Chapter 1

The Fifth Age had its beginning with the captivity of the Jews in Babylon and extends for 690 years, to the Nativity of Christ.

In this age are found the four monarchies of the world: those of the Assyrians, the Persians and Medes, the Greeks, and the Romans. They were prefigured and shown to Daniel in the four beasts coming out of the sea and in the four parts, made from different materials, of the statue he saw.

This age comprehends the second and third monarchies in their entirety, but touches only the beginning of the fourth, namely that of the Romans. For this Fifth Age ends at Christ’s Nativity, which occurred in the time of the empire of Octavian, whereas the monarchy of the Romans began under his predecessor Julius Caesar.

It contains the end of the first monarchy, namely that of the Assyrians. For although the dominion of the Assyrians was diminished under Sardanapalus so that it ceased to be a monarchy when the Medes withdrew from their rule, a kingdom nevertheless still remained. Afterward, according to Jerome, Nineveh was devastated by the king of the Medes in the time of Josiah.

In the fifth year after the overthrow of Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar descended into lower Syria and obtained it. He subjected the Moabites and Ammonites to himself and finally entered Egypt. He subdued it, killed the king who was in it, appointed another there, and led the Jews in Egypt into captivity once again, as the Master of the Scholastic History says.

The Master also says that, when Nebuchadnezzar the Great died, his son, namely Nabuther, reigned in his place, and thus the kingdom of the Babylonians was magnified. Nevertheless, that kingdom appears to be included in the Assyrian monarchy.

When Nabuther died, Evilmerodach reigned in his place. In the thirty-seventh year of the transmigration he raised the captive King Joachim from prison.

There is no contradiction, as there might appear to be, between the statement that Evilmerodach raised Joachim from prison in the thirty-seventh year of the transmigration and the statement below that Belshazzar, the son or grandson of Evilmerodach, was killed by Cyrus and Darius and Babylon captured in the thirtieth year of the Jewish captivity. For this Joachim was carried away to Babylon eleven years before the final captivity, in which Zedekiah, who had last reigned eleven years in Jerusalem, was carried away.

Certain writers hand down that this Evilmerodach, the brother of the younger Nabuchodonosor, committed many impious deeds during the period of his father’s banishment, when the latter was changed into a beast. After his father was restored to his homeland and to his former condition following seven years, Evilmerodach was accused before him. His father sent him to the prison where Joachim was, and there he remained until his brother’s death.

When he began to reign, he raised up Joachim, whom he had had as a companion in prison. Fearing that his father, who had previously returned from a beast into a man, might rise again, he consulted Joachim. At Joachim’s persuasion he dug up his father’s body, divided it into 300 parts, and gave them to 300 vultures. Joachim said: “Your father will not rise unless the vultures come together again as one.”

According to Josephus, Evilmerodach was succeeded by a son named Neglisar, after whom Belshazzar reigned. Eusebius, however, says that Belshazzar succeeded Evilmerodach, saying nothing about Neglisar.

When this Belshazzar was killed by Darius, king of the Medes and maternal uncle of Cyrus, king of the Persians, and by Cyrus the Persian—whom, because of the two kingdoms, he calls the driver of a two-horse chariot, namely of a camel and an ass—the kingdom of the Babylonians was destroyed, as Xenophon, Pompeius, and others note.

It is not recorded how long each of those four successors of Nebuchadnezzar the Great—namely Nabuther, Evilmerodach, Neglisar, and Belshazzar—reigned. But it appears that those four reigned only twenty-one years. For only that much time extends from the ninth year of the Jewish captivity, in which Eusebius places the death of the first Nebuchadnezzar, to the first year of Cyrus, in which the last of those four was killed.

In this Fifth Age many philosophers and poets were renowned, as will be evident. Many excellent deeds of the Gentiles are narrated: of the kings of the Persians and Medes, of the kingdom of Alexander the Great, and of the wars of the Romans.

Concerning the people of the Jews, only those matters are narrated which pertain to their return from Babylon to Jerusalem and to the rebuilding of the city and temple, and afterward to their government through Judas Maccabeus, Jonathan, and Simon, brothers who were at once priests and leaders of the people, as is contained in the Book of Maccabees.

§ I. Cyrus

Therefore, in the year 3404 from the beginning of the world according to Jerome and Eusebius—but 4046 according to others—and in the thirtieth year from the captivity of the Jews, and hence of the Fifth Age, Cyrus, king of the Persians, overthrew the kingdom of the Medes and King Astyages, as well as the kingdom of the Babylonians and King Belshazzar. He transferred the kingdom or monarchy to the Persians.

The Persian monarchy endured for 206 years through the succession of twelve Persian kings, until Alexander the Great destroyed their monarchy after Darius, the last king of the Persians, had been killed, as Vincent says at the beginning of book 4 of the Historical Mirror. Cyrus reigned thirty years.

One should know that Isaiah prophesied about this Cyrus 210 years before he reigned, when he said: “Thus says the Lord God to My anointed Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, that I may subject nations to him and turn the backs of kings,” and so forth, Isaiah 45. According to Josephus, this was therefore in the fourth year of the reign of Jotham, king of Judah.

According to the Scholastic History, this Cyrus was the nephew of Darius through his sister and the grandson of Astyages through his daughter. Astyages had an only daughter and saw in a dream that a vine arose from his daughter’s genitals and occupied all Asia. He learned from the interpreters of dreams that he would have a grandson by his daughter who would become lord of Asia and drive him from the kingdom.

Fearing this, he gave his daughter as wife to a common soldier so that no noble and powerful son would be born from her. Thereafter, he summoned his pregnant daughter, and when a son was born from her, Astyages gave the child to a certain prince of the Arcanians to be killed. That prince, believing that the kingdom would pass to the daughter, feared to kill her son and gave him to one of the king’s shepherds to be exposed in a wood.

When the shepherd had exposed him and reported this to his wife, who had given birth in those days, the woman begged him to bring the little boy to her to be reared and to expose her own child in his place. When the shepherd returned to the boy, he found a female dog offering him her teats and defending him from wild beasts and birds.

When he brought the boy to his wife, the child played with her as though he had known her for a long time. She called the boy Spartacus, that is, “little dog,” for spartos in Persian means a dog.

When he had grown somewhat older, the other boys made him their king while they were playing, and he severely punished those who were obstinate and disobedient to him. Their fathers bore this bitterly and brought a complaint about the shepherd’s son before the king.

When the king summoned him and reproved him for striking the boys, the child answered fearlessly that he had done so as their king. The king marveled and, perceiving in him certain signs of his own lineage, summoned the shepherd and learned the truth of the matter more privately.

Nevertheless, his fear concerning his grandson was assuaged, because he thought that the interpreters’ word about the boy’s kingdom had been fulfilled. He entrusted the boy to be reared by the same man to whom he had formerly entrusted him to be killed, but did not reveal that he was anyone other than the shepherd’s son.

Because that secretary had not obeyed his command, Astyages secretly gave the secretary’s own son to him to eat and afterward revealed to him what he had done.

It later happened that Astyages entrusted his army to that secretary to fight his enemies, namely the Persians, while Astyages himself remained in the province of Media. The secretary, not unmindful of the king’s crime, persuaded the army to choose Spartacus as king of the Persians and surnamed him Cyrus, which is interpreted “heir,” as though to say: “Although Astyages resists, this man will nevertheless be the heir.”

When this had been done, Astyages became afraid. He adopted his cousin Darius as his son, gathered an army, and joined battle against Cyrus. The Persians fled, but their wives and mothers went out to meet them and, exposing their buttocks, said to them: “Do you wish to enter your mothers’ wombs and be born again?” Stirred by this shame, the Persians returned against the enemy, and Astyages was defeated.

Cyrus showed himself to Astyages more as a grandson than as a conqueror, for he gave him the kingdom of the Hyrcanians. To Darius, as to his mother’s brother, he entrusted the kingdom of the Medes, though with the firm expectation that it would return to Cyrus himself.

In the first year of Cyrus’s reign, Aesop was killed by the Delphians, according to Eusebius. Aesop’s elegant and famous fables survive. A certain Romulus translated them from Greek into Latin and addressed them to his son Tiberinus, writing as follows: “A certain Aesop, a Greek and ingenious man from the city of Attica, teaches his servants what human beings ought to observe; and to show human life and conduct, he introduces trees, birds, and beasts speaking.”

“If you read them, you will find well-composed jests that mingle laughter for you and sharpen your understanding sufficiently.” Whether this was the Aesop killed by the Delphians or another is not known, says Vincent in the Historical Mirror.

§ II. The Capture and Destruction of Babylon

Orosius says in book 2, chapter 11: After Cyrus had subdued everyone against whom he had marched, he attacked the Assyrians and Babylon, a nation and city richer than all others. But the force of the River Ganges, second only to the Euphrates in magnitude, interrupted him.

For one of the royal horsemen, distinguished in his whiteness and beauty, was persuaded by confidence that he could cross because the crests of the current rose where the rushing Alpheus met a ford. The waters seized, hurled down, and drowned him.

The king, angered, determined to take vengeance upon the river. He declared that the river which had then devoured his magnificent soldier must be left passable with its water scarcely wetting women’s knees. Nor was he sluggish in accomplishing this. With all his forces distributed along the Ganges, he cut the river into great ditches and reduced it to 460 channels.

After the trenches had been extended, Cyrus diverted the immensely strong Euphrates, which flowed through the middle of Babylon. Thus he made a route through the parts of its bed that were now fordable, even dry and open, and captured the city.

Among mortals it had been almost equally incredible either that the city could have been constructed by human labor or that it could be destroyed by human power. In short, captured Babylon confirms that everything made by labor or human hands slips away and is consumed by age. Just as its empire had been the first and most powerful, so it was also the first to yield.

Jerome, commenting on Isaiah in book 5 and expressing its nobility and magnificence more particularly, says that Babylon was extremely powerful and situated as a square upon level ground. He reports, as do Herodotus and many others who wrote Greek histories, that its walls extended sixteen thousand paces from corner to corner—that is, sixty-four miles around the entire circuit, if a mile is a thousand paces, as is said.

The citadel, that is, the capitol of that city, is the tower built after the Flood. It is said to extend three thousand paces in height, gradually narrowing as it rises so that the broader lower parts might more easily support the immense weight. They describe marble temples there, golden statues, streets gleaming with gold and precious stones, and many other things that seem almost incredible.

We have narrated all this to show that, before God’s wrath, every power is dust and is compared to ashes and cinders. If one were permitted to enter the barbarous nations and see the final traces of so great a city, one would see a possession of hedgehogs and marshes of water, and that what Isaiah’s voice sings concerning it has truly been fulfilled: “I shall sweep it with a broom, wearing it away.” Except for the baked-brick walls, which were restored over many years to confine wild beasts, the entire space within is a wasteland. Thus Jerome.

Cyrus therefore divided the Euphrates into several streams far from the city so that he might make the channel flowing into the city fordable. As the Scholastic History says, the enemies entered the city through that channel beneath the wall, and Belshazzar was killed.

Darius, who was forty-two years old, succeeded him in the kingdom. Cyrus deferred to him in everything as to his elder. Daniel, who was there in Babylon and had foretold the city’s destruction, was brought by Darius into the midst of the kings and was one of the satraps who presided over 120 others. When Darius intended to place him over the whole realm, the others envied him, accused him, and had him sent into the lions’ den. But he was delivered by God’s power, as has been said, and so forth.

§ III. The Seven Sages

Around those times of the Babylonian captivity lived those called the Seven Sages of the world. According to Helinand, their names are these: Thales of Miletus, Solon the Athenian, Pittacus of Mytilene, Chilon the Lacedaemonian, Cleobolus the Lydian, Periander the Corinthian, and Bias of Priene.

Concerning Thales of Miletus, Augustine says in book 8 of The City of God, chapter 2: Two kinds of philosophers are handed down, one Italic, from that part of Italy once called Magna Graecia, and the other Ionic, in those lands where even now Greece is named. The Italic kind had Pythagoras of Samos as its founder. The chief of the Ionic kind was Thales of Miletus, one of those seven who were called sages.

The other six were distinguished by their manner of life and by certain precepts suited to living well. But Thales shone because, in order to produce successors, he investigated the nature of things and committed his disputations to writing. He was especially admired because, after comprehending the calculations of astrology, he could even predict eclipses of the sun and moon.

Nevertheless, he thought water to be the principle of things and held that from it arose all the elements of the world, the world itself, and the things generated in it. Yet he attributed nothing to a divine mind in this work which, when we contemplate the world, we behold to be so marvelous.

Thales was succeeded by his pupil Anaximander, who changed his opinion concerning the nature of things. He thought that things of every kind arose not from one thing, as Thales of Miletus thought they arose from moisture, but from their own proper principles. He believed the principles of individual things to be infinite and to generate innumerable worlds and whatever arises in them. He thought that those worlds were now dissolved and now generated again, for however long each could remain in its own age. Like Thales, he too attributed nothing in these works to a divine mind.

Concerning Solon, Vincent relates the following in book 3 of the Historical Mirror, chapter 20. Solon used to say that, if everyone brought their evils together into one place, the result would be that each would prefer to carry his own evils home rather than bear his portion from the common heap of miseries. From this he concluded that we ought not judge the things we suffer by chance to be especially intolerably bitter.

He also said that he grew old while learning something every day. When he was dying, his friends sat beside him and discussed a certain matter among themselves, and he raised his head. When asked why he had done so, he answered: “So that, when I have understood this matter which you are discussing—whatever it may be—I may die.”

This elegant saying is read as Solon’s: “The final day is the judge of happiness, and the funeral pyre confirms the wise man in the honor of that name.” Tully reports in On Old Age that, when the tyrant Pisistratus asked Solon what support made him resist so boldly, he answered: “Old age.”

Concerning Pittacus, Valerius says in book 4: Pittacus possessed a heart furnished with moderation. The poet Alcaeus had employed the bitterness of his hatred and the powers of his talent most persistently against him. Yet when Pittacus had attained the tyranny offered to him by the citizens, he merely warned Alcaeus of what he had the power to do in crushing him.

Concerning Cleobolus, he says: “We ought to beware the envy of friends more than the snares of enemies. The latter evil is open; the former is concealed, and the deceit used to cause injury is more powerful where it is not expected.”

