Joannes Columbus, Notae in librum de Mortibus persecutorum

Notes of Johannes Columbus on the Book On the Deaths of the Persecutors.

On the title.

Of L. Caecilius Lact. Firm. Here I have followed, as in most other matters, the Paris edition, in which the author is called not L. Caelius, as in the works commonly printed hitherto, but L. Caecilius Lactantius Firmianus. This was so changed by the distinguished Baluze on the authority of that ancient codex of the Colbert library which has preserved this writing for us; and it bears this title at its head: Here begins the book of Lucius Caecilius to Donatus the Confessor, On the Deaths of the Persecutors. Another codex of the same library supports it, in which the other works of Lactantius, those at least that we possess, are extant, where he is likewise called L. Caecilius Lact. Firmianus,

To Donatus the Confessor. To him the book On the Wrath of God, highly praised by St Jerome, is also inscribed. But who he was, out of so great a multitude of those who are recorded under this name among the ancients, is difficult to say. Since, however, below in chapters 16 and 35 he is said to have suffered torments and various tortures nine times for the heavenly truth, and likewise to have been held in prison for six years, and yet not to have been overcome, it is clear that he is rightly celebrated by Baluze with the praise of an illustrious confessor of those times. For at that time those were called confessors who were, as Tertullian calls them, designated martyrs, namely those who, harassed in dreadful ways, persisted bravely in confessing the name of Christ, yet had not yet been carried off to death. Hence St Cyprian, in letter 52, to Antonianus, says: The presbyter Moses, then still a confessor, now also a martyr, subscribing. Today those devoted to the Roman Pontiff call confessors those who, tossed indeed by no

whirlwinds of persecutions, are yet, as these men indeed maintain, conspicuous beyond the rest of mortals for holiness of life.

On the Deaths of the persecutors. That mortes in the plural number was frequently used by Tully and the other writers of the best repute, Vossius, On Analogy, book 1, ch. 40, and Baluze at the beginning of his notes on this book, have shown with very many examples. To these not a few could be added, if there were need; such as that line of Prudentius, Peri Steph., hymn 5:

This force, exercised by the deaths of so many guilty men, gains nothing in this contest; even the art of pains is overcome.

Indeed also that of Lactantius, book 7, ch. 10: For just as two lives are set before man, one of which is of the soul and the other of the body, so two deaths are set before him.

On the First Chapter.

The Lord has heard your prayers. He had in view, I think, that passage of 2 Macc. 1:5: May He hear your prayers and be reconciled to you.

For the merits of their faith. Johannes Vorstius, on the Sacred History of Sulpicius Severus (a book of Sulpicius that young men rightly and profitably read), book 1, ch. 23, and specifically on the words merito fidei noctem avertit, "by the merit of faith he turned back the night", made this note: What the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews so often says, pistei, by faith, and likewise dia pisteōs, through faith, our author says as merito fidei. And the word merito is almost redundant, as in that passage of ch. 12: Benedictionis merito majorem minori praeposuisset, "by the merit of the blessing he had set the elder before the younger", that is, by the blessing, or through the blessing.

See also his notes on ch. 47. Sulpicius too uses the phrase fidei merito, Dial. 2, ch. 11. For mereri is often taken for "to obtain, to acquire, to receive by lot", so that it denotes the outcome rather than a right and a worth, or the outcome as well, and not only a right and a worth, on the authority of that great Gronovius, Observations on the Ecclesiastical Writers, ch. 7, p. 76, where see what he adduces from Plautus, Terence, Cicero and others. So in the prayers of the ancient Church: That through His coming we may be granted to serve Thee with purified minds. Nothing is more frequent in the writings of those times.

An adversary will be added to all these. Against the pagans, who seemed formerly to rage with impunity against the flock of Christ, an avenger is set to restrain them. So Virgil, Georgics 2:

Or shall I recall the harbours, and the barriers added to the Lucrine lake,

And Aeneid 6, in the words of the Sibyl:

Nor will Juno, set against the Teucrians, be absent anywhere.

See Servius there, and especially Macrobius, Saturnalia 6, ch. 4.

Lately overthrown. So Lactantius, Institutes 5, ch. 2: Since a professor of wisdom (Epicurus) was striving to overthrow wisdom. Ch. 4: That I might at one single stroke overthrow all who everywhere perform the same work. The same verb is to be restored to Lactantius in book 6, ch. 23: Souls born for holiness he has plunged as into a whirlpool of filth, he has extinguished modesty, he has overthrown chastity. So read several codices, both manuscript and printed, as Servatius Gallaeus attests, whose own edition, however, has flagitavit; he himself would prefer flagitiavit: neither of which can be propped up there by sufficiently firm supports. On the correct use of this verb let young men consult Gellius, book 6, ch. 23.

Now the God of His servants, appeased. The word precibus ("by prayers"), or another like it, seems to have dropped out; if you restore it, the sentence will be fuller and much more elegant. So in the book On the Anger of God, ch. 21: Therefore God is appeased not by incense, not by a victim, not by costly gifts, but by the amendment of conduct. Sulpicius Severus says that the Lord, appeased by the prayers of Moses, averted the disaster. Yet 2 Macc. 1:2 raises some doubt. In what standing that book is held by the learned, I am not unaware; yet the Christians seem to have read it assiduously in the times of the persecutions, because of the fitness of its subject. That the author of this work has taken over certain words from it in several places will be clear enough below. The order of the words is rather obscure; but I think they are nevertheless to be joined so that He is called the God of His faithful servants, just as elsewhere in the sacred Scriptures He is very frequently called the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Look into it, if you please; and which you think should be chosen, decide for yourself, my reader.

God had deferred their punishment. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks weightily on a like subject, Invective 3, against Julian: Formerly, then, while God still held back and put off His wrath on our behalf, and had not yet kindled all His zeal, but still held His hand raised against the impious, and had indeed bent and made ready the bow, He yet restrained it by force, and, like some festering and malignant disease, waited for his whole wickedness first to break out. This indeed is the law of God's judgement, that He may either save by repentance or punish more justly. But to set forth this doctrine from the divine Scriptures and from their faithful interpreters, ancient or modern, is not my purpose. Yet besides these, from which it ought chiefly to be sought, the things which those outside have declared, led by the law of conscience given to them, or taught by others, are not wholly to be despised. Such is that question of Andromache to Menelaus, in Euripides:

Do you think that divine things are not divine, nor that they have justice?

