriage, while Hercules gave Melanippe back to her sister and received the queen's arms as the price of ransom. After Orithyia, Penthesilea gained the kingdom, of whose valor we have received most illustrious proofs among men in the Trojan war. O the grief! It shames me of human error. Women, fugitives from their fatherland, entered, ranged over, and destroyed Europe and Asia — that is, the most numerous and mightiest parts of the world — and for almost a hundred years held them, overthrowing very many cities and establishing others: and yet the misery of men was not imputed to the pressure of the times.
But now those Getae, who are even now the Goths — whom Alexander pronounced should be avoided, Pyrrhus shuddered at, and Caesar even shrank from — having left and emptied their own seats and having entered with all their forces all the Roman provinces, and having long displayed themselves for terror's sake, hope by entreaties for the fellowship of the Roman alliance, which they could have claimed by arms; they ask for a seat of scanty habitation, not by their own choosing but by our decision, men to whom, with the whole earth subjected and lying open, it was free to presume whatever they pleased; they offer themselves for the defense of the Roman realm, they whom alone the unconquered kingdoms feared.
And yet blind paganism, though it does not see that these things were accomplished by Roman valor, does not believe — when the good faith of the Romans is obtained — nor acquiesce, though it understands; it will not confess that, by the benefit of the Christian religion — which joins a kindred faith among all peoples — the men of those women were made subject to them without battle, whose women had destroyed the greater part of the lands by immense slaughters. But indeed in the year 430 before the founding of the City, the rape of Helen, the conspiracy of the Greeks and the gathering of a thousand ships, then the ten-year siege, and at last the famous destruction of Troy are proclaimed.
In that war, waged most bloodily through ten years, the poet Homer, illustrious among the foremost, has openly shown in a most brilliant poem what nations and how great peoples that same whirlwind enveloped and crushed; and it is not for me now to recount it in order, since the work would be too long and the matter seems known to all. Nevertheless, let those who have learned of the long duration of that siege, the ferocity of its overthrow, the slaughter and the captivity, consider whether they are rightly offended by this present condition of the times, whatever it may be, when their enemies—by a hidden mercy of God—though they could pursue them in war through all lands with marshalled forces, yet for the sake of peace, with hostages offered beforehand, follow after them across every sea;
And lest perchance these things be thought to be done out of love of quiet, they offer themselves and their own perils on behalf of the peace of the Romans against other nations. Furthermore, after a few intervening years, what wars the coming of Aeneas, the fugitive from Troy, into Italy stirred up, what wars he aroused over three years, how many peoples he entangled, how many he afflicted with hatred and destruction—this too is branded into our memory by the teaching of the schools of letters. Besides, in the middle of these times lie the exiles and shipwrecks of the Greeks, the disasters of the Peloponnesians broken by the death of Codrus, the obscure Thracians rising up into new wars, and a general upheaval then throughout the whole of Asia and Greece.
Sixty-four years before the founding of the City, Sardanapalus reigned last among the Assyrians, a man more corrupt than a woman: who, amid herds of harlots, in a woman's dress and spinning purple wool on a distaff, was seen by his prefect Arbatus, who then ruled the Medes, and was held in execration; soon, the Median peoples being roused, he was challenged to war and, being conquered, threw himself onto a blazing pyre. Thereupon the kingdom of the Assyrians passed to the Medes. Then, with many battles welling up everywhere—which it seems by no means fitting to relate in order—through various outcomes the kingdom returned by a like path to the Scythians and Chaldeans, and again to the Medes. And in this brevity it must be weighed:
how great were the ruins and disasters of the nations, how great the wars that flowed forth, where so often so many and such kingdoms were changed. After this Phraortes ruled over the Medes, who consumed the twenty-two years of his reign in most frequent wars with the Assyrians and Persians. After him reigned Diocles, a man most experienced in arms and ever engaged in wars; who, dying, handed over to Astyages the empire that he had widely enlarged. Astyages, lacking male offspring, had a grandson Cyrus, born among the Persians. But Cyrus, as soon as he came of age, gathered a band of Persians and declared war upon his grandfather.
Now Astyages, forgetful of the crime which he had formerly committed against Harpalus—when he slew his only and little son and set him before the father to be eaten, and, lest a happy ignorance should withdraw anything from that most wretched bereavement, taunted the father by showing him the head and hands amid the infamous banquet—forgetful, then, of this deed, he entrusts the supreme command of the war to this very Harpalus, who, having received the army, at once delivers it over to Cyrus by treachery. When this was discovered, Astyages, snatching up his forces with him, himself marches against the Persians and renews the contest more fiercely, having decreed to his men that if anyone should try to retreat from the battle, he should be cut down by the sword.