Concerning Bias, Valerius says: When enemies had almost invaded the homeland of Bias of Priene and everyone fled burdened with the weight of precious possessions, he was asked why he carried none of his goods with him. He answered: “I certainly carry all my goods with me.” For he carried them in his heart, not upon his shoulders. They were not to be seen by the eyes but valued by the mind. Enclosed within the dwelling of the mind, they cannot be weakened by mortal hands; just as they are available to those who remain, so they do not abandon those who flee.

The same Bias of Priene used to say that people ought to conduct themselves in the practice of friendship while remembering that it could be turned into bitter enmity.

But, as Augustine says in The City of God, the world was exceedingly poor and naked in wisdom when only seven men out of the whole world were named. Yet even these sages of the world became fools, for because they did not possess wisdom—that is, true knowledge of God—they perished through their foolishness.

§ IV. The Permission Given to the Jews to Return to Jerusalem

In the first year of Darius, according to Vincent in book 4 of the Historical Mirror, chapter 13, Daniel prayed to the Lord that Darius and Cyrus would free the people of the Jews from captivity. A decree was given that permission to return should be granted, and Gabriel announced to Daniel that it had gone forth from the Lord. Darius arranged to give this permission, but, overtaken by death, did not fulfill it.

After the death of Darius, Cyrus held the monarchy of the East. He established its seat among the Persians, although the kingdom of the Medes was greater and more honorable, because the Persians had elevated him as king.

Therefore, when the entire kingdom of the Medes and Persians had devolved upon him, in the first year of this kingdom the Lord stirred his spirit so that Jeremiah’s word might be fulfilled. Cyrus gave liberty to all the Jews who were in his kingdom and permission to return to Judea and rebuild the house of the Lord.

He was stirred by the words of Isaiah, who 210 years earlier had written that the Lord said of him: “Thus says the Lord to My anointed Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped,” Isaiah 45.

Hence at the beginning of the First Book of Ezra it is said: “In the first year of Cyrus, king of the Persians, so that the word of the Lord from the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of the king of the Persians. He caused a proclamation to pass throughout his entire kingdom, also in writing, saying: ‘Thus says Cyrus, king of the Persians: The Lord God of heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He has commanded me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judea.

“‘Who among you is of all His people? May God be with him. Let him ascend to Jerusalem, which is in Judea, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel. He is the God who is in Jerusalem. Wherever all the rest dwell, let them assist him from their place with gold, silver, and substance.’”

The chiefs of the fathers of Judah and Benjamin arose, together with the priests, Levites, and all whose spirit God had stirred to ascend and build the Lord’s temple that was in Jerusalem.

King Cyrus also brought out the vessels of the temple that Nebuchadnezzar had carried to Babylon and placed in the temple of his god. Through the hand of Mithridates he counted them out to Salabazar, prince of Judah. Altogether there were 5,400 gold and silver vessels of various forms, which were carried to Jerusalem by those who returned there.

In the second chapter of Ezra, the chiefs of the families are set down with the number of their families. In all they were 42,360, apart from their male and female servants, who numbered 7,337. They ascended from Babylon to Jerusalem with many mules, horses, asses, and camels.

Because almost all had been born in Babylonia and possessed property there, however, they chose to remain in the land of their birth. Those who intended to ascend were sluggish and delayed until the third year of Cyrus.

Seeing this, Daniel was still more afflicted with grief and prayed that God, who had given the kings the will to liberate, would also give the people the will to return. Then, while he prayed, the angel appeared to him and told him of the prince of the Persians and the prince of the Greeks who resisted him. These were either evil angels according to Jerome or good angels according to Gregory. They impeded the people’s liberation, while Michael assisted in liberating them, as is contained in Daniel 10.

In the third year of Cyrus, king of the Persians, the prophet Zechariah, who was then in Chaldea, exhorted them to return. Under the leadership of Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest, they left Babylon and arrived at Jerusalem.

In the seventh month, when everyone had assembled in Jerusalem, they erected an altar as best they could, offered sacrifices according to the law, as is contained in 1 Ezra 3, and celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles.

This third year of Cyrus was the seventieth year in which the captivity foretold by Jeremiah was to be released. Jerome says that Cyrus’s first year was the seventh year of the final decade. Hence the third year of Cyrus was the seventieth year in which the release was to occur. Josephus agrees with this, and this opinion is more certain and most firmly sanctioned by authorities, says Vincent in the Historical Mirror.

One should note that, according to this computation, the seventy years of captivity foretold by Jeremiah must begin to be counted from the thirteenth year of Josiah, under whom Jeremiah began to prophesy, and end in the first year of Cyrus. They are computed as follows.

First are the eighteen years for which Josiah reigned after the aforesaid thirteenth year. Second are the eleven years for which Joachim reigned before he was led to Babylon. Third are the eleven years for which his brother Zedekiah reigned. Fourth are the nine years for which Nebuchadnezzar the Great reigned after the final captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem. Fifth are the twenty-one years for which his sons and Belshazzar, whom Cyrus killed, reigned. In that first year, after capturing Babylon and becoming monarch, Cyrus gave the Jews permission to return to Jerusalem.

If these numbers are added together, they make seventy years up to Cyrus’s first year—or his third year, according to Jerome.

Some others begin to count the years of the Babylonian captivity from the third year of Eliakim, that is, Joachim, and end it in the twentieth year of King Cyrus. The seventy years of the temple’s desolation are then completed at the restoration of the temple under Darius son of Hystaspes. But the first opinion is more commonly followed.

In the second month of the second year after the return to Jerusalem, they laid the foundations of the temple. But the Samaritans, who were like neighbors, became indignant and hindered their work. When they could not impede it by themselves, they gave gifts to the king’s officials. Corrupted by money and acting without Cyrus’s knowledge, these officials obstructed them to such a degree that, during the thirty years in which Cyrus reigned, they did not raise the temple walls beyond the level of a parapet.

How long Daniel survived after the people’s return to Judea is not known. When he died, he was buried in a royal cave.

In the thirteenth year of Cyrus, Croesus was captured by Cyrus, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle, and Croesus’s kingdom of the Lydians, which had stood for 231 years, was destroyed. This was Croesus’s final capture, for elsewhere he is read to have been captured by Cyrus both once and again.

Hence Boethius says: “Did you not know Croesus, king of the Lydians, who shortly before was formidable to Cyrus and was soon afterward pitiably delivered to the flames, but defended by rain sent from heaven?” This must be understood of his second capture. For Justin and Orosius relate that Cyrus captured him the first time but gave him his life and patrimony. Justin then says that he rebelled.

Orosius says that, when Cyrus attacked Babylon and Croesus, king of the Lydians, had come at that time with his famous riches to assist Babylon, Croesus was defeated and anxiously fled back to his kingdom. After Cyrus invaded Babylon as an enemy, overthrew it as a conqueror, and arranged it as a king, he transferred the war to Lydia. There, without difficulty, he routed the army already broken by the previous battle. He captured Croesus but granted the captive his life and patrimony.

Eusebius writes in the Chronicle that Croesus made war against Cyrus in Cyrus’s eighth year. This is understood of the war in which, after the capture of Babylon, Croesus—who had already been captured by Cyrus and granted his life and patrimony—later rebelled.

Justin says that Cyrus’s clemency toward Croesus was no less useful to the conqueror than to the conquered. For, when it became known throughout Greece that war had been inflicted upon Croesus, aid flowed together as though to extinguish a common conflagration. So great was the love of Croesus in every city that Cyrus would have suffered a grievous war if he had taken some harsher measure against Croesus.

Other historians relate that, in his second capture, Cyrus ordered Croesus to be placed upon a pyre and roasted. Suddenly such great rain fell that the immensity of it extinguished the fire, and thus Croesus found an opportunity to escape.

When he afterward gloried that these things had turned out prosperously for him and boasted excessively of his abundance of wealth, a certain very wise man named Saloninus told him that no one ought to glory in riches and prosperity.

That same night he saw in a dream that Jupiter drenched him with water and the sun dried him. When he told this to his daughter in the morning, she prudently explained the matter as it was: he would be fastened to a cross, drenched with water, and dried by the sun. This finally occurred, for when captured by Cyrus he was crucified.

Solinus says: “When the victorious Cyrus entered Sardis, where Croesus was then hiding, Achis, the son of Croesus, who had been mute until that time, is said to have cried out: ‘Spare my father, Cyrus, and at least learn from our misfortunes that you are a man.’”

At that time Pisistratus reigned at Athens for the second time. Justin says of him in book 2: Pisistratus, as though he had conquered for himself and not for his homeland, seized the tyranny through deceit. After causing himself to be beaten voluntarily at home, he went out in public with his body torn. He summoned an assembly, displayed his wounds to the people, and complained of the cruelty of the leading men, by whom he pretended to have suffered these things.

Tears were added to his words, and the credulous multitude came over because of his hateful speech. Because of the people’s love, he feigned himself to the senate and obtained the assistance of guards to protect his body. Through them he seized the tyranny and reigned for thirty-three years.

Valerius says of the same man in book 8 that Pisistratus is said to have possessed such power in speaking that the Athenians, captivated by his oratory, entrusted him with royal authority, especially although Solon, the most devoted lover of his homeland, strove on the opposite side.

The same Valerius says: When a certain young man, inflamed with love for the daughter of Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, encountered her in public and kissed her, Pisistratus’s wife urged him to inflict capital punishment upon the young man. He answered: “If we kill those who love us, what shall we do to those who hate us?” This utterance flowed from the mouth of a tyrant out of humanity. In this manner, therefore, he bore the injury to his daughter—and bore his own still more commendably.

During a banquet his friend Thrasyppus assailed him with abuse. Pisistratus so restrained both his spirit and his voice from anger that one would have thought it was a bodyguard being reviled by a tyrant. At last Thrasyppus rose under the impulse of excited drunkenness and spattered Pisistratus’s face with spittle, yet could not inflame him to take vengeance. Pisistratus even restrained his sons when, because their father’s majesty had been violated, they wished to come to his aid.

But on the final day, when Thrasyppus wished to exact punishment from himself by voluntary death, the tyrant came to him, gave him his pledge, and remained with him in the same degree of friendship.

In the time of Cyrus, Anaximenes the natural philosopher was known, Simonides was held to be a famous poet, Chilon was one of the Seven Sages, and Thales of Miletus died, according to Eusebius.

After Cyrus had diverted the course of the river, he cunningly reduced the most warlike nation of the Lydians to indolence. He handed over festivals and games to them and commanded them to devote themselves to amusements, banquets, and embraces, as though showing them kindness. In this way he enervated them and conquered through lust those whom he could not conquer by war.

Afterward, however, having crossed the river, he was defeated and killed by Tamari, queen of the Massagetae. Cutting off his head and throwing it into a skin filled with human blood, she said: “Satiate yourself with the blood for which you thirsted.”

§ V. Cambyses

Cyrus was succeeded in the Persian monarchy by his son Cambyses in the sixty-first year of the Fifth Age. This was the year 3434 from the beginning of the world according to the shorter computation that Jerome places in the translation we use and Eusebius also follows. According to the other, longer computation set down by the Septuagint and Bede and commonly accepted, there were 4,670 years from the beginning of the world to Cambyses. According to the chronicles, Cambyses reigned eight years.

Helinand says in book 15 that this is the Cambyses who added Egypt to his father’s empire. Offended by the Egyptians’ superstitions, however, he ordered the temples of Apis and the other gods to be destroyed. He also sent an army to attack the most renowned temple of Amun, but it perished, overwhelmed by storms and masses of sand.

Cambyses was so severe that he caused a certain unjust judge to be flayed and made that judge’s son sit upon a chair covered with his father’s skin. Thus he would fear to judge unjustly, lest he suffer a similar judgment.

Cambyses is read to have been furious from birth and to have sought the source of the Nile throughout the whole expanse of lands. When his provisions failed, he was compelled to eat the flesh of his companions.

According to the Scholastic History, this Cambyses was Cyrus’s son and successor in the kingdom. In Ezra he is called Artaxerxes or Ahasuerus, while in the history of Judith he is called Nebuchadnezzar.

During his time, therefore, the rulers of the lands neighboring Judea who hindered the Jews who had returned from Babylon from rebuilding—namely Rehum Beelteem, whom Josephus calls the recorder of everything that occurred, and others who governed Syria and Phoenicia—wrote to Cambyses that the Jews were rebuilding Jerusalem, a most wicked and rebellious city, which, if completed, would refuse tribute to kings, and so forth, as is contained in 1 Ezra 3.

Artaxerxes, who is also called Cambyses here, answered them that they should prohibit the Jews from continuing the building they had begun. This was done, and the said work was thus interrupted until the second year of Darius, as will be stated below.

§ VI. Judith

According to the Scholastic History and Vincent in the Historical Mirror, that which is written in the history of Judith is said to have occurred at this time. Yet in that book this Cambyses is called Nebuchadnezzar.

After King Cyrus died, a certain Arphat the Mede rose up at Ecbatana, repaired it, and fortified it so impregnably—winning certain parts of Media to himself—that he might at length rule all Media. But Nabucher, king of the Assyrians, who reigned in Nineveh, conquered it in the twelfth year of his reign.

This Nabucher is Cambyses, to whom his father, while still living, granted Nineveh—although it had previously been defeated and weakened, as was said above—and the kingdom of the Assyrians, and named him Nebuchadnezzar. When his father died, he was in the twelfth year of that reign, for he reigned only eight years in the monarchical kingdom.

After he became monarch, his heart was exalted. He sent to all who inhabited Cilicia, Damascus, Galilee, and Samaria as far as Jerusalem, demanding heavier tribute than his fathers had. They all opposed him with one accord.

Therefore, in the thirteenth year of his reign, he sent Holofernes, commander of his armies, with an innumerable multitude, so that he might subject to his dominion all the cities he could and destroy all gods, that Nabucher alone might be worshiped as God.

When Holofernes went out to war against everyone, no one could resist his power. The Jews prepared to resist, blocking the approaches through the mountains so that he could not reach them.

When Holofernes heard this, he inquired about the condition of that nation. Achior, commander of the Ammonites, spoke at length about it in its praise and explained that its God handed its people into the hands of enemies because of their sins whenever they behaved wickedly, and so forth.

Hearing this, Holofernes became indignant with Achior and ordered him carried to the enemy nation. The messengers accompanied him, but when they perceived some of the enemy ranging about, they left him tied to a tree. The Jews came to that place, found him, and led him into the city. When asked the reason for his bonds, he explained the entire sequence of events.