Likewise those words of the chorus, in another tragedy of his:

Far off indeed, yet dwelling in the ether, the heavenly ones see the affairs of mortals.

How excellent, too, are those lines from his Antiope which Stobaeus has preserved for us:

Justice, surely Justice is slow. / But nevertheless, falling upon [him] / unawares, she escapes notice when she seizes / some impious one among mortals.

That is, in the rendering of Grotius, a distinguished man,

Though Justice may come late, / it is Justice, and yet, inflicting on the impious man / the penalties that are fitting, / it lies hidden as if in ambush.

Here by Dike, or Justice, he denotes the goddess of the pagans; and she is the same as Astraea, Themis, Erigone, Nemesis, Adrastia, or at any rate not very different. Of her a man of rare and altogether abundant learning, Samuel Bochart, treats more fully in the Hierozoicon, part 2, book 5, chapter 2, where he learnedly and skilfully weighs and illustrates that hasty judgement of the Maltese about St Paul, "whom Justice has not allowed to live" (Acts 28:4). Since many expressions of this kind occur here and there in Euripides, elsewhere too, both in the dialogue and in the choruses, where the poet is accustomed to play his own part, it might seem surprising, and not without reason, why Plutarch, and perhaps Sextus Empiricus, in the verses which that most learned man Pierre Petit has given us in a more correct form, do not hesitate to attribute to Euripides himself, so shrewd and skilled an investigator of human affairs, the impious and sacrilegious opinion which he put forward in the person of Sisyphus. But there is no point in inquiring more deeply into these matters now. Certainly that everlasting vigour of justice keeps watch, it keeps watch, the perpetual eye that judges and avenges affairs keeps watch; sometimes late, but a scrupulous examiner of things done rightly or otherwise, as Ammianus Marcellinus nearly says. And "with however slow a step it proceeds to its own vengeance, it makes up for the slowness of the punishment by its severity," as Valerius Maximus has it. On this matter the theologians [speak] more clearly and at greater length. Yet what outsiders have written on this subject, especially Seneca and Plutarch, is not to be wholly despised; nor what various men have gathered from diverse sources to the same effect, such as Erasmus in the Adages, "The gods have feet of wool"; "God has found the guilty man": Mornay, On the Truth of the Christian Religion, ch. 12 and 24; Lipsius, On Constancy, book 2, ch. 13, 14, 15; Barth, Adversaria, p. 2907; Christoph Adam Rupert on Valerius Maximus, p. 31, etc.

Of which end. The words which have dropped out should perhaps be supplied thus, says that most distinguished man Cuper: "Of which end of the empires it has pleased me to bear witness, so that all who have been moved far off, or who will come after us, might know how far the supreme God has shown His power and majesty in ruining and destroying the enemies of His name." The same a little later: "The authors...." Perhaps, he says, "of such great crimes", or "of the persecution", has dropped out. For the rest I agree with that most distinguished man; but in place of what he puts in, "of the empires", I think it more fitting to substitute "of the cruel princes", or "of the tyrants"; just as John of Salisbury later published a book On the End of Tyrants; and not very differently the distinguished Nicolaas Heinsius, as may be gathered from the words cited, seems to have named this present little work, and perhaps to have thought that others should name it so. I confess too that I formerly understood what follows somewhat differently. For by "moved far off" I understood "moved far off from the truth", or "moved away"; as in the Psalms מוט and related words are usually rendered: just as the Christians also called "the lapsed" those who fell away in those most grievous contests of the persecutions, and either went back entirely to paganism, or offended once, by throwing incense onto the altar of the idols. And if any weight is to be given to this conjecture, the whole passage would have to be arranged thus: "Of which end of the most savage princes it has pleased me to bear witness, so that all who have been moved far off, or who will go astray hereafter, might know how far the supreme God has shown His power and majesty in ruining and destroying the enemies of His name. And my discourse will proceed rightly and in order if [I tell] from the beginning who were the authors of the persecution, and with what punishments", etc.

Who were the authors. Both the logic of the syntax and the following verb "vindicaverit" show that Lactantius wrote "qui fuerint auctores", not "fuerunt".

Took vengeance on them. Lactantius, book 2, ch. 4: But indeed they themselves too have often taken vengeance on the sacrilegious. Likewise the same author in ch. 4 of the same book, and book 4, ch. 17; also Hegesippus (whether he is Ambrose, as a certain great man seems rightly to have inferred, or someone else) and the Latin Fathers of the Church, as well as Vegetius, Gellius, Julius Capitolinus and others here and there.

On Chapter II.

Was tortured. The Glossaries of Labbé: Cruciat and crucificat [he tortures and he crucifies], σταυροῖ [he crucifies]. Lactantius, Institutes 1, ch. 16: Visited by men with a signal punishment and tortured. And shortly after: they formed an impious plan of doing away with Him and torturing Him. Ch. 18: And they tortured Him in great humiliation. Ch. 21: He will cease to marvel that God was tortured by men.

After the tenth day before the Kalends of April. An elliptical expression, which you may complete thus: after the tenth day before the Kalends of April had dawned, or after that day had begun. In this way the words of Christ, μετὰ τρεῖς ἡμέρας ἐγείρομαι [after three days I rise], are explained by most of the more learned as: after the third day has come. So in Mark ch. 2, v. 2, post sextiduum means: when the sixth day had begun. These things and more [are set out], following Antonius Augustinus and certain other interpreters of the law, on law 122, De verborum significatione, by Scioppius and Wisembachius, and recently, in a work on intercalation useful for understanding the writings of the ancients, by Philip Munckerus, on whom [see] book 1, ch. 2, no. 4.

