§ 1. It is scarcely worthwhile to collect examples; Thomas Bozius has done this at length and laboriously in eight books On the Ruins of Nations. I call and direct everyone to that work; and if words do not satisfy anyone, let him tremble at the examples of the whole world. We are moved more by a few examples than by very many words; but now there are more examples than any volume could contain words. Let each person, contemplating in those examples an image of his own danger, abstain from vices.
§ 2. I shall omit those familiar things: the Flood and the vices of the primeval world settling into the waves; the fires of the Pentapolis; the Canaanites destroyed; fifty nations that afflicted the chosen people cut off; the corpses or slender remains of nearly all ancient cities; and the changes of all kingdoms with the shaking of the whole world. Let us look upon one state—not its whole course, but a brief time, and nevertheless not its most calamitous one.
Julius Caesar, the most disgraceful of human beings, cut down 1,100,000 in various battles in Gaul; afterward he wages civil wars and is himself preserved for his enemy for a few years, until he is sacrificed by many wounds in the sight of the senate. Poisons from domestic plots avenged Augustus and Tiberius; the avenging sword, Gaius; a mushroom, Claudius; his own hand, Nero. No less were those who followed vessels of wrath and examples of heavenly vengeance. Vitellius, Otho, and Galba seem to have been raised to government so that history might not be silent about their bloody and horrific ends. The force of disease and despair brought Vespasian’s life to an end; Titus, dying by a brother’s poison, was buried nearly alive; a conspiracy of Domitian’s household, among whom was his wife, crushed him. Disease and sorrow extinguished Nerva; poison given in food, Trajan; impatience with torments, and starvation voluntarily undertaken, Hadrian—and avenged Christian blood. Apoplexy carried off Lucius Verus; voluntary hunger, Marcus Aurelius.
Commodus, the most criminal of all, was slaughtered with mockeries added. His successor Pertinax, after he had ruled for eighty-two days, was stripped of government and life by his own praetorians. Severus, often assailed by plots from his son Antoninus Caracalla and attacked by open parricide, died of sorrow. Caracalla himself, after he had killed his brother Geta in his mother’s bosom, was stabbed by his own centurion; for he was a parricide, incestuous, and especially an enemy of his father, mother, brother, and God. The emperors Macrinus and Diadumenian afterward fell by the hands of their own soldiers. The slain Heliogabalus’s body was dragged and cast into the Tiber. Not even a certain piety profited Alexander so as to prevent his being killed by Maximinus. But Maximinus was slaughtered together with his son, and their heads sent to Rome for the consolation of the afflicted city. Soldiers killed Balbinus and Pupienus—raised to government by the senate—after subjecting them to mockery and torturing them most dreadfully.
Philip, Gordian’s colleague and unmindful of his benefit, killed him most cruelly and most undeservedly. Philip, together with his son, although now a Christian with changed morals, was nevertheless struck down by Decius in vengeance for his offenses—the father at Verona, the son at Rome. Their successor and parricide Decius, after his son had been slaughtered by the commander Trebonianus, while fleeing the sword of his own soldier, was swallowed in a marsh together with his horse. Gallus and Volusianus, while marching against Aemilianus, were killed by their soldiers, and Aemilianus four months afterward by the same men. Valerian served a servitude in Persia. His son Gallienus, together with his brother and sons, was killed by his own commanders. Claudius, broken by plague, died; his brother Quintillus, made emperor by the soldiers, was killed by the same men on the seventeenth day. The same punishment befell Aurelian, and the fortune of Probus was no different; his parricidal soldiers set up this epitaph for him: “Here Probus has been placed, truly upright.” God struck Carus with a thunderbolt from heaven. Carinus, conquered in battle in vengeance for adultery, was afterward
stabbed by a member of his household. Numerian was killed by his father-in-law Aper, and Aper by Diocletian. Diocletian ended his life through sorrow, Maximian Herculius by a noose.
Behold, in the most noble and powerful monarchy, the most thoroughly furnished with laws, the emperors succeeding one another in uninterrupted order for three hundred years: all died by violent death, none extinguished on his own day, none by his own fate. I permit you to except one, Antoninus Pius, whom they report to have died from disease. Behold, the wrath of God is revealed against all impiety and injustice; resources or majesty protect no one. Why did God for so long avenge himself upon the wicked by so conspicuous an example? Assuredly, lest anyone be ignorant that punishments for crimes are exacted, and lest a private person hope for impunity when he saw the heads of the world destined for the executioner in so long a series.
Look upon so many deaths of emperors; but first let us consider the monstrous, shameful crimes hostile to the nature of things; then the remarkable fates of the many tyrants who warred with them, the senators who were killed, and the cities that were overturned, so that it may appear most clearly to us how the wrath of God is revealed against every impiety and injustice of human beings who hold the truth of God in injustice.
For emperors and heads of peoples fell amid the greatest shaking of the world, through those at the sides of princes and the destructions of peoples.