The Jews commended themselves to God, devoting themselves to fasting and prayer while the priests exhorted them to do so. Holofernes took away their water, and it failed in the city. When the cisterns had dried up, water was given to the people by measure, and they began to complain against their leaders for not having surrendered to Holofernes.

But Uzziah, one of the leading men of Bethulia, comforted them, promising that he would surrender the city if God did not deliver them within five days.

When Judith heard this—she was a holy widow, a most beautiful woman devoted to fasting and prayer—she left her house, addressed the people, and rebuked the priests for the smallness of their confidence in divine aid.

Then she returned home, prayed with great devotion, adorned herself with the greatest care, and left the city with one maidservant. She told no one what she intended to do, but only asked them to persevere in prayer.

When she reached the enemy camp, she was found by them and asked why she had come. She said that she wished to speak to Holofernes. She did so, speaking many things to him: she knew that the city was to be handed into his hands, and she had therefore come out to him to teach him a way to capture it more quickly.

Holofernes was captivated by love for her and commanded his servants to permit her to go wherever she wished. When a banquet was held, Judith accepted the invitation, though she ate the foods she had brought with her.

When the meal ended and Holofernes and his men had become drunk, they quickly fell asleep. Judith prayed, entered Holofernes’s pavilion, and cut off his head while he slept. She placed it in a basket and gave it to her maidservant.

Returning to the city, she entered by night. She summoned all the people and Achior, showed everyone the head of Holofernes, disclosed what she had done, and admonished them to advance against the enemy at earliest morning.

When they did so, the chamber servants wished to awaken their commander but found him beheaded. When they made this known, all the enemy took flight. The Jews, although few, pursued them, killed many, and carried off an immense quantity of plunder from their camp.

Joachim the high priest came from Jerusalem to Bethulia to see Judith and praised her wondrously. She gave thanks to the Lord for so great a benefit and composed a canticle.

It is called into doubt, however, that she told Holofernes he would capture the city and other things of this kind, which seem to be lies. But there are several ways of speaking about this.

One is that she did indeed tell lies and is praised not for this, but for her character and her great kindness and beneficence toward her people, for whose liberation she exposed herself to death.

Another, more pious way is that she did not tell a lie through those words but spoke prophetically, predicting that the Jews were to be handed under the power of a Gentile people—namely, under Titus and Vespasian—because of the sins they committed against Christ and the apostles.

A third way is that what she said about the people of Israel being captured is to be understood according to that people’s deserts, because their sins required that they be handed over, just as Judith explained; or according to their own inertia, because they had now been abandoned by God and made so fainthearted that they wished to surrender themselves voluntarily.

Alternatively, all her words are to be understood conditionally: the city would be taken unless God delivered them. Therefore she did not lie in speaking such things, although her hearers understood them otherwise, namely as though she spoke simply and assertorically. Thus Vincent in the Historical Mirror.

Concerning the fact that she seems voluntarily and knowingly to have given an occasion for Holofernes’s ruin, it can be said that, in adorning herself in this way, she did not intend to scandalize him or to lay a snare or obstacle tending toward his ruin. She intended, first, the liberation of her people and, second, the benefit of Holofernes, so that, while captivated by her for a time, he might sin less.

For, having many concubines and married women—and perhaps male concubines—he sinned in many ways, even against nature, because the Gentiles abounded in these impurities. Hence, while suspended in love for her, he sinned less.

In the time of this Cambyses, as Justin says in book 2, after Pisistratus, his son Diodes forcibly violated a virgin and was killed by the girl’s brother.

Hippias, the brother of Diodes, holding his paternal power at Athens through tyranny, ordered the man who killed his brother to be seized and compelled him to name all his accomplices in the killing. Deliberately, the man named all the tyrant’s friends. When all of them had been killed, he was asked whether anyone among his accomplices survived. He answered that there was no one left whom he wanted to die except the tyrant himself. By this declaration he showed himself victorious over the tyrant after avenging his sister’s chastity. Admonished by his courage, the city expelled Hippias from the kingdom and drove him into exile.

Helinand says that the conspicuous splendor of the life of Polycrates, tyrant of the Samians, advanced even to envy because of his exceedingly abundant goods—and not without reason. Every undertaking of his was received on a smooth course, and hope grasped the fruit of the thing he desired. He changed countenance only once because of the obstacle of one brief sadness.

He deliberately cast a ring especially dear to him into deep water so that he would not be entirely free of every misfortune. Nevertheless, he immediately recovered it when a fish that had swallowed it was caught.

Yet this man, whose prosperity had always held its favorable course with full sails, was fastened to a cross by Orontes, prefect of King Darius, upon the loftiest summit of Mount Mycale. From there Samos, which had long been oppressed by bitter servitude, beheld with free and joyful eyes his rotting limbs and members dripping with putrid blood.

In the sixth year of this Cambyses, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle, the twenty-eighth dynasty, by which the Persians had obtained Egypt, came to an end. Thus the kingdom of that region ceased for a time. Cambyses and his successors held Egypt until Darius son of Xerxes, for 111 years. This Cambyses built a Babylon in Egypt.

§ VII. Pythagoras

In the eighth year of Cambyses, the philosopher Pythagoras was held in renown, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle. Augustine says of him in The City of God: The Italic school of philosophers in that part of Italy once called Magna Graecia had Pythagoras of Samos as its founder. From him, they say, the very name of philosophy arose.

For previously those who seemed to surpass others in a certain praiseworthy manner of life were called sages. When Pythagoras was asked what he professed to be, he answered that he was a philosopher, that is, one zealous for or a lover of wisdom, because he judged it exceedingly arrogant to profess himself a sage.

Justin says of him: Pythagoras of Samos, born to Demaratus, a wealthy merchant, was formed by great advances in wisdom. He was far richer than his father in that the merchant father could not acquire as many things as the son preferred to despise rather than possess.

He first went to Egypt and then to Babylon to learn the movements of the stars and observe the origin of the world, and he attained the highest knowledge. Returning from there, he went to Crete and Lacedaemon to learn the laws of Minos, that is, Lycurgus.

Instructed in all these things, he came to Croton and, by his authority, recalled the people, who had fallen into luxury, to the practice of frugality. Every day he praised virtue and enumerated the vices of luxury and the downfall of cities destroyed by this plague. He stirred the multitude to such zeal for learning frugality that it seemed incredible that any of them had ever lived luxuriously.

He frequently taught matrons separately from their husbands and children separately from their parents. He taught the women chastity and obedience to their husbands and the children modesty and the study of letters. Amid all this he instilled frugality into everyone as the mother of the virtues.

After continuing his disputations assiduously, he urged the matrons to lay aside their gilded garments and the other ornaments of their rank as instruments of luxury, carry them all to Juno’s temple, and consecrate them to the goddess herself, asserting that chastity, not clothing, is the true ornament of matrons.

After he had spent twenty years at Croton, he moved to Metapontum and died there. So great was their admiration for him that they made a temple from his house and worshiped him as a god.

Valerius says of him in book 5: Pythagoras’s hearers accorded him such reverence that they considered it impious to draw into dispute the things they had received from him. Indeed, when pressed to give a reason, they answered only this: “Pythagoras said it.”

Seeking Egypt, he learned their sciences; then, going to the Persians, he learned the art of magic.

Tully says of him that, when Pythagoras heard a young man of Tauromenium, burning with lust, raging at the door of his courtesan friend, he ordered three lyres to play in the spondaic mode and thus recalled him to a sound mind.

Jerome says in Against Jovinian that Pythagoras’s virgin daughter presided over a choir of virgins and instructed them in teachings of chastity.

The same Jerome says upon Ecclesiastes: The discipline of the Pythagoreans is to remain silent for five years and afterward to speak when learned. It is useless frequently to see that by which you have been captured and to entrust yourself to the experience of things that you can scarcely do without. Hence the Pythagoreans, avoiding frequent encounters of this kind, lived in solitude and deserted places.

He also says, rightly, that philosophy is a meditation upon death, striving every day to lead the soul from the prison of the body into freedom.

According to Vincent in the Historical Mirror, Pythagoras was the first among the Greeks to discover that souls are immortal and pass from some bodies into others. Hence he says that he was first Euphorbus, second Talides, third Hermonius, fourth Pyrrhus, and finally Pythagoras; and that, after certain cycles of time, the things that had existed came to be again, that nothing new came to be in the world, and that learning was recollection.

In these things he erred greatly, for they are contrary to the Catholic faith. From them is perceived how true is Solomon’s statement in the Book of Wisdom: “Vain are all human beings in whom knowledge of God is not found,” a true judgment concerning all things to be believed and done.

§ VIII. The Two Magi after Cambyses

After Cambyses, two of the seven Magi—that is, wise men—who governed the Persian kingdom in the following way obtained it.

When Cambyses saw in a dream his brother named Mergus, as though about to reign, seated upon a golden throne, he awoke terrified and had him killed. To accomplish this, he chose one of the seven Magi as his agent. After the crime was committed, Cambyses repented, cried out that he was a fratricide, and pierced himself with the same sword with which he had killed his brother.

After Cambyses died, as the Scholastic History relates, this Magus married Panthea, the daughter of Cambyses, and assumed the kingdom. He pretended that he did not wish to reign himself, but to preserve the kingdom for Mergus, Cambyses’s brother, because Mergus—whom he knew to have been killed—was still a boy and supposedly alive. This Magus was called Erineides.

When he died after seven months of his reign, he substituted for himself his brother, a young man distinguished in beauty and strength, saying that this man was Mergus, son of Cyrus and brother of Cambyses. He was indeed very like Mergus, and among the Persians the king’s person is concealed under the appearance of majesty so that he is rarely seen.

But one of the Seven Magi, suspecting that he was not Mergus, asked his daughter, who was one of the king’s concubines, whether he was Cyrus’s son or the brother of Erineides. When she said that she did not know, he taught her a way to discover it: while she slept with him at night, she was to draw his head into her lap and examine whether he had ears.

For that Magus, the girl’s father, knew that the brother of Erineides—whom he suspected this man to be—had no ears, because Cambyses, while still living, had caused them to be cut off for a certain reason. The daughter carried out the test and informed her father that the man had no ears. He then formed a conspiracy with the other Magi, and they killed the impostor. Thus those two brothers, the Magi, did not reign among the Persians for a full year.

Valerius relates in book 2 that the Persians do not look upon their children before they have completed seven years, so that they may bear the loss of little children with an undisturbed spirit.

After the Magi were killed, says Justin in book 1, the princes gained great glory for recovering the kingdom, but still greater glory because, when they disputed about the kingship, they could not agree among themselves. They were so equal in courage and nobility that their equality made the people’s choice among them difficult.

They therefore found a way to entrust judgment concerning themselves to religion and fortune. They agreed among themselves that, on the appointed day, all would lead their horses before the royal palace at first light. The man whose horse first gave a neigh before sunrise would be king. For the Persians believe the sun to be the one God and say that horses are consecrated to that god.

Among the conspirators was Darius son of Hystaspes. When he was anxious about the kingship, the keeper of his horse said that, if victory depended upon this matter, there was no difficulty. The groom arranged during the night for Darius’s horse to mate with a mare in the place where they were to gather, thinking that the result would follow from the pleasure of intercourse, as indeed happened.

The next day, when everyone had assembled at the appointed time and place, Darius’s horse recognized the place and immediately neighed from desire for the mare. While the other horses remained sluggish, it was the first to send forth the fortunate omen for its master.

The others showed such moderation that, when they heard the omen, they immediately dismounted from their horses and saluted Darius as king. The kinship of Darius was then joined to the former kings, for at the very beginning of his reign he took Cyrus’s daughter in marriage.

§ IX. Darius Son of Hystaspes

Therefore, after the two Magi, Darius son of Hystaspes, one of the Seven Magi and the fourth ruler from Cyrus, received the monarchy of the Persians, according to Vincent in the Historical Mirror. This was the sixty-ninth year of the Fifth Age and the year 3442 of the world according to our translation, but the year 4679 according to the Septuagint and Bede. He reigned thirty-six years.

Zerubbabel son of Salathiel, of the lineage of Joachim and the tribe of Judah, was a familiar companion of this Darius. When Cambyses had forbidden the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, Zerubbabel went to him and, through Darius’s intervention, attempted to change the king’s mind, but he could not.

Zerubbabel then secretly persuaded Darius to vow to the God of Israel that, if He made him king, Darius would restore that temple and send back to Jerusalem all the vessels of the Lord’s house still kept by the kings of the Persians. Darius made this vow. Hence, when Zerubbabel heard that Darius had received the kingdom, he approached him confidently to obtain this thing.

The prophets of the Lord, Zechariah and Haggai, exhorted the people to rebuild the temple. The Persian rulers who were their neighbors prohibited them, yet they did not on that account abandon the work. They informed Darius of this so that his will in the matter would be made known to them. Zerubbabel went to Darius with the said messengers and was received honorably by him.

Darius held a great banquet for all the rulers of the provinces. A question was raised, or a problem proposed, among three of Darius’s chamber servants who guarded his body, one of whom was Zerubbabel: what thing was stronger than all others?

The first said wine; the second, the king; and the third, who was Zerubbabel, said a woman, but added that truth was still stronger than all things. Darius promised great rewards to the one who solved the question most perfectly.

The problem was therefore discussed before Darius and the sages, with each man assigning a reason for his statement. By the judgment of everyone, what Zerubbabel had said was determined to be true: truth is stronger than all things and remains forever, as is fully contained in 2 Ezra.

When Darius then offered to grant whatever Zerubbabel asked of him, Zerubbabel requested the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem and the return of its vessels. King Darius, remembering that he had vowed this, willingly agreed.

He entrusted the temple vessels to Zerubbabel and sent through him letters ordering the rulers of the nations neighboring Judea—who had obtained from Cambyses the prohibition against continuing the building already begun—not to impede it any further, but to assist it at the king’s expense. He decreed that whoever acted against this edict should have timber taken from his house upon which he would be hanged, and that his goods should be confiscated.

Thus, in the second year of Darius Hystaspes, work on the Lord’s temple was resumed, and in the seventh year of the same king’s reign it was completed. From the first permission given by Cyrus, when the work was begun, until the seventh year of Darius, forty-six years elapsed, as is evident from the things said above.