Under the two Gemini as consuls. The chronologers' problem concerning the year, month and day on which Christ the Lord redeemed the human race by His saving passion it is not indeed my purpose to unfold; for if anyone undertakes to do this, he needs both to examine the differing opinions of the ancients and also to work out the calculations of the more recent writers. It will suffice for the present to have pointed out that this was the opinion of many of the Fathers, the one which Lactantius follows, namely of Tertullian, Julius Africanus, Jerome, Augustine, and also Sulpicius Severus and Paulus Orosius, and indeed of more recent writers too, Glareanus and Haloander: that Christ preached the Gospel publicly for one year only, and that, this being completed, in the next year, under the consuls C. Rubellius Geminus and Fusius Geminus, He underwent His passion and death. Of those, however, who at the present time examine this question with care, those seem to deserve assent above the rest who agree indeed with the ancients in this, that Christ was baptized in the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, since Luke says this expressly in ch. 3, namely under the consuls Appius Junius Silanus and P. Silius Nerva; but who hold that from then He kept four Passovers, or at any rate before the fourth underwent that mighty sacrifice, to be venerated by all pious men of all times; and so that this was accomplished under the consuls Sergius Sulpitius Galba and L. Cornelius Sulla. And this is the opinion of Scaliger, to which those of our own scholars attach themselves who arrange the reckonings of these times more successfully. Those seem to have reached the next nearest step who add one year, holding that the Son of God underwent that death, saving to the human race, before the fifth Passover; the rest depart further. As regards the month and day, it is well enough established from sacred history that Christ suffered and died on the fourteenth day of the month Nisan, at the first full moon after the equinox; that is, if we follow Scaliger, on the third day of April. But if we should think that one year must be added to Scaliger's total, namely a lunar year (for the intercalation customarily made three times in the eight-year cycle does not seem to have fallen in that year), the day of the crucifixion will have been the tenth day before the Kalends of April, on which, or around which, either the computation of most of the ancients or the account which followed earlier writers comes to rest. But these matters, which need to be worked out more fully and with greater polish, I gladly leave to others.

This office having been fulfilled. He uses the word officium elegantly, for administration. Nothing is better known or more customary in speaking of the counts of the palace, the governors and judges of the provinces, and even of the attendants; yet I shall perhaps adduce a few instances below. The Greek Fathers too call the ministry of Christ οἰκονομία [dispensation].

Storm of cloud. The most illustrious Cuperus very rightly points out that

one ought not to have departed from the guidance of the divine writings. Certainly, to have rashly mingled at times those outside darknesses with the heavenly light did no small harm to certain Fathers of the early Church. So here too I fear that this notion, as though Christ had been snatched from the eyes of His own by the intervention of a sudden storm, clung to Lactantius from the things that are read about Romulus in Livy and the other Roman historians: to say nothing of the clouds of Homer or Virgil, in which they hide their gods or heroes. Not much better, in book 4, ch. 21, he says that the cloud poured itself around Him suddenly; whereas from the divine Scriptures it is gathered that the thing was done calmly and gently, like most of Christ's acts on earth. Blessed Cyprian, near the end of the little book On the Vanity of Idols, puts it somewhat more simply and correctly: Then, he says, He was taken up into heaven with a cloud poured around Him.

They laid the foundations. Sidonius Apollinaris, book 2, letter 11: Nor would I cease to build up, with various kinds of honours, the foundations of a vying friendship once laid. Not much otherwise did the writers on land-surveying say "to lay a line or a boundary", "to lay the lettered rule of an estate", and the like. "To put down a root" you have in the old translator of the Bible, 2 Reg. 19; "to lay a wall or a rampart" in Lampridius, in the Life of Sept. Severus, ch. 12; in place of which the older writers said "to drive a root", "to draw a wall".

Peter came to Rome. The truth of that story is still in doubt, as far as it concerns Peter.

And stable. So Lactantius himself is accustomed to speak; as in book 4, ch. 24: And let it have a root and foundation, and remain stable and fixed among men; and book 7, ch. 10: But when it has set for itself a stable dwelling, etc. What he calls faithful, however, is the same thing; for the one word explains the other. I think, moreover, that it is a Hebraism, and that the words of God are in view by which, through the prophet Ahijah, He promises Jeroboam a firm and stable house, on condition that he act piously and keep to the laws of God, 1 Reg. 10, v. 38: I will be with you, and I will build you a faithful house, as I built a house for David. The true Church of God, moreover, as the illustrious Cuperus noted on the preceding chapter, the holy Fathers everywhere call the house or temple of God, following, of course, the guidance of the sacred writings. And so does Lactantius too in many places: as in book 4, ch. 10, he says: that the Son of God came down to earth to establish the temple of God and to teach justice. So in ch. 11: God, therefore, wishing to send to earth the surveyor of His temple, did not wish to send Him in heavenly power and splendour; in ch. 13: The Church is the true temple of God, which is not in walls but in the heart and faith of men, who believe in Him and are called faithful; but that temple of Solomon, because it was made by hand, fell by hand. Add the beginning of chapter 14, where there are many fine things. Likewise in the book On Anger, ch. 2, where in like manner he calls Christ the founder of the divine and immortal temple. I refrain from gathering more from other writers, for the sake of avoiding prolixity.

To a new religion. It is true that the pagans everywhere brought this charge against the Christians; and Galerius does the same in his edict, which is read in Greek in Eusebius and Nicephorus, and in Latin below, in chapter 34 of this book. On the sense of the words of Julius Capitolinus, if I too must altogether take a side, I confess that I go over to Casaubon; the other, a very great man, faced with a knot which he himself admits is difficult, seems to take refuge in emendation as a poet who is not of the best takes refuge in the machine. But let love of truth excuse this said of a man whom otherwise, as is fitting, I admire and look up to.

To cut down the heavenly temple. So Lactantius, book 5, ch. 3: When he had striven to cut down the truth utterly. Thus "to cut down vices" in book 3, ch. 26, as two older manuscripts have it there; likewise book 6, ch. 15, and On the Anger of God, ch. 17.