When by this necessity the Medes fought relentlessly and the Persian line was again driven back and gradually giving way, the mothers and wives of the Persians ran out to meet them and begged them to return to the battle; and when they hesitated, the women lifted their garments and exposed the obscene parts of their bodies, asking whether they wished to flee back into the wombs of their mothers or wives. At this the men, blushing, returned to the fight, and, making an onslaught, compelled those whom they were fleeing to flee. There then Astyages was captured, from whom Cyrus took nothing but the kingdom, and set him over the great nation of the Hyrcanians. He himself, however, was unwilling to return among the Medes. This was the end of the empire of the Medes. But the cities which were tributary to the Medes revolted from Cyrus: which thing became for Cyrus the cause and origin of many wars.
At that season Phalaris the Sicilian, having seized the tyranny, was ravaging the people of Agrigentum. He, cruel in mind and crueller in his devices, doing all things wickedly against the innocent, at length found one whom, being himself unjust, he might justly punish. For a certain Perillus, a worker in bronze, courting the friendship of the tyrant and thinking it a gift fit for his cruelty, made a bronze bull, in whose side he skillfully fashioned a door to serve for thrusting in the condemned: so that when one was shut up there and roasted by fires kindled beneath, the capacity of the hollow bronze would amplify the sound of the voice wrung out, and, struck with a deathly resonance suited to the figure, would emit a bellowing, so that in this wicked spectacle the lowing of a beast, not the groaning of a man, might seem to be heard.
But Phalaris, embracing the deed yet execrating its maker, furnished material both for vengeance and for cruelty: for he punished the very craftsman by his own invention. There had also, a little earlier, been among the Latins a king Aremulus, who, growing through eighteen years in outrages and impieties, was at last cut off by a thunderbolt through the divine judgment, paying his ripe punishment in an unripe age. Let the Latins and Sicilians now choose, if they please, whether they would rather have lived in the days of Aremulus and Phalaris, who wrenched out by torments the lives of the innocent, or in these Christian times, when the Roman emperors, ordered above all by religion itself, after crushing tyrannies for the good of the commonwealth, do not exact even the very injuries of the tyrants themselves.
Thirty years before the founding of the City, the greatest war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians was joined with all their strength and spirit: in which by mutual slaughters they were brought to this point, that, as if vanquished, they withdrew from one another and abandoned the war. Then too the sudden incursion of the nation of the Amazons and the Cimmerians into Asia produced very great devastation and slaughter far and wide for a long time. Twenty years before the founding of the City, the Lacedaemonians, warring against the Messenians for twenty years with untiring fury, on account of their maidens being violated at a solemn sacrifice of the Messenians, entangled the whole strength of Greece in their own ruin.
When these men had bound themselves by great curses and oaths never to return home unless Messene were stormed, and yet, wearied for ten years by the long siege without gaining any fruit of victory, and moreover moved by the complaints of their wives, who protested over their long widowhood and the danger of barrenness, and were being recalled—holding a deliberation, and fearing lest, the hope of offspring being cut off, ruin might rather be nourished for themselves by this perseverance than for the Messenians, they sent back to Sparta selected men in the army, those who had come after the oath as reinforcement to the soldiery, to whom they granted promiscuous intercourse with all the women, a license infamous enough and yet of no use.
But they themselves, persisting in their purpose, took the Messenians by stratagem and, having conquered them, pressed them with servitude. But the Messenians, having long endured a bloody domination amid scourges and chains, shook off the yoke, took up arms, and renewed the war. The Lacedaemonians chose Tyrtaeus, an Athenian poet, as leader for the battle. He, routed in three engagements, made up his lost army by a band of slaves called into freedom. But when even thus they thought they must desist from the contest through fear of danger, being once more inflamed by a song composed by Tyrtaeus the poet and leader and recited before the assembly, they soon rush into the contest; and the clash came on with such force of spirit that scarcely ever did a bloodier battle blaze up; yet in the end the victory was the Lacedaemonians'.