According to this interrupted construction of the temple, they said to Christ: “This temple was built in forty-six years, and will You—” and so forth. In the twelfth month they dedicated it and afterward celebrated Passover at the proper time.

What happened to the Ark of the Covenant is uncertain. It is nevertheless believed that the Hebrews made another in the likeness of the former one. For among the spoils that the Romans carried away from Judea were an ark, a table, and a lampstand.

§ X. Democritus, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Aeschylus

At this time the philosophers Democritus, Heraclitus the Obscure, and Anaxagoras, and Aeschylus, the writer of tragedies, were held in renown, as Eusebius says in the Chronicle.

Aulus Gellius relates in the Attic Nights that Democritus was exceedingly rich but, leaving his entire patrimony to his fellow citizens, went to Athens and there tore out his own eyes so that he might have more vigorous thoughts.

Liberius, however, says that he did this so that he would not see that things were going well for wicked citizens. Tertullian assigns another cause: he could not look upon women without concupiscence.

He deservedly tore out his eyes, moreover, because he brought the darkness of magic upon human eyes. Isidore says that Democritus enlarged the art of magic many centuries after Zoroaster, when Hippocrates’s discipline of medicine flourished.

According to Augustine, Heraclitus said that all gods consist of fire, just as Pythagoras said they consist of numbers and Epicurus of atoms. As Macrobius reports, Heraclitus said that the soul is a spark of stellar essence.

Macrobius testifies that there were two men named Heraclitus: one was called the natural philosopher and surnamed Heraclitus the Obscure, while the other was the Pontic Heraclitus, who said that the soul is light.

§ XI. Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras was a pupil of Anaximenes. According to Augustine in The City of God, he held that the divine mind was the maker of all the things we see. He said that they were made from infinite matter composed of particles of all things similar to one another, each individual thing coming from its own proper particles, but with the divine mind as their maker.

It may deservedly be said of these men: They did not know divine things or understand the human things that ought to be done, and therefore they dwell in the darkness of hell, although they did or said some good things.

This Anaxagoras said that the human being is the measure of all things. As Valerius says in book 8, after a long journey undertaken in the pursuit of wisdom, he returned to his homeland. When he saw his estates deserted, he said: “I would not have been saved unless those things had perished.”

When he heard of his son’s death, he answered the man who announced it: “You tell me nothing new, for I knew that the one born from me was mortal.” If anyone effectively receives this statement in his mind, says Valerius, he will understand that children are to be begotten while remembering that they will die. Just as no one dies who has not lived, so no one can live who is not going to die.

Boethius says that poison was given to Anaxagoras as to a man guilty of death because he said that the sun was not a god but a burning stone, whereas the Athenians worshiped the sun as a god.

Augustine, however, says in book 18 of The City of God: “I wonder why Anaxagoras was made guilty of death at Athens because he said that the sun was a burning stone, plainly denying that the sun was a god, when in the same city Epicurus flourished in glory and lived securely. Epicurus not only did not believe the sun or any star to be a god, but contended that neither Jupiter nor any of the gods at all dwelt in the world so as to be reached by human prayers and supplications.”

As Augustine says, Anaxagoras had Archelaus as his successor, who was Socrates’s teacher. Archelaus thought all things were composed of particles similar to one another, from which each individual thing was made, in such a way that mind was also within them. This mind did all things by joining and dispersing the eternal bodies, that is, those particles.

Aeschylus, the writer of tragedies, was once in Sicily outdoors with his bald head uncovered. An eagle flying above with a tortoise thought that head was a stone suited for breaking the tortoise and dashed it upon him so that, when the hardness had been broken, it could eat the flesh inside. By that wound the founder of the more powerful tragedy was killed, says Valerius.

§ XII. Darius’s War against the Scythians and the Battle of Marathon

In the nineteenth year of Darius Hystaspes, as Justin relates in book 2, King Darius of the Persians made war upon Iancitus, king of the Scythians, after he had sought but not obtained marriage to his daughter.

He entered Scythia with 700,000 armed men. The Scythians did not offer him an opportunity for battle. Fearing that the bridge over the Ister might be broken and his return cut off, he fled back in alarm after losing 800,000 men. Because his multitude was so abundant, the loss was not counted among his disasters.

He then subdued Asia and Macedonia and defeated the Ionians in a naval battle. When he learned that the Athenians had assisted the Ionians against him, he directed the entire force of the war against them.

Hearing this, the Athenians sought help from the Lacedaemonians. In the meantime, when they saw that the Persians were being held by a four-day religious observance, they seized the opportunity. Without waiting for the Lacedaemonians, they drew up ten thousand citizens and one thousand assisting auxiliaries and went out to battle against 600,000 enemies on the plains of Marathon.

Miltiades was the commander of the war and the advocate of not waiting for the assistance. He displayed such confidence that he placed greater protection in speed than in allies. So great was the eagerness of those going into battle that, when there were a thousand paces between the two lines, they reached the enemy at a rapid run before the discharge of arrows.

The outcome did not fail their daring. They fought with such valor that one would have thought there were men on one side and beasts on the other.

The defeated Persians fled to their ships, many of which were sunk and many captured. In that battle the glory of the young Themistocles and of the Athenian soldier Cynaegirus shone forth.

After countless slaughters in the battle, Cynaegirus drove the fleeing enemies to their ships and held a laden vessel with his right hand, not releasing it until he lost that hand. When it was lost, he also held the ship with his left. When he had lost that hand too, he finally held the vessel with his teeth. Thus, neither wearied by the slaughter nor conquered by the loss of both hands, he fought to the end with his mutilated limbs like a rabid beast. Two hundred thousand Persians died in that battle apart from those lost by shipwreck.

In the twenty-ninth year of Darius, Aristides was expelled in disgrace from his city, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle. Vincent adds in the Historical Mirror that he is read to have been expelled because he was just beyond measure.

§ XIII. The Death of Darius and the Accession of Xerxes

Darius at length died, leaving many sons begotten both before and during his reign. Of these, Artamenes, the eldest, claimed the kingdom for himself by the privilege of age, while Xerxes claimed it by the good fortune of his birth. For Artamenes had been born to Darius when Darius was a private man, but Xerxes when he was already king.

Xerxes therefore said that the patrimony Darius possessed when still a private man was owed by right to the brothers born before the reign, but the kingdom was owed to him. At length, by harmonious agreement, they chose their uncle Ariophernes as judge.

The brothers’ contest was so fraternal that neither the victor exulted nor the defeated man grieved. Even during the lawsuit they sent one another gifts and enjoyed among themselves not only pleasant consolations but also trusting banquets. The judgment itself was conducted without arbiters or witnesses. With as much greater moderation did brothers then divide the greatest kingdoms among themselves as men now divide very small patrimonies. Thus Justin in book 2.

Xerxes son of Darius, therefore, the fifth king of the Persians, began to reign in the 116th year of the Fifth Age and the year 3489 of the world according to the shorter computation. He reigned twenty years.

As Valerius says in book 9, Xerxes was so luxurious that by an edict he offered a reward to anyone who invented a new kind of pleasure.

Valerius says of him in book 1 that, while Xerxes was considering a plan to invade Lacedaemon, wine poured into a cup was changed into blood not once but twice. He was thereby warned to desist from the undertaking.

The same author says in book 9 that, when Xerxes was about to bring war upon Greece and had summoned the princes of Asia, he said: “Lest I seem to have used only my own counsel, I have gathered you. But remember that it is more your duty to obey than to advise.”

Seneca says in book 6 of On Benefits: When Xerxes declared war upon Greece, there was no one who did not urge on his swollen spirit, forgetful of how much it trusted in transitory things. While many uncertain assertions were being cast about, Demaratus the Lacedaemonian alone said that the very multitude in which Xerxes delighted—disordered and burdensome—was to be feared by its commander. It had not strength but weight. Nothing immense can ever be governed, and that which cannot be governed does not endure long.

Orosius says: Xerxes had 700,000 armed men from his kingdom and 300,000 auxiliaries, 1,200 beaked warships, and 3,000 transport ships.

Against so great an army, Leonidas, king of the Spartans, stood with only 4,000 armed men in the narrow pass of Thermopylae. For three continuous days there was not a battle between two peoples but the slaughter of one.

On the fourth day, when Leonidas saw the enemy surrounding him on every side, he urged his allies to preserve themselves for better times. With only 600 men, he broke into the camp of 600,000. The Persians themselves assisted the Spartans through their mutual slaughter, and the battle, with the Persians killing one another, was drawn out from the beginning of the night until the greater part of the day. At last the Spartans, weary from conquering, fell dead among the dead.

That most renowned commander of the Lacedaemonians, Leonidas, had first uttered to his men these celebrated words of encouragement: “Eat breakfast as though you are to dine in the lower regions.”

Justin says in book 2 that Xerxes meanwhile sent 4,000 armed men to Delphi to despoil the temple, but all were destroyed by rains and thunderbolts. At the beginning of the war, moreover, when the Spartans consulted Delphic Apollo, the response had been that either the king of the Spartans or the city must fall.

Xerxes, having received two wounds in battle, determined to attempt a naval contest. As Xerxes approached and the Athenians consulted the Delphic oracle, the response was that they should at least defend themselves with wooden walls. Themistocles, commander of the ships, interpreted this as protection by a fleet and persuaded the Athenians and the allied cities to build ships.

When the plan was approved, they abandoned the city and entrusted their wives, children, and most precious possessions to nearby islands. Xerxes therefore burned Thespiae, Plataea, and Athens after they had been emptied of people. Because he could not rage against human beings with the sword, he raged against buildings with fire.

When the naval battle was joined, Xerxes remained on the shore as a spectator. Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, who had come to assist Xerxes, fought most fiercely among the foremost commanders.

Because the battle remained doubtful, the Ionians, according to Themistocles’s instruction, began gradually to withdraw themselves from the contest. Their defection also broke the spirits of the others and persuaded the Persians, who had long been looking around for a means of flight, to flee openly. During that flight many ships were sunk and many captured, while still more men, fearing the king’s savagery, slipped away to their homes.

Mardonius approached the king, who was anxious from so many disasters, and persuaded him to return to his kingdom before the adverse report stirred rebellion at home. If the remaining forces were entrusted to Mardonius, he would take vengeance upon the enemy and drive away the domestic disgrace; but if adverse fortune persisted, he would yield to the enemy without disgrace to the king.

The plan was approved, and the army was entrusted to Mardonius. The king, eager to return, went to the place where he had constructed a bridge from ships as though he were conqueror of the sea. Finding it broken apart by winter storms, he crossed anxiously to his kingdom in a fishing boat.

Such was the flight of the king whose arrival had been so terrifying. His flight had been beautifully signified by the monstrous offspring of a mare in his army, which had given birth to a fox.

According to Orosius, the ground forces entrusted to the commanders wasted away from labor, hunger, and fear. As disease became more severe, such pestilence and such foulness arose among the dying that the roads were filled with corpses. Hence dreadful birds and shameless beasts, enticed by food, followed the dying army.

§ XIV. Themistocles

When the war had ended and the city deliberated about the prize, says Justin in book 2, valor was preferred above everything else by the judgment of all the Athenians. Among the commanders, Themistocles also was judged chief by the testimony of the cities and increased the glory of his homeland.

Yet the youth of this Themistocles was initially subject to so many vices that his father disowned him and his mother ended her life by hanging because of him.

This is the Themistocles whom a certain man consulted concerning his daughter, asking whether he should give her as wife to a poor but honorable man or to a rich man of little probity. Themistocles answered: “I prefer a man who lacks money to money that lacks a man.”

When he was going to the theater and was asked whose voice would be most pleasing for him to hear, he answered: “The voice of the one by whom my achievements are sung best.” From this, according to Vincent’s History, it is understood that he was exceedingly desirous of glory.

At length Themistocles, while in exile, was received by Xerxes, king of the Persians. When he saw Xerxes bringing war upon the Athenians, he died at Magnesia after drinking bull’s blood, lest he either abandon one who had treated him well or attack his own homeland.

Tully likewise says of him in the book On Friendship: “Who in Greece was more renowned than Themistocles? Who more powerful? As commander in the Persian War he freed Greece from slavery. Because of this he was driven into exile in India [read: through envy], and he did not endure the injury of his ungrateful homeland as he ought. Rather, he did what Coriolanus had done among us twenty years earlier: no one was joined to these men as a helper against the fatherland. Thus each brought death upon himself.”

These men are praised by the pagans but condemned by Catholics, as is evident in cause 23, question 5, If It Is Not Permitted.

§ XV. Pindar, Sophocles, and Euripides

In these times Pindar, Sophocles, and Euripides were renowned, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle.

Pindar was called away from a banquet by Castor and Pollux while the other guests watched. As soon as he had left, the dining room collapsed upon those who remained. According to Valerius, when he had placed his head in a gymnasium upon the lap of a boy in whom he took singular delight and given himself to rest, he met a peaceful end.

Sophocles composed tragedies into extreme old age, as Valerius testifies. When someone asked the aged man whether he still engaged in sexual matters, he answered: “Speak of better things, for I have gladly fled from them as from some furious master.”

When Sophocles, already an old man, had submitted a tragedy to a contest and waited anxiously for the judgment of the uncertain competition, he heard that he had won by a single vote and expired from excessive joy.

Boethius says in the book On Consolation: “I approve the saying of Euripides, who called the man free from the misfortune of lust happy.”

When Euripides was returning home from the supper of King Archelaus, he was torn apart by dogs. “A cruelty of fate undeserved by so great a talent,” says Valerius. King Archelaus loved Euripides so much that he entrusted him with the highest place in his counsels. When he heard of his death, he cut off his hair, although Seneca says that he did this from fear of a sudden eclipse of the sun.

At that time Herodotus, the writer of histories, was known. In Rome, Symia, a Vestal virgin, was discovered in sexual misconduct and buried alive, as Eusebius says in the Chronicle.

Justin says in book 3: Xerxes, formerly the terror of nations, began to be despised even by his own people after conducting the war in Greece unsuccessfully. As the king’s majesty diminished daily, Artabanus, his prefect, was led to hope for the kingdom.

In the evening Artabanus entered the king’s palace with his seven very strong sons. It always stood open to him by right of friendship. After killing the king, he treacherously approached his sons. He told the young Artaxerxes that the king had been killed by his brother Darius, and thus impelled him to kill his innocent brother. Darius was found asleep and killed as though he were pretending to sleep.