He suddenly appeared nowhere. We shall wonder somewhat less that this is so reported by the author of this little work if we remember that Tacitus, Histories book 2, ch. 8, relates that long after his death a rumour went about concerning him as though he were alive. About the same time, he says, while, that is, holding of affairs

the supreme power was Vespasian, Achaia and Asia were terrified by a false fear, as though Nero were approaching: the rumour about his end varied, and for that reason a great many pretended and believed that he was alive. He then goes on to relate what disturbances a certain worthless little man caused by pretending to be Nero; on which consult the historian himself, or Casaubon's notes on Suetonius. That the error was strengthened by these false rumours, an error which seems to have clung to many Christians of those times, that Nero either survived or would come back to life in the last times, so as to rage against the whole Christian name, certain Fathers of the ancient Church touch upon and refute together with our Lactantius; as Jerome on chapter 11 of Daniel, Augustine, On the City of God book 20, chapter 149, Ambrose on 1 Cor. 4, verse 9; others too have themselves suspected that Nero was, and is to be, either a type of Antichrist or Antichrist himself. See Chrysostom on 2 Thess. 2, homily 4, p. m. 1504, and the sermon on almsgiving, Sulpicius Severus, Sacred History book 2, chapter 29, and Dialogue 2, last chapter, etc.

When He began to descend. Those who read Lactantius see that he loves old formulas and elegances of speech; and a distinguished man notes excellently that the same holds in the word descensor, or in descendere as made into a noun. Consult besides, if you please, Adrian Turnebus, Adversaria book 9, chapter 9, the interpreters of Virgil on the Georgics 2, verse 326, and Torrentius on that line of Horace, Epode 13:

And rains and snows bring Jove down.

As regards supplying the gaps around this place in the page, pierced by moths or damaged by age, I have nothing to add, except that I think it could be read with less change as et in ultima aetate; and so on, as the most distinguished Cuperus leads the way: or and in the last ages, when the holy and everlasting beginning of Christ began to descend, they declare that they will return. Some of the ancients, however, thought that Enoch would return together with Elijah, as Augustine bears witness, book 9 On Genesis according to the Letter, chapter 6. Others have already cited his words, and have also shown what Gregory the Great thought on the same matter. Andrew of Caesarea also seems to incline to this, in his commentary on the Apocalypse, p. m. 45, which Sylburgius published together with certain books of Chrysostom; to say nothing now of the words of Tertullian, much more ancient than these, also known from the works of others, which are read in him, book On the Soul, chapter 50, where Pamelius has collected more from the same author, of nearly the same opinion. Indeed certain heterodox men of our times have tried to confirm this very thing from Sir. chapter 44, verse 11, whom not so much the Greek words of the Siracide favour as the version of the Latin translator: Enoch pleased God, and was translated into Paradise, that he may give repentance to the nations. In Hoeschel's Greek edition, which he corrected against the most ancient copies, one reads: Enoch pleased the Lord, and was translated, an example of repentance to the generations. But on these matters it would be far better to consult the theologian of Helmstedt of most celebrated name, Dr Georg Calixt, in that part of his treatise on the Last Judgement in which he deals with the signs that are to precede that decisive day. That this error was excellently refuted by him is the judgement of Johann Heinrich Boecler, a most celebrated and most learned man, Universal History page 210.

On Chapter III.

A no lesser tyrant. This was Domitian, whom his Rome called a bald Nero, as Ausonius says; Tertullian in the Apology called him a portion of Nero in cruelty; and in the book On the Cloak, an under-Nero.

He pressed upon the necks. Lactantius, Institutes book 5, chapter 9: But those worshippers of God who have not denied themselves, upon them they press with all the strength of their butchery. Book 7, chapter 19: For when the world has been seized, he will press down upon it with great armies of robbers.

Even the memory of his name was erased. Dio Cassius, Herodian and the Latin writers of the Augustan History mention this custom in many places. Indeed Lactantius too alludes to it in the last chapter of this little work.

He had built works. Symmachus book 1, letter 52:

I was raising works in the city with the loftiest pediments. Spartianus in the Life of Hadrian, ch. 19: Although he had built works everywhere without number, he himself never inscribed his name on them, except on the temple of his father Trajan. But this is very widely known. The works of Domitian, however, are listed by Suetonius and Eutropius, and most fully by Eusebius in the Chronicle, no. 2100: the Capitol restored, the Odeum, the Forum Transitorium, the Stadium, the Pepper Warehouses, and more; on which consult the very great men who have illustrated the said writers with notes.

Having persecuted his name. Tertull. On Patience, ch. 2: Persecuting the name together with his household. Aur. Victor On the Caesars, ch. 3: They pursue under arms the family and all its kindred.

He stretched out his hands. Lact. book 7, ch. 15: For once Carthage was destroyed, it stretched out its hands over the whole world by land and sea.

On Chapter IV.

For who would persecute justice, except an evil man? Tertullian, Apology ch. 5: Such have always been our persecutors: unjust, impious, base; men whom you yourselves are accustomed to condemn, and those condemned by whom you have been wont to restore. Compare book 1 Against the Nations, ch. 7, and very many other sayings of others in this sense. For the godly men of every age truly glory in this, that they are hated by the wicked alone; but to cite their words would be a lengthy task.

Having set out against the Carpi. The author of this book names the Carpi alone, although it is established that there were present with the Carpi other peoples, many times more numerous: the Borani, for instance, the Goths, the Urugundi, as Zozimus is wont to call them; indeed also the Astringi, the Taphili and more, whom Jornandes lists in this History. Yet Lactantius names the Carpi alone, inasmuch as they were better known than the rest for their frequent incursions into Roman territory. The same Jornandes, On the Affairs of the Getae, ch. 16: But three thousand of the Carpi also joined them, a race of men exceedingly ready for war, who were often hostile to the Romans. Add what very learned men have noted, Cellarius on Zozimus book 1, ch. 28, and Baluze on these words of Lactantius. That it happened not rarely, however, that emperors assumed a surname from a people scarcely conquered, let alone thoroughly subdued, is well known; likewise that usurpers took titles from those peoples whom they had not even provoked in war. But more on these matters perhaps elsewhere.

On Chapter V.