A third time the Messenians renewed the contest, nor was there any delay on the part of the Lacedaemonians; both sides brought up many forces in aid. But the Athenians prepared to attack the Lacedaemonians from another quarter while they were intent elsewhere. Nor did the Lacedaemonians rest: for they themselves, being occupied against the Messenians, sent in the Peloponnesians to engage the Athenians in battle. The Athenians, however, having sent a small fleet into Egypt and being unequal in strength, were easily overcome in a naval encounter. Thereupon, having recovered the fleet and being increased also in the strength of soldiers, the victors call them to battle. The Lacedaemonians too, leaving the Messenians, turned their arms against the Athenians. Long the battles were varied and grievous, and the state of victory uncertain, and at last, the outcome still hanging, both sides withdrew.
It must, however, especially be known that Sparta is the very same city which is also called Lacedaemon, and that from it the Lacedaemonians are called Spartans. Therefore, when the Lacedaemonians had been recalled thence to the Messenian war, lest they should leave the intervening time idle for the Athenians, they made a pact with the Thebans that they would restore to them the dominion of Boeotia, which they had lost in the times of the Persian war, if those would take up the wars against the Athenians. So great was the fury of the Spartans that, entangled in two wars, they did not refuse to undertake a third, provided only that they might acquire enemies for their foes. The Athenians, moved by so great a storm of wars, chose two leaders: Pericles, a man of approved valor, and Sophocles, the writer of tragedies:
who, having divided the army, both widely ravaged the territories of the Spartans and added many cities of Asia to the dominion of the Athenians. From this point onward, for fifty years, with victory ever uncertain, they fought by land and sea, until the Spartans, with their resources diminished and their good faith ruined, became a reproach even to their allies. But that these things weighed upon Greece through so many volumes of ages is reckoned of little account. Now, however, that pleasures should sometimes be interrupted and lusts hindered for a little while is not endured. And yet between the men of that time and of this there is this difference, that those bore these intolerable things with an even mind, because they had been born or reared amid them and had known nothing better:
but these men, accustomed throughout their life to a perpetual serenity of tranquility and delights, are disturbed by every cloud, however slight, of overcast anxiety. And would that they might pray to the very Banisher of this disquiet, however slight—by whose gift they have had this continuity of peace, unknown in other ages! And since I remember to have promised, when I marked out the order of my discourse as it were by certain joints, that I would speak from the founding of the world down to the founding of the City, let this be the end for this volume, which I have unfolded from the founding of the world, so that from the founding of the City the following little book may begin, which will contain the more closely woven evils of those times, since the men were more practiced and more learned in wickedness.
BOOK TWO OF THE HISTORIES AGAINST THE PAGANS. I think there is now no man whom it can escape that God made man in this world. Whence also, when man sins, the world is rebuked, and on account of our intemperance, which must be restrained, this earth on which we live is chastised by the failing of the other living creatures and by the barrenness of its fruits. Therefore, if we are God's creation, we are deservedly also God's dispensation; for who loves more than He who made us? And who rules more orderly than He who both made and loves? Who indeed can more wisely and more strongly order and rule things made than He who both foresaw what was to be made and perfected what He foresaw?
Wherefore that all power is from God, and all ordination, both those who have not read perceive and those who have read recognize. But if powers are from God, how much more kingdoms, from which the remaining powers proceed; and if the kingdoms are diverse, how much more justly is some one supreme kingdom, to which the universal power of the remaining kingdoms is subjected—such as was from the beginning the Babylonian and then the Macedonian, afterward also the African, and at the last the Roman, which remains even until now—and by the same ineffable ordination, through the four cardinal points of the world, the principates of four kingdoms standing eminent in distinct degrees: namely the Babylonian kingdom from the east, the Carthaginian from the south, the Macedonian from the north, the Roman from the west:
Between the first and the last of these, that is, between the Babylonian and the Roman, like between an aged father and a small son, came the African and the Macedonian, brief and intermediate, like a guardian and a curator, admitted by the power of the time and not by the right of inheritance. Whether this be so, I will most plainly take care to set forth. The first king among the Assyrians who was able to stand eminent above the rest was Ninus. When Ninus was slain, his wife Semiramis, queen of all Asia, restored the city of Babylon and established it to be the head of the kingdom for the Assyrians. The kingdom of the Assyrians long stood with unshaken power;
but when Arbatus, whom others call Arbaces, prefect of the Medes and himself a Mede by nation, had slain his own king Sardanapalus at Babylon, he transferred the name and the supremacy of the kingdom to the Medes. Thus the kingdom of Ninus and of Babylon was diverted to the Medes in that year in which, among the Latins, Procas, the father of Amulius and Numitor, and the grandfather of Rhea Silvia who was the mother of Romulus, began to reign. And that I may thoroughly teach that all these things were disposed by ineffable mysteries and by the most profound judgments of God, and did not befall either by human strength or by uncertain chances, all the ancient histories begin from Ninus, and all the Roman histories arise from Procas.