When Artabanus saw that Artaxerxes alone survived among the king’s sons and feared a contest with the princes over the kingdom, he took Bacabasus into partnership in his counsel. Bacabasus, content with the present state, revealed to Artaxerxes how his father and brother had been killed.

Learning this and fearing the number of Artabanus’s sons, Artaxerxes ordered the army to be prepared for the next day, as though he intended to inspect both the number of the soldiers and each one’s skill in arms.

When Artabanus himself stood armed among the others, the king pretended that he had a cuirass that was too short and ordered Artabanus to exchange with him. As Artabanus took off his armor and stood exposed, Artaxerxes pierced him with a sword and ordered his sons seized. Thus the excellent young man both avenged his father’s murder and freed himself from the plot.

This Artabanus, the sixth king of the Persians, reigned seven months.

§ XVI. Artaxerxes Longimanus

He was succeeded by the seventh king, Artaxerxes, who was surnamed Longimanus. In his time Pericles and Sophocles, the writer of tragedies, were chosen at Athens as commanders against the Thebans and Lacedaemonians.

When the Lacedaemonians devastated the lands of the Athenians, they left Pericles’s fields untouched, hoping either to win him for themselves or to expose him to danger from envy or to disgrace from suspicion of betrayal. Pericles foresaw this and had predicted to the people that it would occur. To avoid the force of envy, he gave those fields as a gift to the republic. Thus Justin.

Pericles, instructed with the greatest zeal under his teacher Anaxagoras, governed Athens and turned it according to his own judgment, as Valerius says in book 8. Even when he spoke against the people’s will, his voice was nevertheless pleasing and popular. What difference was there between Pisistratus and Pericles except that the former exercised tyranny armed and the latter without arms?

As Tully says in On Duties, when Pericles and Sophocles sat down together to discuss public consultations and a beautiful young man happened to pass, Sophocles said: “O Pericles, look at the beautiful boy.” Pericles answered: “A magistrate ought to keep not only his hands and tongue under restraint, but also his eyes.”

At that time, says the Chronicler in the Scholastic History, Socrates was born, and a stone having the form of a goat fell from heaven into the Aegean Sea.

§ XVII. Ezra

At that same time Ezra the Aaronite restored the law burned by the Chaldeans. He also devised new letter forms that were easier to write and pronounce, and for this reason he was called a swift scribe. He added certain things of his own, such as the titles of the Psalms and many things read in the Pentateuch.

Some also hand down that he taught the Hebrews the manner of writing from right to left, whereas they had previously written in the manner of those plowing. Hence writing is customarily called exaratio, “plowing.” For they wrote from the left edge toward the right and then from the right toward the left.

Ezra found favor in the eyes of Artaxerxes and asked permission from him to return to Jerusalem so that he might instruct the people in the Lord’s law, which he had restored. The king gave him permission, together with letters to the rulers neighboring Judea and the guardians of the public treasury so that they would deliver the necessities to him.

He freed the ministers of the temple from every toll, tribute, and provision. He also gave Ezra power to advance and appoint judges and governors beyond the river and to punish the disobedient.

Seventeen hundred people ascended with him. When they came to Jerusalem, they offered sacrifices in the Lord’s house. Ezra then adjured the priests to send away the foreign wives they had married and the children born from them, which they did.

At that time, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle, the philosophers Empedocles and Parmenides were also renowned.

Boethius testifies in the prologue to On the Art of Music that, when a certain furious man attacked the host of Empedocles with a sword because the host had condemned the attacker’s father by an accusation, Empedocles is said to have altered the musical mode and thereby calmed the young man’s anger.

Aristotle says of him in book 2 of the Metaphysics: Empedocles imagined that strife is the cause and principle of corruption. He thought that it generates all these things except one, and that all things except God were made by it. He imagined that from strife comes the generation of all things that have been, are, or will be. If strife did not exist in things, all would be one; but because strife exists in things, it disperses them and does not allow them to rest. He also imagined that friendship is the cause through which all things are one.

When someone asked Empedocles why he lived, he answered: “That I may look upon the stars. Take away the heavens and I shall be nothing.” As Lactantius relates, he gave himself to the flames, inflicting death upon himself because he thought souls were eternal. Macrobius, however, says that he claimed the soul was blood. In this opinion, which is most false, he was a heretic.

Concerning Parmenides, Vincent says in the Historical Mirror that he is read to have discovered logic upon a rock of the Caucasus.

At that time Zeno and Heraclitus the Obscure were also known. Anaxagoras died. Aristarchus the tragedian was renowned. Cratinus and Plautus, writers of comedies, and Crates the comic poet and Bacchylides the lyric poet also flourished. But because none of these possessed wisdom and the knowledge of the saints, they perished through their foolishness.

§ XVIII. Nehemiah

In the twentieth year of this Artaxerxes, Nehemiah, one of the children of the Jewish captivity, was the king’s cupbearer. While he was in the fortress of Susa, he heard travelers speaking Hebrew, as is said in the Scholastic History. He approached and asked them about the condition of Judea and Jerusalem. When he heard that the city was without walls and that the people in it were afflicted—for by day they sustained the attacks of enemies, while at night brigands entered and filled the streets with the corpses of the slain—Nehemiah wept and remained very sorrowful.

When the king perceived this, he asked the cause of his sorrow. He gave Nehemiah permission to go, appointing a time for his return, and granted him royal letters so that he might be held in honor by everyone and supplied with the expenses for rebuilding the city. Hence, passing through Babylon, he led back with him many of the children of the captivity. When they arrived, they completed the work—namely, the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls—within two years and four months, despite many impediments.

They also made gates. For neighboring nations attacked them with a strong hand. But Nehemiah stationed half of the people under arms outside the city to withstand the assaults of those attacking, while the other half built, placing stones with one hand and holding a sword with the other.

After this a second impediment arose. For when famine arose in the land, the people bound themselves under usury and were compelled by hunger to sell their fields, vineyards, beasts of burden, and finally their children. Afterward Nehemiah caused the rich to remit the interest and debts and to free the children from servitude.

The third impediment was that the princes beyond the river, who envied him and the work, corrupted certain elders of the Jews with gifts so that they might betray him to death. When he guarded against this, they devised other ways of hindering him. Sometimes they falsely said that he would be accused before the king because he wished to become king there; at other times they feigned friendship. Resisting all these things, he completed the work, erecting six gates by their names, as the same Comestor says, and each man building his own portion of the walls throughout.

Nehemiah commanded that the gates be closed before sunset and not opened in the morning before the sun grew warm. All these things occurred figuratively, so that one might possess knowledge for rebuilding the soul, which has been broken down by sin in the walls of the virtues.

When the seventh month, that is, September, arrived and everyone assembled in Jerusalem to offer sacrifice, they heard from the elders that during the captivity Jeremiah had hidden the pieces of wood and embers of the altar in a well beneath the earth in the Valley of Josaphat. They sent men to the place. Finding the wood and thick water in the well, they brought them back. When this water was poured upon the pile of wood and the sacrifices were placed upon the altar, fire burst forth and consumed the sacrifices.

That fire endured, nourished with wood laid upon it, until the time of the Maccabees, when the high priesthood was sold to Jason. It was then extinguished, to make known the excess of the vice of simony, as Augustine says in cause 1, question 1, Sicut.

Ezra, having brought forward the book of the law, stood upon a raised platform and read from morning until noon. The Levites kept silence among the people so that he might be heard well by everyone. They assembled eight times each day to hear the law: four times by day and four by night.

Because the city was almost empty of inhabitants, Nehemiah asked the leading men to dwell there. He also cast lots among the remaining multitude and determined that one in every ten should dwell there. When these things had been completed, Nehemiah returned to King Artaxerxes, and Ezra died in a good old age.

Some say that this Ezra was the prophet Malachi. Others assert that Malachi was another man, born in Judea after the return from captivity.

Besides the two books of Ezra regarded as authentic in both our canon and that of the Hebrews, three other books bearing his name are held to be apocryphal. Therefore, although the things placed in them may be good and prophetic, I omit them. Vincent nevertheless relates many things from them in book 4, chapter 49, of the Historical Mirror.

§ XIX. Hippocrates and Gorgias

In the thirty-fifth year of Artaxerxes, Hippocrates the physician and Gorgias the rhetorician were renowned.

Jerome says in the Hebrew Questions on Genesis that it is found written in the books of Hippocrates that a certain woman would have been punished on suspicion of adultery because she had borne a very beautiful son unlike either parent, had the aforesaid physician not resolved the question by advising them to ask whether perhaps such a picture was in the bedchamber. When it was found, the woman was freed from suspicion.

Vincent says in the Historical Mirror that this Gorgias mentioned above is not the Gorgias Epitota of whom Valerius relates in book 1 that, while his dead mother was being carried on a bier to the tomb, he fell from her womb and by an unexpected cry compelled the bearers to stop. Rather, he is Gorgias of Leontini, of whom the same author relates in book 7 that he was the wisest man of his time. In a public notice he proposed that he would answer every question. Hence even his ashes obtained the same honor as the Delphic oracle.

Tully also relates of him in On Old Age that he was Socrates’s teacher, that he completed 107 years, and that he never ceased from his study. When he was asked why he wished to remain in life so long, he said, “Because I have nothing for which to accuse old age.”

Jerome says concerning him: “Gorgias the rhetorician recited at Olympia a most beautiful book on concord to the disagreeing Greeks.” His enemy Melanthius said to him: “This man teaches us about concord, though he could not bring three persons in one house—namely, his wife, himself, and his maidservant—into harmony.” His wife was jealous of the maidservant’s beauty and harassed her most chaste husband with daily quarrels.

§ XX. Socrates

In the fortieth year of Artaxerxes, Socrates was celebrated in much discourse. As Augustine says in book 8 of The City of God, he is reported to have been a disciple of Archelaus. He is remembered as the first to have directed all philosophy toward correcting and regulating conduct, whereas before him all philosophers had devoted their greatest effort more to the investigation of physical and natural matters.

“It does not seem to me that one can clearly determine whether Socrates did this because weariness with obscure and uncertain things directed his mind toward finding something manifest and certain which was necessary for the blessed life—the one cause for whose sake the industry of all philosophers appears to have kept watch and labored—or whether, as some more favorably suspect concerning him, he did not wish minds unclean with earthly desires to extend themselves toward divine things and attempt them.

“For he saw that they were investigating the causes of things, which he believed to be first and highest only in the will of the one true and supreme God. Hence he thought that they could not be comprehended except by a purified mind. He therefore judged that insistence must be placed upon purifying life through good morals, so that the soul, relieved of oppressive lusts, might raise itself by its natural vigor toward eternal things and might behold with purity of understanding the nature of incorporeal and immutable light, where the causes of all created natures live immovably.

“It is nevertheless agreed that, whether by his confessed ignorance or by knowledge concealed, he agitated and turned about with marvelous charm of discourse and most acute wit the foolishness of the ignorant who thought themselves to know something, even in those moral questions upon which his whole mind appeared to be intent. Hence, enemies having been stirred up, he was condemned on a slanderous charge and punished with death.

“In the debate over moral questions, however, the supreme good is discussed, without which a human being cannot be blessed. For the end of the good is that by which, when anyone has attained it, he is blessed. Because Socrates’s disputations stir up and demolish almost everything, and because it did not clearly appear what pleased him, Socrates’s successors took from them whatever pleased each. Aristippus said that pleasure was the supreme good; Antisthenes, virtue.” Thus Augustine.

Hugh of Saint Victor also says of him: “Socrates was the inventor of ethics, concerning which he wrote twenty-four books according to positive justice.”

Jerome likewise says in book 1 Against Jovinian: Socrates had two wives, Xanthippe and Myrto, the granddaughter of Aristides. When they frequently quarreled with each other, he was accustomed to laugh at them because they contended over him, a most ugly man with snub nostrils, a bald forehead, hairy shoulders, and bowed legs. At last they turned their assault upon him and long pursued him as he fled after beating him severely.

On one occasion, after he had withstood Xanthippe as she hurled endless abuse from a higher place, he was drenched with filthy water. Wiping his head, he answered nothing more than: “I knew that rain would follow thunder.”

When Alcibiades asked him why he did not cast away so bitter a woman as Xanthippe, he answered: “While I endure her at home, I become accustomed and trained to bear more easily the pestilence and injury of others outside.” He said that he knew nothing except this very thing: that he knew nothing. Thus Vincent in the Historical Mirror.

Seneca says of him that when Prince Archelaus invited him to come to him so that he might honor him, Socrates is reported to have answered that he did not wish to receive benefits from a man to whom he could not return equal ones.

John Cassian says in the book of Conferences: A certain physiognomist, looking at Socrates, said, “Your eyes are the eyes of a corrupter of boys.” When the disciples rushed upon him and wished to punish the insult inflicted upon their teacher, Socrates restrained them with this saying: “Be still, companions, be still; for I am what he asserts. But I restrain myself.”

Aulus Gellius says of the same man in book 1: Socrates is said to have been accustomed to stand in a fixed posture throughout both day and night, from the first rising of the light until the next sunrise, abstaining from food, motionless in the same footprints, with his face and eyes directed toward the same place, absorbed in thought as though he had made a certain withdrawal of mind and soul from the body.

It is also handed down that his temperance was so great that through almost every period of his life he lived with unimpaired health. Socrates likewise said that many people wished to live so that they might eat and drink, but that he ate and drank so that he might live.

Tertullian says concerning him: “A demon is said to have adhered to Socrates from boyhood. Philosophers regard demons as gods. Socrates’s expression is, ‘If the demon permits.’ Even when he perceived something of the truth by denying the gods, at the very end he ordered a rooster for Aesculapius as a thank-offering. I believe this was in honor of Aesculapius’s father, because Apollo proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all. O thoughtless testimony to wisdom by Apollo! He rendered it to a man who denied that the gods existed.”

Jerome says: “We cannot always keep the same countenance, a thing concerning which the philosophers falsely glory in Socrates. How much more, just as the faces of human beings are many and varied, so too are their hearts diverse.”

Seneca says to Lucilius: “Socrates used to say, ‘Whoever wishes will do injury and insult to you; nevertheless, you will suffer nothing, if only virtue is with you.’” When a certain man asked why a change of places had not helped him cast off his vices, Socrates said: “Why do you wonder that travel has not helped you, when you carry yourself around?”