He said that this was true. I was somewhat in doubt whether some word had dropped out here, namely yoke, or trophy, or another like it. But the most distinguished and most learned Cuper, consulted on the matter, relieved me of this scruple. That the Romans, however, were accustomed to hand down their deeds to memory by pictures or carved stones, I do not think should be counted a fault. How many very fine things we would know better, if this zeal had belonged to other nations too! Let there be read, if you please, what Pliny in book 35, ch. 4, relates of Messala, L. Scipio, Hostilius Mancinus, and above all of Augustus; likewise what Aur. Victor relates of L. Aemilius publicly displaying his triumph over the Ligurians painted on a panel; and other things here and there in other authors. Nor did they only paint, but they also very frequently carved their deeds in marble; as Caesar Bulengerus shows in his commentary on triumphs from the marble trophies of Marius, which survive even now, from the triumphal arches of Constantine and of others, and from other monuments. Coins also, as the illustrious Cuper has already pointed out, show everywhere with what zeal they laboured to make their victories known to posterity; on which there occur not only very many of the Caesars bearing trophies, but some also struck under the free state, on which the victor presses down the neck or the back of the vanquished. Let that coin of Paulus Aemilius in Goltzius serve as an example, on which the victor tramples the vanquished not much otherwise than Sapor does.

That the Romans, however, laboured to the point of excess at depicting all their affairs by painting and similar arts, especially in the time of those emperors who are mentioned here,

Casaubon does not conceal on the Life of Pescennius Niger, chapter 6, which I should wish to be consulted. But now the reader (I think) demands that I set out the words of Nazianzen praised above by the most distinguished Cuper. "It is an imperial law, I do not know whether among all men among whom there is kingly rule, but among the Romans at any rate, and among the things most zealously observed (the Greek-Latin edition, Paris, 1630, has λίαν), that those who reign are honoured with public images. For the crowns do not suffice, nor the diadems, nor the bloom of the purple, nor the laws enumerated, and tributes, and the multitude of subjects, to hold the kingship together for them (the same edition has 'to knit together'); but they need adoration as well, by which they will appear more august, not only so that they themselves may be adored, but also in moulded figures and in colours (the same has τῆς for τῶν), so that the veneration paid to them may be more insatiable and more complete (the same has τελεώτερον). To these images different emperors delight to have different things added: some the more splendid of the cities bringing gifts, others Victories crowning them above the head, others the magistrates doing obeisance and honoured with the insignia of their offices; others scenes of beast-slaying and of good marksmanship; others the manifold figures of barbarians defeated and cast beneath their feet [or being slain] (the words enclosed in brackets are lacking in the same edition; the same, after the words 'of things only', adds: 'on which they pride themselves'). For they love not only the realities of things, but also (the same has 'also those of these') their images." Thus truly that holy writer; and it would be very easy to illustrate all these points one by one. But since anyone not too ignorant of Roman affairs could do the same, I shall be content to have noted for the present that the origin of victors trampling on necks, or backs, appears to have come from the East and to be very ancient. Thus at the command of Joshua the leader, the chiefs of the Israelites tread with their feet on the necks of the conquered kings, Josh. 10:24. From this so ancient, so well-known custom that phrase seems to have arisen, συντρίβειν ὑπὸ τοὺς πόδας, or "to trample": and it signifies to subdue, or to tame, or to bring an enemy to order and set a limit on him, lest he do harm in future. You have it in Gen. 3:15; Ps. 119, 118; Rom. 16:20. With these some other biblical sayings agree. All of which, although they are most holy and plainly mystical, nevertheless show the custom of the Orientals. But on these matters others have written more fully.

On Chapter VI.

Mad and headlong. This is sufficiently shown, among other things, by the title of Lord and God that he usurped, on which see the illustrious Spanheim in De praestantia et usu numismatum, p. m. 729. On the persecution instituted by the same man, see what Antoine Pagi has collected in his learned dissertation on the imperial consuls, p. 380.

Caenofrurium. Paeanius calls it καινὸν φρούριον; and that it should therefore be written with ae, not even Scaliger was reluctant to point out.

Slain by his friends. That those are called friends of kings whom they keep close to themselves for more intimate access and more secret counsels, and that this is that friendship of Aristotle's, καθ' ὑπεροχὴν φιλίαν, men of most praiseworthy learning have shown. But in order to forestall the threats of Aurelian, a bloodthirsty emperor, Mnestheus, one of his freedmen (by Zosimus he is called Eros, "appointed reporter of the replies brought in from outside", book 1, chapter 62, that is, Master of the Offices), stirred up several men to his murder by terrors partly true, partly false: just as afterwards Commodus provoked his own men against himself, in Spartianus, Commodus, chapter 9. See Vopiscus, Aurelian, chapter 36; Aurelius Victor, Caesars, chapter 35, Epitome, chapter 50; Eutropius, book 9, chapter 9.

They acted against God. Coelius in Cicero, To Atticus, book 10: "For you to act against Caesar now that he is victor is the height of folly." So too that bishop, or overseer, unworthy of his office, in Optatus of Milevis: "Both this man I have killed, and whoever acts against me, I shall kill."

On Chapter VII.

To confirm what he said above, that Christians had been hateful to none except

the wicked, being about to speak of Diocletian and the sharers of his empire, he teaches that they did many things perversely, and he inveighs heavily against their morals and institutions. But although those tyrants, by their most savage and most atrocious butchery of Christians, deserved the hatred of every age that has been from then on and, if it so seems good to God, will be hereafter, let those who know those times nevertheless consider whether Lactantius here in some matters serves his own purpose, and does so in such a way that he sometimes censures things whose rationale is different, and which are narrated and explained far otherwise by others.

Inventor of crimes and contriver of evils. Lact. Div. Inst. 7, c. 24: The prince of demons, who is the contriver of all evils. So Ulysses is called inventor of crimes by Maro, and Rufinus by Claudian.

For three sharers of the kingship. The same Claudian, 2 Against Rufinus:

Let him rebuke Augustus, let him mount the lofty tribunal, let him declare him sharer of the sceptre, partner of the honour.

Thus in Amm. Marcellinus, book 26, Valentinian is said to have brought forward his brother Valens as a lawful sharer of power, but compliant after the manner of an attendant. And the author of the Life of Septimius Severus, c. 8: And when he (Pescennius Niger) called Severus to a share [in rule], he was scorned. Further, that I may say something summarily about this institution of Diocletian for the benefit of the young, nothing is better known than that Homeric saying, "the rule of many is not good; let there be one ruler." This has been confirmed by the assent of very many others, and of Euripides, Andromache, act 2, in the chorus:

The power of one, both throughout halls and throughout cities.

