Now had God almighty abolished the days of the primeval age by an avenging flood with all the waters which heaven scattered and the surface of the sea spewed forth — having thus far agreed not to decree punishment by clear destruction, but as often as the air should bring on winter, He had commanded the changeful bow to curb the rains, marking the clouds with a purple and green border, in the name of Iris, which is the proper clasp for the storm-clouds. But with the second generation of men, impiety sprang up again in like measure, and once more a new age of evil burgeons — destined now to be destroyed not by rains but by fires. Thus the land of Sodom deserved to be burned with blazing dews and to portend signs of the end to come. There savage luxury, foe of chastity, stood in the place of law.
A foreseeing guest would have fled it, choosing rather death at the Scythian altars, or at the shrines of Busiris through sacred rites, to pour out his blood with the gauntlets of the Bebrycians, or to glut the Libyan wrestling-grounds of Antaeus, or through the cups of Circe to take on new shapes, than to lose his violated sex at Sodom. Their wickedness assailed heaven: unions mingled in like incest, nature rebellious to its own kind, and a man's name wronged together with his body. But at a fixed time God surveys all things: He judges the unjust, when the age, patient of crime, had left space to cease — no force, but His wrath, had compelled it. And now the avenging day was at hand: two sent from the flock, youths of angelic form, both of them spirits bearing the divine ministries commanded by the Lord, draw near to Sodom.
There, of the stock of the godly, the foreigner Lot was present, a wise man and a tiller of righteousness; he alone was mindful of God. As a useful tree is wont to lie hidden in the woods, bearing fruit like a host, so he then, sitting before the gate — scarcely had the heaven-dwellers approached the walls — though unaware they were divine, of his own accord calls them, addresses them, honors them with fatherly reverence, and bids them to lodging, as they were preparing to spend the night far off. Striving with long entreaties, he settles his accounts with his friends through a devout table and worthy services. Night had given rest; the second day had loosed the night, and Sodom clamors at the doors with its shameful law. Lot, kneeling before them, pleads: 'Let not lust now inflame you, young men, to defile youth itself with debauchery, for which nature calls, for which the seed — in vain — for which no souls are wedded.'
Not those who haunt the wild lairs, not those returning to their stalls, not those gaping beneath the waters, nor those that hang near the clouds on beating wings, nor those that creep along the earth dragging their bodies — every kind, however lustful, is a kind; yet for all, the female is wife, and never to anyone is the mother other than a woman. Now, if your youthful frenzy must lay waste chastity, I have within two daughters joined in marriageable age; their virginity swells in flower: now fit for the harvest, a worthy desire for men — let your pleasure take it. As a father I give them up, and on behalf of my guests I will pay the grief.' The mad crowd to this: 'Who are you, and how great, and whence, that you should lord it over us,' it says, 'and store away laws? A foreigner, not a ruler of Sodom's acres and furrows. Now therefore you yourself shall pay the price, for our desire is this:'
'in place of the daughters and in place of the guests: one is enough for all.' Said and done at once — there was no delay in the raging crowd. As a turbid torrent, while it rolls down with wintry onset, carries off in a single course the countless streams of its tributaries: if any tree there is struck by the rushing waters, it will not stand long; however much its root may let it endure crowned with long delay, when below it loses the undermined soil, hanging now with its trunk dug round about, hither and thither it postpones the certain ruin, itself uncertain — not otherwise did Lot, in the midst of the crowd's whirl, totter, all but overcome already. But the divine power comes to aid: the angelic youths, snatching him from the threshold, restore him to the house. And the mad crowd there meanwhile, by way of foretaste of their punishments, they smite with loss of sight. Then they unseal the decrees of God, that a fitting penalty shall come from heaven upon Sodom:
and that he himself had merited salvation by the title of his righteousness. 'Why then, gird yourself to hasten your flight from here, and lead out with you, if you have any of your kindred — we now bring destruction upon the city.' Lot quickly addresses his sons-in-law; but the hard mind of men scorned to believe the warning and laughed at the fear. Soon, at the time when the light tries to kindle the darkness and the face of heaven is two-colored, of night and of day, the youths pressed to lead the Chaldean family out of Sodom and grant the righteous house to safety. 'Up, come, Lot, arise and take your wife and your two daughters, and from here go into exile, forestalling Sodom's punishment.' With friendly hands too they lead forth the trembling ones, and lay upon you these further charges: 'Save, Lot, your life; lest perhaps you should wish to turn your gaze back behind you,'
'or to halt the step you have begun: hasten to the mountain!' Lot feared to clamber up the steep with slow step, lest the heavenly wraths should overtake him first; he therefore goes to ask for other havens — a small city which he had spied across the way. 'Hither,' he says, 'let my flight be: surely it scarcely stands out with its walls, neither far nor great for me.' They favored his request, and granted likewise the safety of that very city. From that place a barbarous word knows the name Zoar. Then Lot enters Zoar: at the same time the sun rises — that last sun indeed — and seething brings the conflagrations upon Sodom: for it had armed all its rays with fire. A rival darkness creeps in, beginning to shut out the light and to interweave globes of cloud into the confounded sky. The smoking clouds gather, a strange rain rushes down, brimstone with flames; chaos blazes.