Vincent gives the following as his praiseworthy sayings in the Historical Mirror:

“It is better to beware than to be afraid.

“He who has power over many things ought first to purify his conscience, so that the one who corrects offenses does not commit them.

“It is foolish for someone to wish to command when he cannot command himself.

“Conduct another’s business so that you do not forget your own.

“Benefit a friend in such a way that you do not harm yourself.

“Use what you have in such a way that you do not need what belongs to another.

“Take up a burden through your own labor rather than another’s.

“One ought to observe moderation in acquiring and guarding money.

“Swift counsel is followed by repentance.

“The things most contrary to counsel are haste and anger.

“With friends one ought to have brief speeches and long friendships.

“He denies himself who seeks what is difficult.

“Do not make another’s misfortune your joy.

“Speaking well is the beginning of friendship; speaking evil, the beginning of enmities.

“A friend is rarely acquired, quickly lost, and much more shamefully condemned.

“Impose upon no one what you yourself cannot endure.

“It is by no means fitting to praise someone in his presence.

“Let speech that you alone have heard be buried with you.

“If you conduct yourself well, you yourself will give authority to your character.

“He whom his offense does not shame doubles his sin.

“Things above us are nothing to us.”

Valerius says of him in book 7: “Socrates, as though a certain earthly oracle of human wisdom, used to say that those who acted so as to be the sort of persons they wished to seem would reach glory by a shortcut.”

§ XXI. Darius Nothus and Plato

After Artaxerxes, Eusebius says in the Chronicle, Xerxes, the eighth king of the Persians, reigned for two months. After him Sogdianus, the ninth, reigned for seven months. Darius, surnamed Nothus, succeeded him.

He began to reign in the 166th year of the Fifth Age and in the 3,439th year of the world; but according to the computation of Bede and the Seventy, in the year 4,676. He reigned for nineteen years.

This is the third Darius. The first was Darius the Mede, Cyrus’s uncle; the second, Darius Hystaspes; and the third, this Darius Nothus.

As Orosius says in book 2, in these times Sicily was shaken by a very severe earthquake. In addition, as the mountains of Etna boiled over with fire and hot cinders, it was laid waste, with the loss of very many fields and villas. A pestilence also invaded the miserable remnants of the Athenians and ravaged them for a long time.

In the fourth year of this Darius, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle, Plato was born. Apuleius says of him in the book On His Life and Character that he was first named Aristocles. His father, Ariston, descended from the lineage of Neptune; his mother, Perictione, derived her origin from Solon, the wisest founder of the Attic laws.

As Jerome says in the book Against Jovinian, Speusippus, the son of Plato’s sister, and Anaxilides say that Plato’s mother Perictione was overpowered by an apparition of Apollo, and they imagine that the prince of wisdom was brought forth in no other manner than by a virgin birth.

Valerius says concerning him that while Plato slept in his cradle, bees placed honey upon the little child’s lips, signifying the sweetness of his singular eloquence.

When Ariston, Plato’s father, brought the child to Socrates to be instructed, Socrates had seen in a dream the preceding night that a young bird of extraordinary whiteness and melodious voice had flown from the altar of Cupid in the Academy into his lap, and that it then flew singing from his lap into heaven. When, therefore, he saw the boy Plato being brought to him by his father, Socrates at once said that the interpretation of his dream had been fulfilled. Thus Apuleius.

Plato was born in the forty-third year of the life of Socrates, his teacher. Socrates later died in the seventieth year of his life. Concerning him Orosius says: “That Socrates, the most renowned author among the philosophers, wrested away his own life with poison among the Athenians.” From these words Vincent says in the Historical Mirror that Socrates did not wait for poison to be given to him by the executioner. Instead, deceived by the counsel of his familiar demon, whom Apuleius calls the god of Socrates, he brought death upon himself, either from love of popular glory or from fear of a greater punishment.

Socrates had already been condemned by the Athenians because he destroyed the gods, as Tertullian says. Nevertheless, when the Athenians repented of their sentence, they afterward punished Socrates’s accusers and placed a golden image in the temple. The rescinded condemnation rendered testimony to Socrates.

Valerius says concerning him: It is agreed that Socrates began to devote himself to playing the lyre when he was advanced in age. For he wished even the humblest element of musical theory to be added to the great riches of his learning. While he always believed himself poor in learning, he made himself most rich in teaching.

He says below: “The nature of things does not permit a human being to be capable of continuous labor.” The wisest Socrates saw this. Therefore he was not ashamed when Alcibiades laughed at him for playing with his little sons with a reed placed between his legs.

Alcibiades was also a disciple of Socrates. Valerius and Augustine say of him that, although he thought himself blessed because he was rich, handsome, and eloquent, Socrates disputed with him and showed how wretched he was because he was foolish. He pressed him so greatly with his arguments that he compelled him to weep.

Boethius also relates in the book On Consolation that Aristotle said that if someone had lynx-like eyes with which he could look upon the interiors of the human body, he would see that the body of Alcibiades, which was most beautiful on the surface, was most ugly within.

Valerius says of him in book 6: “Alcibiades was allotted, as it were, between two fortunes. One assigned to him outstanding nobility, abundant riches, surpassing beauty, the eager favor of the citizens, the highest commands, exceptional strength, and a most ardent intellect. The other inflicted condemnation, exile, poverty, hatred of his homeland, and a violent death. Neither the one nor the other was entire, but each was variable and perplexed, like the sea and its tide.”

According to Eusebius in the Chronicle, this Alcibiades fled through envy from the Athenians to the Lacedaemonians, who were enemies of the Athenians. But once again, among the Lacedaemonians, his virtue attracted more envy than favor. He fled to Bamathus, who, after receiving payment from Lysander, prince of the Lacedaemonians, ordered him killed, as Jerome says in the book Against Jovinian. He sent Alcibiades’s head to Lysander as proof of the killing.

While the rest of his body lay unburied, his concubine rendered the rites of the funeral pyre to him, prepared to die for love of him. Others, however, say that he burned himself. Still others, such as Justin and Orosius, assert that when he fled to the Persians, the Thirty Tyrants of Athens sent men to kill him on the way. Because this could not be done openly by day, he was burned at night while he slept in his chamber.

At that time, namely in the ninth year of Darius, Eudoxus the astrologer was renowned, according to Eusebius in the Chronicle. He climbed to the summit of a lofty mountain to observe the movements of the stars and the heavens.

§ XXII. The Lacedaemonians and the Thirty Rulers

The Lacedaemonians destroyed Versatium and founded the city of Heraclea. As Helinand says in book 16, that marvelous theater which is placed fifth among the seven wonders of the world was there. For it was so carved out of a single marble mountain that all the cells, chambers, walls, and dens of beasts were made from one solid stone. The entire theater hung upon seven crabs carved from the same stone. No one could speak around it, however secretly, either alone or with another, without all who were round about hearing.

At that time Egypt revolted from the Persians, and a dynasty of the Egyptians arose again.

Jerome says in the Chronicle that Euripides, when prophesying about Jove on Crete, reportedly abstained not only from meat but even from cooked foods.

Helinand testifies in the place cited above that the thirty rulers who had been created to govern the Athenian republic turned to tyranny, having gathered to themselves 3,000 guards and 700 soldiers from the victorious army.

As Jerome relates Against Jovinian, when these thirty rulers had killed Phido at a banquet, they ordered his virgin daughters to come to them, to be stripped naked in the manner of prostitutes, and to play with immodest gestures upon the pavements stained with their father’s blood. After concealing their grief for a little while, when they saw that the banqueters were drunk, they went out as though to satisfy the needs of nature, embraced one another, and hurled themselves into a well so that they might preserve their virginity by death.

§ XXIII. Artaxerxes Mnemon and Esther

After Darius, his son Artaxerxes, who was called Mnemon, reigned in Persia. In the Book of Esther he is called Ahasuerus, as the Hebrews say and the Scholastic History relates. Hence the history of Esther was written under him, a book that is authentic even according to the Hebrews.

He ruled over 127 provinces, from India as far as Ethiopia, and the throne of his kingdom was in the city of Susa. Justin and Pompeius Trogus say that this Artaxerxes had 115 sons by his concubines. This agrees very well with the Book of Esther, where it is said that after Queen Vashti’s repudiation, beautiful virgin girls were sought throughout all the provinces on two occasions and brought to the city of Susa. The king knew them, and afterward chose Esther from among them all as his wife.

In the third year of his reign, this Ahasuerus held a great banquet for all his princes of the Medes and Persians and the prefects of the provinces for 180 days, and afterward for the people who were in Susa for seven days. The magnificence of its provision and its marvelous splendor are set forth there.

When the king sent for Queen Vashti, his very beautiful wife, who had herself held a banquet for the women, and she refused to come, he was indignant. Therefore, on the counsel of the wise men, he repudiated her and deprived her of the kingdom.

Beautiful virgins were sought from different places so that, after being adorned for a fixed time, they might afterward enter before the king on an appointed day. Among them all Esther, a Hebrew by race and the niece of Mordecai, who had adopted her as his son [read: as his daughter], was brought to him. She was the most beautiful and pleased him above all the others. He took her as his wife and made her queen in Vashti’s place.

After this Mordecai, remaining at the palace gate, uncovered the treachery of the eunuchs who were plotting to kill the king.

King Ahasuerus exalted Haman, who was of the stock of Agag, above all his princes. Hence everyone worshiped him and bent the knee except Mordecai. When Haman perceived this, he was indignant and persuaded the king to procure letters commanding that on a fixed day all the Jews should be killed wherever they were found, as though they dissented from the customs and laws of others. In this way Mordecai, whom he knew to be of the Jewish race, would be killed with the others.

When Mordecai understood this, he caused word to be sent to Queen Esther so that by speaking with the king she might prevent their destruction. She said that he should lead the Jews to fasting and prayer.

After three days of fasting and prayer by herself and her people, Esther adorned herself and entered before the king unbidden. When the king saw her, at first he showed her a terrifying countenance. On account of this she turned pale from fear and almost collapsed. For the law was that anyone who entered before the king unbidden should be killed immediately unless the king extended over that person the golden rod he held in his hand.

God turned the king’s spirit to gentleness. Leaping from his throne, he supported the queen and comforted her so that she would not be afraid. When she had kissed the rod, he extended it over her neck. After praising the king, she asked him to come with Haman to her banquet, which he promised to do.

Haman left the court and encountered Mordecai, who did not worship him. Angry against him, Haman returned home and conferred with his wife and friends about the favor of the king and queen and about his indignation against Mordecai, who refused to worship him. They advised him to prepare in his house a wooden gallows fifty cubits high and to have Mordecai hanged upon it. He arranged this.

During the night preceding the banquet, the king remained sleepless and had the histories of deeds in those times read to him. They came to the conspiracy against the king by the eunuchs, which Mordecai had uncovered. Finding that Mordecai had received no recompense for so great a benefit, the king asked Haman, whom he found in the court, what honor and procedure should be bestowed upon a man whom the king wished greatly to honor.

Thinking that the king meant him, Haman described a magnificent procedure. The king ordered all of it to be fulfilled for Mordecai. At the king’s command Haman himself went before Mordecai through the city, crying and saying, “Thus shall the man whom the king wishes to honor be honored.”

Returning to his house in the great sorrow of envy, he told his wife and household what had happened. They said that if this Mordecai was of the seed of the Jews, Haman would not be able to resist him, but Mordecai would prevail over him.

When Haman came at the summons to the banquet prepared by the queen with the king, the king asked her after the meal what she sought from him, prepared to give even half of the kingdom. She asked that her own life and that of her people be preserved, since they had been given over to death by Haman’s ordinance. When the king heard this, he rose angrily from the banquet and went into the garden. He afterward ordered that Haman himself be hanged upon the cross prepared for Mordecai.

Then the king gave Mordecai the ring that he had ordered taken from Haman and exalted Mordecai in Haman’s place when he heard that he was Queen Esther’s uncle. Esther obtained from the king that letters should be sent to all the cities to the contrary: the first letters were to be annulled, and on the day established for killing the Jews, the Jews themselves were instead to be given permission to kill their enemies.

All this was done on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is called Adar. Thus the destruction and mourning of the Jews were turned from danger into joy and festival. On that thirteenth day, the Jews killed 500 of their enemies in Susa, and Haman’s ten sons were hanged. In other cities and places 75,000 people were killed. Mordecai ordained by letters that this day should be celebrated as a feast by the Jews everywhere. They still observe it, calling that day Purim.

Afterward the dream that Mordecai had once seen is set forth: two dragons fighting against one another, at whose cry all the nations were stirred up. The nation of the just was troubled, fearing the evils prepared for it unto death, and they cried out to the Lord. As they shouted, a small spring grew into a great river and overflowed into very many waters; light and the sun arose, the humble were exalted, and they devoured the renowned dragons. That dragon was Haman, and Mordecai was the small spring, and so forth. These things, however, are in the Vulgate edition.

Likewise, the words of the letter sent by Artaxerxes Ahasuerus concerning the killing of the Jews, the reason for it, Mordecai’s devout prayer, and Esther’s prayer are in the Vulgate edition. A very beautiful letter of Artaxerxes is also placed there, addressed to all the provinces subject to his dominion and revoking the first letters. It declares that such a revocation did not proceed from fickleness but from weighty reason, and it declares Haman’s malice and Mordecai’s goodwill.

But since Esther was first known carnally by Artaxerxes not as a wife, because she was not yet his wife, I do not see how she can otherwise be excused from the mortal sin of lust unless it is said that she did this by the familiar counsel of the Holy Spirit, just as the prophet Hosea did in knowing a fornicating woman and Samson in knowing Delilah. For everywhere there are great mysteries between Christ and the Church.

Ahasuerus is also said to have been led to faith in the true God through Esther. Hence the gloss upon the Apostle’s words in 1 Corinthians 7, “The unbelieving husband is saved through the faithful woman,” adduces the example of Ahasuerus saved through Esther, his faithful wife.

§ XXIV. Xenophon and Diogenes

In the time of this Artaxerxes, Xenophon, a disciple of Socrates, was renowned. After Plato he attained the palm of eloquence among Socrates’s disciples.