Likewise of Seneca, both the philosopher, On Clemency book 1, c. 4, and the poet, in the Medea; of Lucan, book 1; and of those whom the illustrious Grotius mentions there. Indeed these too are the words of Jerome to Rusticus the monk: Even dumb animals and herds of wild beasts follow their leaders. Among bees there are chiefs; cranes follow one in lettered order. One emperor, one judge of a province, and so on. Add to these Cyprian, On the Vanity of Idols, p. 289 of my copy, and Minucius Felix, who borrows his words, by whom at the same time the emendation of Fulvius Ursinus is confirmed, who reads desiit instead of discessit; where you have more [authors] cited to this effect by the most illustrious and most learned Ouzelius, p. 139. Nor is it fitting to pass over our Lactantius, Inst. book 1, c. 3 and 5. Truth itself approves the judgements of these and others; and the emperor Diocletian would without doubt have acted more prudently if, instead of opening for future times a wide window to internal discords by gradually making Maximian equal to himself and then adding the others, he had, by choosing suitable ministers and vicars everywhere and retaining the supreme power of the empire in all its parts, provided for the quiet of his subjects by a safer plan. So at any rate judges our Firmianus, and rightly. Yet I am well aware that certain others go off into a wholly different view. Ammianus indeed praises Valentinian, book 26, because, considering that he was being overcome by the magnitude of pressing affairs, he thought there should be no delay in proclaiming his brother Augustus. Zonaras pronounces the same of Diocletian, Annals vol. 2: "Looking to the excessive bulk of the empire, he takes a partner in it in the fourth year of his rule, or, according to others, in the second." But Mamertinus, all too panegyrically: You who bound your empire not by the regions of the earth but by those of heaven, to share so great a force, so great a power with one another is the mark of a truly divine and immortal confidence, which covetousness could not disturb: Paneg. to Maximian, c. 10. Things equal to these, or even fuller, you have in the Genethliacus, chap. 6. What then shall we say of this tetrachord, praised not a little by Julian the Apostate and others? Our writer answers here too that that concord was not sincere, but a partnership kept up somehow for the sake of the times: not a friendship born of virtue as its mother and cultivated, but such a conspiracy as arises for mutual help among robbers and citizens of Rogues' Town. Nor indeed is it unworthy of observation that they also had very similar faces (inspect the coins

of each), whom nature had matched so aptly in temperaments, fortune, lot, life, habits and actions. But if we look at the other two, Constantius, on account of the gentleness and affability of his disposition, did not approve the most cruel manners of that pair, but bore them somehow, since he could not correct them. In Galerius, however, the tetrachord was far too discordant; he was in other respects too a terror to those two elder men, and at the last he forced his father-in-law Diocletian to abdicate the empire, whom Herculius then also imitated. But enough of this; for if anyone is prepared to sift serious works, the subject of a not unpleasant, perhaps not useless, dissertation will arise from here.

Of indictions. Indictions seem at first to have been made extraordinarily, at the will of the victor or according to the needs of the State; and Asconius seems to have understood this, since he made them distinct from the canon and the oblation. Afterwards, however, these too were assigned to a fixed time. But see the Jurisconsults. The translator of the Bible also has, 2 Kings 15: And Manahem levied silver upon Israel, upon all the powerful and the rich; and ch. 18: The King of the Assyrians levied upon Hezekiah King of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. Add the last part of chapter 23.

Many governors. Eutropius touches lightly on this matter, book 9, ch. 15, and at the same time shows what occasion Diocletian used for accomplishing these things, namely wars and victories; for having gained these, he regulated and arranged the individual provinces at his own nod and will. An example is Egypt, after Achilleus had been overthrown there: He used his victory harshly, he says; he defiled the whole of Egypt with grievous proscriptions and slaughters. Yet on that occasion he providently ordered and arranged many things which remain to our own age. More clearly and more to the point Paeanius: And Diocletian himself, having conquered Achilleus in Egypt, both put him to death and followed up the victory with every cruelty, slaughtering some of the Egyptians and imposing on the rest tributes as heavy as could be; and from this cause he also laid the levies upon all his subjects, having measured out the land and brought everything into a register, which has prevailed even to this day. Wherefore all things agree nicely with these; and hence it appears that the fuller things which that Metaphrast has are not always so unhistorical, whether he added them of his own or used a more copious Eutropius than the one we use today. Indeed I seem to have observed traces of the matter treated here in the laws too of those times and of the times that followed thereafter; but there is not enough leisure now for collecting them. Our author, moreover, rightly calls them governors, because they had been sent and appointed by the emperor. See Lipsius, Excursus on Tacitus, Annals book 1, ch. 75; book 12, ch. 60; Salmasius on Spartianus' Hadrian, ch. 13 and 33; Spanheim, On the Excellence and Use of Coins, p. m. 572. By officia he here understands the attendants of the Governors and Judges, that is the lesser magistrates with soldiers; in which place had nearly been those whom an older age called accensi and statores (although the more recent age too had its statores) and, if they attended the highest magistrates, lictors, and whom a later age called by the common name officiales. Nothing is more frequent in the Acts of the Martyrs, in the Laws of that age, in the Notitia of both empires, and in other writings. Indeed the illustrious Gronovius, in his Observations on the Ecclesiastical Writers, shows that Suetonius too spoke thus in the Vespasian. Thus a certain count of the East had 600 men in his officium; the praetorian prefect of Africa, 388; others more, others fewer, as the matter seemed to require. See what Pancirollus has collected on these at ch. 9 of the Notitia of the Eastern empire. But if anyone should contend that here the governors themselves are rather what Lactantius means, namely a hendiadys, or men a little greater than they, equal, or nearly equal, I shall certainly not strongly object. For I remember that these too come under the name of officia, especially in the regard of the emperors themselves. Thus Trajan writes to Pliny: By the diplomas which I gave to your officium, last letter, book 10. Thus again to another governor of Bithynia, in this book, ch. 48, Licinius: letters having been given to your officium. But these things may already be known before.

Many rationales. The rationales appointed in the provinces also had a staff, or body of attendants, as the most learned Valesius showed from law 7 On the Cohortales, and laws 2 and 4 On Vacant Goods, in the Theodosian Code. These, moreover, seized the goods of the condemned and of those proscribed by the sentence of a judge. Look at Valesius on Ammianus Marcellinus, book 28. Indeed, the rationales were procurators of the emperors, who collected any provincial revenues whatever that belonged to the emperors. Add Du Fresne in his Glossary.