The upper air seethes; the burnt-out air crackles with liquid blazes. Hence a false fable holds, in place of the truth, its repute — that the offspring of the Sun begged his father's chariot and, a frivolous boy, could not rein in the proud horses of the fire; that the world was set ablaze; that then the charioteer, presuming what was unlawful, was snatched away by a thunderbolt; that his sisters changed their lament into trees. Let the Eridanus see to it, if any poplar there gleams pale, or if any bird, more tuneful in its old age, grows feathers. Here it is otherwise: men mourn the marvels of a transformed shape; for the companion wife — alas for me, then too, the woman not enduring the divine law — turned back, in vain and alone, her bold eyes toward the murmurs of heaven, never to tell what she would see; and at once there, changed into brittle salt, she herself stood as her own tomb, herself also her own image, preserving a form without a body.
For it still endures even now, bare under the open sky, neither dissolved by rains into decay nor cast down by winds. Nay more, if some newcomer should mutilate the form, straightway from itself, by accretion, it fills up the wounds. And it is said even to be living, now with another body: at the customary times this sex discharges the bountiful monthly courses with the usual blood. Nowhere is Sodom; nowhere do those impious walls there gleam; nowhere is every inhospitable house with its lords. The whole region is one pyre: here the ashes mark out the conflagrations with black horror, here with gray decay. No one plows in vain the pitchy clods with soot. That earlier savagery perished — the savagery which, looking ahead, Lot, separated from his uncle, had chosen along with the rich fields. Even if some half-destroyed acres there try for the glad wealth of autumn,
the pears readily promise themselves the finest to the eyes, and peaches and all the apples, until they be plucked: for at once, touched by the finger as proof, the deceit of the empty fruit dissolves into ash. Thus then, with heaven and earth alike buried, not even the sea lives there: that is the death of a stagnant sea, which animates no waves through its panting eddies, and which never even sighs from its native south wind, and which lacks the power to bring forth any scaly race from its gulf, fenced with smooth skin or with bark, or crinkled and shut up in the double joining of a shell. There alone the bitumen counterfeits a fruit of its own — the soot of a burnt-out sea, which a living heat, cooking beneath the pools from the seething of brimstone and salt, tempers, and makes the marine pitch cling to the earth.
At its proper season the rich poison of the burnt water is carried in, and the skin is woven over the black waters with foam. They put in to shore — what a catch of merchandise this is! — they lean their light skiffs sideways by a balance of their flanks, so as to teach the vein, once laid upon it, to climb aboard; for, raising itself of its own accord, it will swim up to the mouth of the idle vessel and yield to the press in advance, in lavish abundance — unless a blow should strike it where a woman is clad each month. Behold another marvel marked from the sea's disaster: all things there float against their will; nature has withdrawn the property given to bodies for sinking. If finally upon a potsherd you set a light-bearing lamp-nose, where the spirit is in the fire, the tip of the flame shall sail along; but if the flame be quenched, the wreck-prone structure of light shall go down beneath the waters.
These are the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah, sealed for the ages, for unjust peoples — those whose hard hearts have forsaken the fear of God. They will teach men to revere the ordinances of heaven and to care for the one Lord of all things.