As Valerius relates in book 5, while Xenophon was sacrificing, he learned that the elder of his two sons had perished in battle. He did not therefore think that the worship of the gods should be abandoned, but was content only to remove his crown. When he asked in what manner his son had fallen and heard that he had died fighting with the greatest courage, he replaced the crown upon his head, calling the divinities to whom he was sacrificing as witnesses that he felt greater pleasure from his son’s valor than bitterness from his death. Thus Valerius. From this example, let the faithful person know how calmly the death of loved ones should be borne.

As Jerome says Against Jovinian, Xenophon, describing the life of the Persians, testifies that they lived on porridge, cress, salt, and bread.

In the thirteenth year of Artaxerxes, Diogenes, head of the sect of Cynic philosophers, was held in renown. Tully, however, says that the Cynics first took their beginning from Aristippus, who thought virtue should be praised because it was productive of pleasure. But in these times Epicurus flourished, almost a supporter of the same sect and an advocate of its opinion.

Augustine says of them in book 14 of The City of God: “Those canine—that is, Cynic—philosophers put forward against human modesty a canine, that is, filthy and shameless, opinion: namely, that since what is done with a wife is just, one should not be ashamed to do it openly. Natural shame nevertheless defeated the opinion of this error. For although Diogenes is reported to have done this, the practice afterward ceased among the Cynics. Shame had greater power to make human beings blush before human beings than error had to make human beings affect similarity to dogs.”

Macrobius relates concerning Diogenes in the Saturnalia that, when he had fallen from freedom into slavery and was being sold, Xeniades of Corinth wished to buy him and asked what skill he knew. Diogenes answered, “I know how to command free men.” Marveling at the answer, Xeniades immediately manumitted him—that is, freed him—and entrusted his own sons to him, saying, “Receive my children, whom you may command.”

This is a saying of Diogenes: “Conscience overcomes whatever evil the tongue may invent.”

Valerius says of him in book 3: While Diogenes at Syracuse was washing vegetables, Aristippus said to him, “If you wished to flatter Dionysius, you would not eat those things.” “Rather,” Diogenes answered, “if you wished to eat those things, you would not flatter Dionysius.”

Jerome says Against Jovinian: After Antisthenes had taught rhetoric with glory, he heard Socrates say to his disciples, “Go and seek a teacher for yourselves, for I am now withdrawing.” Immediately selling what he possessed and distributing it publicly, Antisthenes reserved nothing for himself beyond a little cloak. Xenophon is a witness to his poverty and labor.

That most famous Diogenes was his follower, more powerful than King Alexander and a conqueror of human nature. For when Antisthenes received no disciples and could not drive away the persevering Diogenes, at last he threatened him with a club so that he would depart. Diogenes is said to have put his head beneath it and said, “No club will be hard enough to separate me from obedience to you.”

Satyrus relates concerning this Diogenes that he used a cloak against the cold, had a bag for a pantry, and had a staff because of the frailty of his little body, with which he was accustomed to support his limbs when already old. He accepted from another what he begged. He dwelt in the vestibules of gates and in the porticoes of cities.

When he turned himself about in his jar, he joked that he had a movable house and that it changed with the seasons. In the time of cold he turned the mouth of the jar toward the south; in summer, toward the north. Wherever the sun inclined, Diogenes’s chamber was turned at the same time.

Once, when he had a wooden cup for drinking, he saw a boy drink with a cupped hand. Diogenes is said to have dashed the cup to the ground, saying, “I did not know that nature also had a drinking vessel.”

His death also indicates his virtue and continence. When, already an old man, he was going to the Olympic contest, which was celebrated by a great gathering of Greece, he is said to have been seized by a fever on the journey and to have lain down beside the road. When his friends wished to lift him either onto a beast of burden or into a vehicle, he did not consent. Instead, moving into the shade of a tree, he said to them: “Go, I beg you, and proceed to the spectacle. This night will prove me either victor or vanquished. If I conquer the fever, I shall come to the contest. If the fever conquers me, I shall descend to the lower regions.” Passing the night there and crushing his throat, he said that he did not so much die as expel the fever by death. Learn from an unbeliever contempt for the world, abstinence, and patience, but detest his shamelessness.

At this time Speusippus, a distinguished philosopher and Plato’s nephew through his sister, was also held in renown, according to Vincent’s Historical Mirror. This is said to have been his saying, which he reportedly uttered to one praising him: “Flatterer, cease deceiving both of us. You accomplish nothing, since I understand you.”

Justin relates in book 18 that, after the Carthaginians had long fought successfully in Sicily, the war was transferred to Sardinia. Having lost the greater part of their army, they were defeated in a severe war. On account of this they ordered their commander Malchus, under whose auspices they had subdued part of Sicily and performed great deeds against the Africans, to go into exile with the part of the army that remained.

Returning armed to the city, these men besieged it, saying that they had come not to storm the city but to recover their homeland, and that they would show their fellow citizens that in the former war fortune, not valor, had failed them. By cutting off provisions they brought the city to utmost desperation.

Meanwhile Carthalo, the son of the exiled commander Malchus, was returning past his father’s camp from Tyre. The Carthaginians had sent him there to carry Hercules’s tithe from the Sicilian booty that his father had captured. When summoned by his father, he answered that he would fulfill the duties of public religion before those of private affection. Although Malchus bore this indignantly, he nevertheless did not dare inflict violence upon public religion.

After several days Carthalo obtained safe conduct from the people and returned to his father adorned with purple and the priest’s fillets. Drawing him aside privately, his father said: “Have you dared, most wicked head, to come adorned with purple and gold in the sight of so many wretched citizens? I shall establish an example in you, lest after this any son mock the miseries of an unfortunate father.” Thus he ordered Carthalo, together with his ornaments, to be fastened upon a very high cross in the sight of the city.

Not long afterward Malchus captured Carthage. Having killed ten senators and punished the authors of his exile and that of his companions, he restored the city to its laws. Not long afterward he was accused of seeking the kingship and killed. Learn from this that one must have compassion for the wretched.

Mago succeeded Malchus as commander, as Justin relates. He was the first of all who, after establishing military discipline, strengthened the empire of the Carthaginians no less by the art of war than by valor. At his death he left two sons, Hasdrubal and Hamilcar.

Under these commanders war was brought upon Sardinia, where Hasdrubal fell after being gravely wounded. His brother Hamilcar succeeded in his place and was killed in the Sicilian war. While he was besieging Syracuse, he was told in a dream, as Valerius relates, that on the following day he would dine in the city. This indeed happened, for he entered not as conqueror but as captive.

In the time of this Hamilcar, as Justin says, envoys sent by Darius, king of the Persians, came to Carthage. They brought an edict forbidding the Carthaginians to sacrifice human victims and eat dogs’ flesh, while also requesting aid against Greece, upon which Darius intended to bring war. The Carthaginians refused aid because of continual wars with their neighbors; nevertheless, lest they appear disobedient in everything, they eagerly obeyed the edict.

Hasdrubal left three sons: Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and Sappho. Hamilcar likewise left three sons: Himilco, Hanno, and Gisco. Hamilcar’s son Himilco succeeded him as commander of the Sicilian war. Although he had waged successful battles by land and sea, he suddenly lost his army beneath a pestilential star. When he returned to Carthage with a few men, the loss of the army caused the greatest mourning among everyone. Himilco himself killed himself with a sword from grief.

Orosius says that this war was waged in the time of Darius but does not say which Darius; Jerome places it in the time of this Artaxerxes.

§ XXV. Dionysius

At this time Dionysius remained in his tyranny. As Justin says in book 20, after the Carthaginians had been driven from Sicily, he seized command of all Sicily and transported his forces into Italy. He first made war against the Greeks who occupied the shores nearest the Italian sea. When they had been defeated, he attacked all their neighbors, especially all who possessed Italy under a Greek name.

But the arrival of the Carthaginians recalled him from Italy. With increased strength they renewed the war they had abandoned, under Hanno as commander. Suniatus, the most powerful of the Carthaginians and Hanno’s enemy, secretly foretold to the tyrant Dionysius in a private letter written in Greek the arrival of the army and the commander’s sluggishness. When the letter was intercepted, he was condemned for treason. The senate therefore decreed that thereafter no Carthaginian should study either Greek letters or the Greek language, lest anyone be able to speak or write with the enemy without an interpreter.

Valerius says of Dionysius in book 6: Although he had received as an inheritance from his father the tyranny of the Syracusans and almost all Sicily and had been lord of the greatest resources, commander of armies, director of fleets, and powerful in cavalry, at last through poverty he taught little boys their letters at Corinth. At the same time, by so great a reversal, he warned those older in years that no one should trust fortune too greatly, for he had been mocked by fortune and transformed from a tyrant into a schoolmaster. Thus Valerius.

This happened to him as punishment for his tyranny and sacrileges. As the same Valerius says concerning him, he seasoned his sacrileges with jokes. After removing Jove’s golden cloak—that is, garment—and putting a woolen one upon him, he joked that a golden cloak was heavy in summer and cold in winter, whereas a woolen one was suitable for both seasons.

When he removed crowns and bowls from the images of the gods upon which was written “Gifts of the gods,” he said that he was not taking but accepting them. “It is foolish,” he said, “to be unwilling to receive good things when those from whom we pray for them offer them.” He also removed Aesculapius’s golden beard, saying that it was unfitting for his father Apollo to be beardless while his son was bearded.

Although all the Syracusans desired this Dionysius’s death, one woman of extreme old age alone prayed to the gods every morning that he might be kept safe and survive her. When Dionysius heard this, he marveled and asked the reason. She answered: “When I was a girl and had a harsh tyrant, I desired to be rid of him, and another succeeded him. When I desired to be rid of that one also, we began to have you, a third, more troublesome than the others. Fearing, therefore, that a worse man may succeed you, I devote my head for your safety.” Dionysius was ashamed to punish so witty an audacity. Thus Valerius.

Plato was this Dionysius’s teacher, as Tully relates. The tyrant received Plato so honorably that he went to meet him with a vast multitude and ships adorned with white sails.

Tully also writes of him that this tyrant was so suspicious and fearful, knowing that everyone hated him, that after removing his friends he substituted in their place the fiercest barbarians, to whom he might entrust his flanks. From fear of barbers, he taught his daughters to shave him. When they were grown, he did not dare entrust a blade to them, but arranged that they should singe his beard and hair with the glowing shells of walnuts.

He acted no more securely as a husband than as a father. For although bound simultaneously in marriages to two women, Aristomache and Doris, he never sought the embrace of either unless she had first been searched. He surrounded his bed like a camp with a broad ditch. He crossed into it by a wooden bridge and carefully barred the inner door.

§ XXVI. Plato

At this time Plato the philosopher was also renowned, namely in the seventeenth year of Artaxerxes. Augustine praises him above the other pagans in book 8 of The City of God.

Jerome says Against Jovinian: Although Plato was rich and had trampled the couches of Diogenes with muddy feet, so that he might be free for philosophy he chose the Academy, a villa far from the city, not merely deserted but also pestilential, so that the impulses of lust might be broken by anxiety over and continual experience of illnesses. Hence several of his disciples gouged out their own eyes. Thus Jerome. Let wretched Christians learn from this at least to gouge out from themselves the eyes of vain sight for the name of Christ, as they are admonished by his teaching.

Valerius says of him in book 4: When Plato had become violently enraged at the offense of a slave, he feared that he might exceed the measure of vengeance and entrusted the decision concerning punishment to his friend Speusippus.

Plato himself received accusations only with the greatest difficulty. Once he had heard that his disciple Xenocrates had spoken many impious things concerning him, but he rejected the accusation. The accuser persisted, asking why he was not believed. Plato added that it was not credible that the man whom he had loved for so long did not love him in return. When the accuser wished to proceed to an oath, Plato affirmed that Xenocrates would never have said these things unless he had judged it expedient for himself that they be said.

The same Valerius says in book 8 concerning Plato’s devotion to study: “Plato received Athens as his homeland, Socrates as his teacher, a place and a man most fertile in learning. Although he was already held to be the wisest of all, and although young men devoted to study hastened to Athens in rivalry to seek Plato as their teacher, he himself, a disciple of the elders, traversed the Nile’s inextricable banks, the most extensive plains, and the widespread barbarism of the Egyptians. From the priests of that nation he learned the manifold numbers of geometry and the observation of celestial principles. He also entered Italy to receive the precepts of Pythagoras from Archytas of Tarentum and Arion. So great an abundance of learning had to be gathered from every quarter so that in turn it might be dispersed and spread throughout the whole world.”

As Jerome says of him: “That man found everywhere something to learn, and always made himself better.”

Augustine says in book 8 of The City of God: “Although Plato surpassed his disciples in marvelous intellect, thinking himself insufficient for the reception of philosophy in the Socratic discipline, he traveled far and wide wherever the fame of some distinguished knowledge to be received carried him. Thus in Egypt and the regions of Italy, where the fame of the Pythagoreans was celebrated, he learned whatever the greater teachers there possessed and taught.

“Because the pursuit of wisdom is occupied with action and contemplation, one part of it can be called active and the other contemplative. The active pertains to conducting life and instructing morals; the contemplative, to beholding the causes of nature and the most sincere truth. Socrates is remembered as excelling in the active part, whereas Pythagoras devoted himself more to the contemplative with all the powers he possessed.

“Therefore Plato is praised for having perfected philosophy by joining both parts. He divided it into three parts: the moral, which is occupied with action; the natural, which is assigned to contemplation; and the rational, by which the true is distinguished from the false. Although the rational is necessary to both, contemplation nevertheless claims perfection for itself.

“Some think that when Plato went to Egypt he heard the prophet Jeremiah. But a diligent computation of the chronology according to the chronicle history indicates that Plato was born almost one hundred years after the time when Jeremiah prophesied. It could nevertheless be that, as a man of the keenest intellect learned the Egyptian writings, so he also learned the Hebrew writings through an interpreter.

“This may be thought because in Plato’s Timaeus, which he wrote concerning the constitution of the world, he says that God first joined earth and fire. This saying is very similar to that in the beginning of Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth,’ and so forth. Then what Plato says, that the philosopher is a lover of God, blazes nowhere in those writings as it does there. Most of all, that which especially leads me to assent fully that Plato was not without knowledge of those books is that Plato grasped most strongly and commended most diligently those words of the Lord to Moses: ‘I am who I am.’”

That tripartition of Plato, however, which divides philosophy into natural, moral, and rational, is not contrary to the distinction according to which the whole pursuit of wisdom is said to be occupied with action and contemplation.