And magistri. The word magister has a wide range; for all are so called who either govern men and order their life and morals, or preside over affairs. Thus Tully himself calls the Roman consuls magistri of the people. Thus the censors are everywhere called magistri of morals. Thus you have magistri of works (in our tongue Arbeles Fouqtar, in Greek ergodiōktai) in the old version of the Bible, Exod. 1. Thus those were called magistri who by the authority of the praetor presided over the dividing of goods, and very many others. Festus, and from him Gronovius on Livy book 34, ch. 25, list as magistri more properly so called those of the districts, of the companies, of the villages, of the colleges, of the knights, of the games, besides those of banquets, and finally the teachers of the arts; the dignity of all of whom is a magisterium, not a magistracy. Afterwards that word began to be frequent in the courts of the emperors; and there were magistri of the soldiers, about whom see the same Gronovius, Observations on Ecclesiastical Writers, p. 217. Likewise magistri of the offices, about whom consult Corippus Africanus, book 3, line 172, and what the learned have noted there, especially Salmasius on Julius Capitolinus's Marcus Antoninus the Philosopher, ch. 8, and Valesius on Ammianus Marcellinus book 26. But there were also magistri of letters, of memorials, of petitions, of arrangements, of the census, of the linen wardrobe, of the private wardrobe, and others for other matters; on which consult the Notitia of both empires, and the notes on the Historia Augusta by men illustrious through the fame of rare learning.

Civil acts. Actus for actiones was common in that age. And so also Lactantius, On the Anger of God, ch. 12: That our acts are watched by God; ch. 17: He takes note of the acts of each.

Exactions. Whence exactors, epistatai, who demand either tributes or labour. See the interpreters of Moses, Exod. 5:6 and 14: And those who were over the works of the sons of Israel were scourged by the exactors of Pharaoh. But on these [see] passim elsewhere too, in sacred and in foreign writings. These exactions in Diocletian, however, are somewhat excused by the very frequent wars which harassed the world while he ruled. For, to omit the very beginnings, the Bagaudae were shaking the Gauls, Carausius Britain together with the inhabitants of that island, the Persians the East, Achilleus Egypt, Julianus and the Quinquegentian nations the rest of Africa. Whence also the author of this writing says below: These things too can be tolerated, which pertain to furnishing soldiers Further, on this census, or assessment, and especially on the poll tax, see Lipsius on Tacitus's Annals 1, ch. 31.

A law for the prices of goods for sale. Formerly, indeed, the frenzy of sellers was restrained by the aediles, whom the Greeks call agoranomoi. See what Piccart collected on Aristotle's Politics book 6, ch. 8; unless you prefer to ransack the records both of the Romans and of the other nations.

Until the law was dissolved by necessity itself. When excessive cheapness is decreed, all the sellers act by agreement, like the oil-dealers in the Velabrum, to speak with Plautus, and cause goods withdrawn from sale to be sought in vain. For this and other reasons use, the corrector of laws, finds fault with many of them by experience, as Livy says, roughly, in book 45, ch. 32, which among other things is to be understood above all of those laws that concern the measure of price. For that is more uncertain than the winds of spring. See Boecler's dissertation On the Measure of Price, and those whom that most eminent man praises there.

Here a mint. The old glossaries: Moneta, a place, the charangeion. Likewise, Moneta, a place where money is stamped. Thus mention of the mint of Trier is made in the inscription of a mutilated stone in Gruter, p. 93, no. 3. Thus those are celebrated by Ausonius which were at Milan

Temples, and Palatine citadels, and wealthy Moneta. Ferretius, in the Musae Lapidariae, book 4, mem. 21, shows that several verses of this poem survive on an ancient marble. But that marble does not bear out the emendation of the learned man who, in his notes on Ausonius, restores et laeti mores where Antiqui mores was formerly read. And indeed that well-known phrase of Ennius, Moribus antiquis, twice repeated by Plautus, and cited also by the emperor Vespasian in Tacitus, book 3, ch. 57, and by the emperor M. Antoninus the Philosopher in Volcatius Gallicanus, in the Life of Avidius Cassius, ch. 5, seems to have a quite fitting place in that poem of Ausonius.

So he was continually out of his mind. That is, he was insane, he was raging and demented. Hincmar, On the Divorce of Lothar: "But some were driven out of their minds by sorcerers through drink, others through food." The Latin-Greek Glossaries: Dementat, ἐξίστησιν. Dementire is used by Tertullian in the book On the Soul, by Lactantius himself in the Institutes, and by others. Cuperus. The words of Lactantius, book 4, ch. 27, are these: "Behold, someone, stirred by the prompting of a demon, loses his mind, is carried away, goes mad." Twin to these are the following, book 1, ch. 21: "For with their shoulders slashed, and brandishing drawn swords in either hand, they run, they are carried away, they rage." This reading must by all means be retained, not the one which Dempster and Gallaeus force upon us against the books, et efferantur. Lactantius imitates Cicero, as he very often does elsewhere. Speech for Caelius, ch. 9: "Wounded, they grieve; angered, they are carried away"; Against Rullus, ch. 35: "But they will surely be held in check; they will go further; they will be carried away." But to return to the matter in hand, dementare is used thus, as efferare is in Hegesippus: "So savage," he says, "had Herod grown against all." See Gronovius, Observations on Ecclesiastical History, p. 71. Thus ponere, mutare, movere, praecipitare, and many others are used intransitively at times, or rather elliptically, so that se is to be understood. Let well-born young men consult Vossius, book 3 On Analogy, ch. 3.

On Chapter VIII.

His brother Maximian. Max. Herculius was the brother of Diocletian, not by nature but by partnership in rule: a use of that name frequent among the historians and panegyrists of that age. See Baluze, or rather Mamertinus himself, whom he cites, and the others.