Then from the first year of the reign of Ninus until Babylon began to be restored by Semiramis, sixty-four years intervene; and from the first year of Procas, when he began to reign, until the founding of the City accomplished by Romulus, there are likewise sixty-four years. Thus, while Procas was reigning, the seed of the future Rome was sown, even though the sprout did not yet appear. In the same year of the reign of that same Procas the kingdom of Babylon failed, even though Babylon itself still stood. But when Arbatus departed to the Medes, the Chaldeans retained part of the kingdom for themselves, who claimed Babylon for themselves against the Medes. Thus the power of Babylonia was with the Medes, the ownership with the Chaldeans: the Chaldeans, however, on account of the ancient dignity of the royal city, preferred to call, not it theirs, but themselves its own.
Whence it came about that Nebuchadnezzar and the rest of the kings after him down to Cyrus, although they are recorded as powerful through the strength of the Chaldeans and renowned by the name of Babylonia, yet are not counted in the number and the cardinal line of the illustrious kings. And so Babylon, in that year, was dishonored under the prefect Arbatus, in which Rome, under King Procas, was, to speak properly, sown. Babylon was at last overthrown at that time by King Cyrus, in which Rome was first freed from the domination of the Tarquin kings; since indeed under one and the same coincidence of times the one fell, the other rose;
the one then for the first time suffered the domination of foreigners, the other then for the first time spurned even the disdainful rule of its own people; the one then, as if dying, gave up its inheritance, the other, growing to maturity, then recognized itself as heir; then the empire of the East set, and that of the West arose. And, that I may not delay longer with words, I commit myself to the teeth of the raging, but to be delivered by the safeguard of truth. Ninus reigned fifty-two years. Him there succeeded, as I have said, his wife Semiramis: who, when she too had reigned forty-two years, in the middle period of her reign founded Babylon as the head of the kingdom. Thus Babylon, after one thousand one hundred and well-nigh sixty-four years from when it had been founded, was despoiled of its wealth and kingdom by the Medes and by Arbatus, their king but its own prefect, and deprived of its very king.
Yet it itself afterward remained unharmed for some while. Likewise also Rome, after just as many years, that is, one thousand one hundred and nearly sixty-four, was broken into and despoiled of its wealth but not of its kingdom by the Goths and by Alaric their king but its own count, and it remains still and reigns unharmed—although the whole order of the correspondence between the two cities was preserved by hidden decrees to such a degree that there too its prefect Arbatus invaded the kingdom, and here this city's prefect Attalus attempted to reign; although in this city alone, by the merit of a Christian emperor, the profane attempt was rendered void.
And so I have believed these things especially worthy to be recalled for this reason: that, with so great a secret of God's ineffable judgments in part laid open, those who foolishly murmur about the Christian times may understand that one God disposed the times, both for the Babylonians in the beginning and for the Romans at the end; that it is of His clemency that we live, but that we live wretchedly is of our intemperance. Behold, like is the rise of Babylonia and of Rome, like the power, like the greatness, like the times, like the goods, like the evils; yet not like the end nor like the failure. For the one lost its kingdom, the other retains it; the one was bereaved by the slaying of its king, the other is secure with its emperor unharmed—and why is this?
Because there, in the king, the foulness of lusts was punished, but here the most continent equity of the Christian religion was preserved in the king; there, apart from any reverence for religion, license of frenzy fulfilled its greed for pleasure, but here there were both Christians who would spare, and Christians whom they would spare, and Christians on account of whose memory and in whose memory sparing was shown. Wherefore let them cease to tear at religion and to provoke the patience of God, on account of which they hold even this thing unpunished, if at length they would desist.