The same Augustine says in the place cited above: “If the human being was so created that through that which excels in him he may attain to that which excels all things—that is, the one true and best God, without whom no nature subsists, no doctrine instructs, and no use is expedient, as Plato says—let Him be sought where all things are secure for us; let Him be perceived where all things are certain for us; let Him be loved where all things are right for us.

“Therefore, if Plato said that a wise person is the imitator, knower, and lover of Him through participation in whom he becomes blessed, what need is there to examine the others? None have come nearer to us than these men.”

The same Augustine says in book 9 that Apuleius asserts that Plato preached the supreme creator of all, whom we call the true God, in such a way that He alone, because of the poverty of human speech, cannot be comprehended by any discourse, even to a slight degree. His understanding scarcely flashes upon the wise inwardly—and this only at times, like a bright light from a most rapid flash amid the deepest darkness—when they have withdrawn themselves from the body by the vigor of the mind as far as permitted.

Helinand says concerning him: Plato was accustomed to title his books with the names of his teachers or of those who had taught his teachers, so that from their names his words and arguments might acquire greater authority. Hence his books were called Timaeus, Phaedo, Gorgias, and Pythagoras. Tully translated the first and the last of these.

In the dialogue Phaedo, after the disputation concerning the soul’s immortality, he distinguishes the places owed to those departing this life according to the law that each established for himself by living. Similarly, in the Gorgias, after completing the disputation, he spoke concerning the condition of souls after the body. He preserved these two matters in the books On the Republic: first he granted primacy to justice; afterward he discussed where the soul goes after the body and whence it comes into the body.

Macrobius says in book 1 of the Dream of Scipio: Plato defines in the Phaedo that a human being must not die by his own will. But in the same dialogue he says again that death should be desired by those who philosophize and that philosophy itself is a meditation upon dying. These statements appear contrary to each other, but they are not.

For Plato knew two deaths of the human being, one of which nature and the other the virtues bring about. A human being dies when the soul, released by the law of nature, leaves the body. One is also said to die when the soul, while still established in the body, at philosophy’s command despises the body’s allurements and burns away the sweet snares of desires and all the remaining passions. Plato says that this death should be desired by the wise, but he forbids the death which nature has appointed for everyone to be compelled, inflicted, or summoned.

The same Macrobius says in book 2: In Plato’s Phaedo, which Tully translated, the immortality of the soul is asserted by the strongest arguments. After all the reasonings it is reduced to the compendium of a single syllogism as follows: “The soul is moved from itself. What is moved from itself is the principle of motion. What is the principle of motion was not born; and what was not born is immortal. Therefore the soul is immortal.”

It is read that when Theobrotus had read Plato’s book concerning the immortality of the soul, he hurled himself headlong from a wall out of desire for a better life. Although he acted foolishly and damnably, this is nevertheless introduced so that the soul’s immortality may be known.

These also are Plato’s words in the Phaedo: “As long as we have a body and our soul is mingled with so great an evil, we shall never sufficiently attain what we have long desired, that is, knowledge of the truth. For the body brings infinite occupations by which we are worn away on account of our daily sustenance.

“The body is also burdened by diseases, desires, fears, and innumerable appearances of various things and appetites, so that because of it we cannot even be wise in any matter. But the mind of the dead is free and released from the body.

“Therefore, during the time in which we live, we shall finally approach knowledge if we use the body not at all or as little as possible and do not lower the soul into fellowship with it except insofar as necessity requires. For thus we shall be filled as little as possible with the body’s turbulent and vicious nature. Instead, pure from its contagion, departing incorrupt and sincere, we shall come to all incorrupt and sincere things.”

Vincent says in book 4, chapter 79, of the Historical Mirror that many excellent things are read as having been said by Plato, such as what Boethius relates him to have said: “Commonwealths will be blessed if either wise men govern them or their rulers study wisdom.”

There is also what Tully asserts that he said: “Pleasure is the bait of evils,” because human beings are caught by it just as fish by a hook.

Plato is likewise reported to have said:

“If the form of wisdom could be seen by the eyes, it would arouse everyone to the greatest love of itself.

“The form of justice cannot be comprehended unless the form of injustice is first examined.

“The soul is a self-moving essence.

“Not only knowledge that is removed from justice should be called cunning rather than wisdom; but even a spirit prepared for danger, if it is driven by its own desire and not by the advantage of all, has the name of recklessness rather than courage.

“That justice is most true which is observed toward inferiors.

“It is the triumph of innocence not to sin where one could.

“Cease to sin against the person over whom you have greater power.

“Death should be desired by those who philosophize, and philosophy itself is a meditation upon dying.

“Patience is the chief strength of philosophy.”

As Helinand relates, when this Plato saw Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, surrounded by guards for the protection of his body, he said, “What so great an evil have you done that you must be guarded by so many?”

Vincent says that he asserted the existence of two worlds: an intelligible world in which truth itself dwelt, and this sensible world, which it is evident that we perceive by sight and touch. Accordingly, the former was true, while the latter, made in its image, was truthlike. Concerning the former, therefore, the things the soul knew could be polished, as it were, and truth could be reasoned out. Concerning the latter, not knowledge but opinion could be generated in the minds of fools.

As the same Vincent says in the place cited above, Plato erred in these matters because he said that the ideas are in the divine mind as the eternal exemplar of the things that are made. This is true, but he thought the ideas themselves were something other than the divine mind. This is false, since they are the same in reality.

He also erred greatly because he placed God in the division of existing things, although “to be” is said in one way of the creator and in another of the creature. For this name “being” is predicated not univocally of God and the other creatures, but analogically. Therefore God cannot be placed in the division of the things that are, as though He existed in some category; rather, He exceeds every being of the categories.

He also erred concerning the matter of providence, which he made threefold, as Thomas sets forth in the First Part. Plato said that there are three kinds of providence. The first provides for intellectual creatures and for the whole world with respect to genera and species; this he attributed to God. The second provides for individual animals and plants with respect to generation, corruption, and other natural changes; this he attributed to the gods who circle the heavens. The third provides for matters pertaining to human life, or human acts; this he attributed to demons.

But blessed Thomas refutes all these things there with arguments. For there is one providence of God by which all things together are most excellently provided for, according to Wisdom 6: “He has equal care for all.” From these matters anyone can know that saying of Jeremiah: “Every human being has become foolish through his own knowledge,” unless it is aided by the knowledge of God.

Plato died in the twenty-first year of Darius, the son of Artaxerxes who was also called Ochus. As Seneca says of him in letter 58, Plato died on his birthday and completed exactly eighty-one years, without any deduction. Therefore the magi who were then at Athens offered sacrifice to him after his death, judging that he had been of a lot higher than the human, because he had completed the most perfect number, which nine multiplied nine makes.

Augustine nevertheless says in book 11 of The City of God: “Labeo places Plato among the demigods, as he does Hercules and Romulus. He prefers demigods to human beings, but he places both among the divinities. We, however, do not compare Plato even to any Christian human being.” Similarly, Jerome, upon Ecclesiastes, places Plato with other ancient pagan philosophers among the damned.

It is also evident from what has been said that Archytas of Tarentum flourished in these times, since Plato was his pupil. Tully says of him in On Old Age: Archytas of Tarentum, while Plato of Athens was present at his discourse, said that nature had given human beings no more deadly plague than bodily pleasure. Since God had given the human being nothing more excellent than the mind, nothing was so hostile to this divine gift as pleasure.

To make this more intelligible, he imagined in his mind someone stirred by as much bodily pleasure as could possibly be experienced. He judged that no one would doubt that for as long as that person enjoyed the pleasure, he could consider nothing with his mind, think nothing, and accomplish nothing by reason.

The same Tully says of him in On Friendship: “Nature loves nothing solitary. Hence what I heard our elders say was customarily spoken by Archytas of Tarentum is true, as I think: if someone had ascended into heaven and beheld the nature of the world and the beauty of the stars, his admiration would be unpleasant without a friend and companion, though it would be most delightful if he had someone to whom he could disclose it.”

Valerius says of him in book 4: Archytas of Tarentum said to his steward, “I would have exacted punishment from you if I were not angry with you. For I preferred to leave you unpunished rather than punish you more severely than was just because of anger.”

Aulus Gellius says of him in the book of Attic Nights: The philosopher Favorinus affirms that an image of a dove made from wood by a certain method and mechanical art flew to Archytas.

Vincent gives this as his opinion concerning the soul in book 4, chapter 8: “The soul was composed after the example of the one, and it thus rules without location in the body, just as one does among numbers.” And: “There is, finally, no crime and no wicked deed which the desire for pleasure does not impel one to undertake.”

§ XXVII. The Later Reign of Artaxerxes

Returning to the history of Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, who is also believed to be Ahasuerus as was said above: of the 115 sons he had, only three were received from a lawful marriage—Darius, Arabathus, and Ochus.

Contrary to the custom of the Persians, among whom the king is changed only at death, while he was still alive the indulgent father made Darius king, as Justin says in book 10. But in repayment for so great a benefit, Darius contemplated the crime of parricide against his father and took fifty brothers into partnership in the deed. The cause of the parricide was more criminal than the parricide itself.

King Artaxerxes had taken in marriage Astasia, the concubine of his brother Cyrus. Darius had demanded that his father yield her to him just as he had yielded the kingdom. Artaxerxes first promised this. Then, led by repentance so that he might honorably deny what he had rashly promised, he appointed her to the priesthood of the sun, by which perpetual chastity from all men was commanded for her.

Enraged by this, the young man conspired against his father. He was discovered and destroyed with his associates, and the wives and children of them all were killed. After this Artaxerxes died of an illness contracted from grief.

The inheritance of the kingdom was delivered to Ochus. Fearing a similar royal conspiracy, he filled the palace with the slaughter and killing of his relatives, moved by no mercy for blood, sex, or age. Then, as though the kingdom had been pacified, he brought war upon the Susians.

In that war a certain Codomanus advanced with every favor against a champion of the enemy. Having slain the enemy, he obtained victory for his people; on this account he was appointed prefect over the Armenians. Later, after the death of Ochus, in remembrance of his former valor, he was established as king by the people.

In the time of this Ochus, the orator Demosthenes was known. Valerius says of him in book 8: Although Demosthenes could not pronounce the first letter of the rhetorical art because of the thinness of his voice and a defect of his mouth, he attacked the defect with such effort that no one uttered what he wished more clearly. By continual exercise he brought his exceedingly weak voice to a sound pleasing to the ears.

To overcome the weakness of his side, he completed many verses in a single breath and pronounced them while rapidly climbing steep places. Standing upon shallow shores, he delivered declamations against the crashing obstacles of the waves. He was also accustomed to speak much and for a long time with pebbles inserted in his mouth, so that his speech would be readier and more fluent.

This is the Demosthenes who, playfully stroking the belly of Lais, the most famous courtesan, asked, “How much for this?” When she said, “A thousand denarii,” he answered, “I do not buy repentance for so high a price.”

Isidore says of him in book 1 of the Etymologies: The orator Demosthenes used a fable against Philip. When Philip demanded that the Athenians give him ten orators and that he would then depart, Demosthenes devised this fable to dissuade them. He said that wolves, wishing to deceive the diligence of shepherds, once persuaded them to enter into friendship, but on this condition: that they hand over the dogs against whom there was cause for quarrels as the pledge of security. The shepherds agreed and in hope of security gave up the dogs, whom they had as vigilant guardians of their sheep. Then, with every fear removed, the wolves tore apart the whole flock not only for satiety but even for lust. Thus Philip intended to act among the people once the orators had been taken away.

Helinand says of the same man in book 11: When Demosthenes asked Aristodemus, a performer of plays, how much payment he had received to act, and Aristodemus answered, “A talent,” Demosthenes said, “But I received more to keep silent.” Thus the tongue of legal pleaders is harmful unless, as the saying goes, you bind it with silver cords. Among advocates, therefore, even silence itself is for sale.

The same Demosthenes was being sought by the Athenian senate as an advocate against Philip, king of the Macedonians. Feigning weakness, he lay down in bed, as they say, and answered those who came to him that he was suffering from a disease that passed judgment. One of the messengers replied most bitingly, “Surely you are suffering not from one that passes judgment, but from one that produces silver.”

At that time Aeschines appears to have flourished. Valerius says of him in book 8: The ornaments of eloquence consist in suitable pronunciation and appropriate movement of the body. When someone has equipped himself with these, he approaches people in three ways: by penetrating their ears, charming their eyes, and invading their minds.

Therefore, when Aeschines had gone to Rhodes because of judicial disgrace and there, at the request of the city, had recited first his own most renowned speech against Ctesiphon and then that of Demosthenes on the same matter, everyone marveled at the eloquence of both, but somewhat more at that of Demosthenes. Aeschines said, “What if you had heard the man himself?” So great an orator admired the force of his enemy and the ardor of his speaking so much that he declared himself an inadequate reader of his writings.

For Aeschines had experienced the exceedingly sharp vigor of Demosthenes’s eyes, the terrible weight of his countenance, the sound of his voice adapted to each word, and the most effective movements of his body. Thus, although nothing could be added to his work, a great part of Demosthenes is nevertheless absent when he is read rather than heard.

Seneca says of him in the book On Benefits: When the other disciples offered many things to Socrates, the poor Aeschines offered himself alone, saying that he offered whatever better thing he had, while the others, although they had given Socrates a few things, retained more and better things for themselves. Hence he said, “I beseech you to cultivate this little gift of my poverty and by your diligence and care render it better and more adorned.” Socrates answered that he had received the greatest gift from him, unless Aeschines valued himself cheaply, and that he would gladly devote his effort to making him better.

Tully says of him in the book On the Republic: When Aeschines as a young man had composed an Attic tragedy, he held the commonwealth in check and turned and governed Athens at his judgment, so powerful was he in eloquence.

Orosius says that at that same time envoys were sent from Carthage to Rome and made a treaty with the Romans. The continuous fidelity of the histories, and the places and reputation where these things were done, testify that the entrance of the Carthaginians into Italy would be followed by a hailstorm of evils and the darkness of continual miseries.

Then night appeared to extend into most of the day, and a stony hail descending from the clouds beat the earth with actual stones for twenty-five days. During these days Alexander the Great, that flood of miseries and most savage tempest of the whole East, was also born.