Let them indeed recall with me the times of their forefathers, most restless with wars, abominable with crimes, foul with dissensions, most continuous with miseries, which they can both rightly shudder at, because they happened, and necessarily ought to pray against, that they may not be: praying indeed to that one God alone, who both then by hidden justice permitted them to happen, and now by open mercy grants that they should not be. These things shall presently be set forth by me more fully from the very beginning of the City, the histories being unrolled in order. In the four hundred and fourteenth year after the overthrow of Troy, and in the sixth Olympiad—which is wont to be celebrated with contest and games at Elis, a city of Greece, in the fifth year after four have been completed in between—the city of Rome was founded in Italy by Romulus and Remus, twin founders.
Romulus straightway stained that kingdom with parricide, and with a like success of cruelty dowered the Sabine women, ravished without precedent and bound in wicked marriages, with the blood of their husbands and parents. And so Romulus, having first slain his grandfather Numitor and then his brother Remus, seized the empire and established the City; he dedicated the kingdom of his grandfather, the walls of his brother, the temple of his father-in-law, with blood; he gathered a band of criminals by the promise of impunity. The first plain for war was for him the forum of the City, signifying that wars external and civil, mingled together at once, would never be wanting. The women of the Sabines, whom he had lured by treaty and games, he as dishonorably presumed upon as he wickedly defended.
Their leader Titus Tatius, an old man insisting on honorable grounds of piety, long repelled by arms, he soon, as soon as he had taken him into partnership of the kingdom, slew. With the Veientes the battle was waged, of a still small name but already of great strength. The town of the Caeninenses was taken and demolished. Once arms had been taken up, there was never any rest, since for these men shameful want and obscene hunger were feared at home, if ever they should acquiesce in peace. From here on let me touch most briefly upon the incessant contests, ever grievous in proportion to the magnitude of their strength:
that Tullus Hostilius, the founder of military discipline, in confidence of a well-trained youth, made war upon the Albans, and, after long fighting on both sides with hope uncertain but loss certain, at last brought the worst issues and doubtful outcomes to a brief conclusion by the encounter of the triplets: that again, when peace was broken, Mettus Fufetius, suspended in the Fidenate war, having even meditated treachery, paid the penalty of his double mind by the punishment of a divided body, as the chariots dragged him in opposite directions: that the Latins, with Ancus Marcius as leader, often clashed and were sometimes overcome: that Tarquinius Priscus laid low all the neighboring and then-powerful twelve peoples of Tuscany in countless engagements: that the Veientes, with Servius Tullius pressing them, were beaten but not subdued:
that the kingdom of Tarquinius Superbus, assumed by the crime of his murdered father-in-law, held by cruelty practiced against the citizens, and lost by the outrage of the violated Lucretia, and—amid domestic vices and virtues shining forth abroad—that is, the strong towns in Latium captured by him, Ardea, Oricolum, Suessa, and Pometia, and whatever he perpetrated against Gabii, whether by his own treachery, or by his son's punishment, or by Roman strength. But how great evils the Romans endured through three hundred and fifty-three years under that continuous domination of the kings is shown not only by the expulsion of one king but also by the abjuration of the royal name and power. For if pride only had been at fault in so great a measure, it would have been fitting that he alone should be expelled, the royal dignity being preserved for better men.
Therefore, the kings being driven from the City, the Romans, thinking it better to take counsel for themselves than to be lorded over by anyone in their liberty, created consuls: by whom, as it were the mature age of the growing commonwealth, the state was exercised with bolder ventures. In the two hundred and forty-fourth year after the founding of the City, Brutus, the first consul among the Romans, strove not only to equal but even to surpass by parricide the first founder and king of Rome; for he dragged his own two young sons and as many brothers of his wife, the young Vitellii, accused by a plot to recall the kings into the City, before the assembly, beat them with rods and struck them with the axe; and then he himself, having engaged in the Veientine and Tarquinian war with Arruns, the son of Superbus, fell down dead together with him.
Porsenna, king of the Etruscans, a most weighty supporter of the royal name, thrusting Tarquinius forward by his hand, for three continuous years terrified, hemmed in, and besieged the trembling city; and unless either Mucius by his steadfast endurance of a hand set on fire, or the maiden Cloelia by her admirable boldness in swimming across the river, had moved the enemy, surely the Romans would have been compelled to endure either captivity, overcome with the enemy pressing on, or servitude, subjected by the king received back. After this the Sabines, scraping together forces from every side with great apparatus of war, made for Rome. Dismayed by this fear, the Romans create a dictator, whose authority and power should take precedence over the consul; which thing then brought very much advantage in that war. There follows the secession of the plebs from the patricians, when, under Marcus