Herculius. That is, as Diocletian impersonated Jupiter, so Maximian impersonated Hercules bringing aid to his father against enemies; whence also the names of the Jovii and Herculii, carried on further to posterity, of which this writer speaks below at the very end of this book. Go to the panegyric of Mamertinus, especially the earlier one, addressed to Maximian. Moreover, with remarkable insolence many princes formerly usurped the names and honours of the gods. Thus Antigonus, thus Antiochus, one of the sons of Grypus, likewise Mithridates, and after them M. Antonius, and also C. Caligula, strove to represent Bacchus; Menecrates, Mercury; Themiso, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Commodus, and this Maximian, Hercules: indeed Maximinus the elder did the same. Augustus played Apollo, yet without shunning at times the name of Jupiter; so at any rate he was called more than once by Ovid and others: which you may read several times of the rest as well. This was shown more fully by Andreas Schottus, book 3, ch. 3 of the Historical Observations, and by the illustrious Spanheim, On the Excellence and Use of Coins, in several places.

That in the younger, compared with the other, there was more avarice, but in the elder less, but more of timidity, yet more of spirit, not for doing good but for doing ill. The most distinguished Baluze admits that these words are corrupt and depraved; nor does the most eminent and most learned Cuperus conceal that the passage is difficult. I shall try nevertheless, as best I can: and I think it can be restored thus: "In this alone they differed, that in the elder, compared with the other, there was more avarice, and also more timidity, but in the younger less; yet more spirit, not for doing good but for doing ill." That Diocletian was timid and crafty, and also avaricious (and he is indeed the more timid who fights not with strength but with deceitful arts; and again avarice is wont to be in agreement with both vices), such, I say, the historians everywhere relate Diocletian to have been. Maximian was driven to plunder and other injuries by luxury and a lust for squandering and for giving rashly; so that a wonder

it is not that he too is called avaricious, although less so than the other. For men of that kind strive to scatter what they have seized, and to gather up again with rapacious avarice what they have scattered, as Seneca says, book 1 On Benefits, or as Ovid [says]:

They strive to acquire in order to consume, and to seek again what they have consumed, / and these very alternations are food for their vices.

Likewise Manilius, book 4, line 25:

And we buy luxury with our gains, and plunder with luxury; / and the highest value of wealth is to pour wealth away.

Add, if it seems good, Aristotle, Nicomachean [Ethics], book 4, chapter 3. But to return to these Lactantian words, a passage very similar in the arrangement and figure of its words is found in book 4, chapter 3; from which it could be established either that these words too are truly Lactantius's, or that the author of this writing imitated him very assiduously: "In that former part, as there is less danger, so there is more difficulty, because the obscure nature of things compels men to hold different opinions. Here, as there is more danger, so there is less difficulty, because the very practice of affairs and daily experience can teach what is truer and better."

"Immediately at hand." Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book 1, chapter 38: "What of the fact that, as soon as it has pleased me, an image is at hand?"

"I pass over Constantius." These words thus seem more rightly to belong to the ninth section, or chapter.

On Chapter IX.

"Savagery foreign to Roman blood." Write et feritas ("and wildness"): so below, chapter 40, essagitarii for sagitarii. The most distinguished Cuper writes, most kindly, that he embraces this emendation of mine and the two that follow.

"Lofty in stance." So the Paris edition: but that one should read status celsus is shown by many similar passages of Lactantius: Divine Institutes book 2, chapter 2: "But to us an upright stance and a lofty face have been given by the Artificer"; chapter 2: "that you might despise the earth set beneath your feet, with the stance of your body preserved"; chapter 17: "We have received a lofty stance." Book 3, chapter 1: "whose stance is upright"; book 7, chapter 9: "whose body, raised up from the shoulder, with lofty face and erect stance, seeks its origin." On the Wrath of God, chapter 7: "With upright stance, with lofty countenance." On the Workmanship, chapter 8: "Therefore of man alone is the reason upright, and the stance lofty." Similarly Minucius Felix, p. 138, and among older writers Plautus, Amphitryon: "I have taken on myself his form and stance."

"And cast down in mind." I write dejectus, as in Claudian, now more correct through the labour of a great man, book 3 On the Rape of Proserpina, line 297:

. . . . . A suppliant and cast down, / I roll myself at your knees.

Elsewhere too the same author said dejectum clientem ("a cast-down client"): as also Statius, Silius, Prudentius and others. Also the Glossaries: Dejicio ("I cast down"), καταφέρω ("I bring down"), καταβάλλω τὸ φρόνημα ("I cast down the spirit"), καταβάλλω ("I throw down").

"To go to war with all his people." Concerning the peoples of the East, among whom, as they enter battle,

. . . there is a most fierce mobility in no / order, and unexpected returns [to the attack],

as Claudian says, there is no reason why I should heap up here what has been observed in ancient and modern writers. Let whoever wishes see Julius Caesar, On the Gallic War, book 3, chapter 3; Herodian, book 4, last chapter; Seneca, On Anger, book 3, chapter 3; Florus, book 3, chapter 3; Num. 5, etc. The Turks of today also keep this custom of their ancestors.

"So that he now refused." So in Minucius Felix, p. 260, insparsa mendacia ("lies sprinkled in"); in Symmachus, book 6, last letter, commandare; in others, contractabil⟨ ⟩ impartire, obaudire, circumsedere.

On Chapter X.

"Out of fear he was a searcher into future things." Prae timore or prae metu is indeed more usual. I think, however, that pro timore can be said, as in the interpreter of the Bible, 2 Kings 6: "And the heart of the king of Syria was troubled on account of this matter"; and as Sulpicius Severus, Sacred History book 1, chapter 9: "The brothers, fearful after their father's death out of [guilty] conscience,

he treated kindly." And he says learnedly that superstitious divination arose from fear and anxiety, by which we anticipate future things. Arrian on Epictetus, book 2, chapter 7: "What then leads us to divine continually? Cowardice, the fearing of outcomes." Lucian in the Pseudomantis: "They perceived that the life of men is tyrannized over by these two greatest things, hope and fear... for in both cases, to the one who fears and to the one who hopes, they saw that foreknowledge was most necessary and most longed for, and that Delphi had thus long ago grown rich.... and Delos, and Claros, and Branchidae," and the rest, which will be read more correctly in the author himself. Valerius Flaccus too says charmingly, book 4:

But the blind mind cannot trust, and the nearer Phasis draws, and that supreme labour of the tasks, the more do the things close at hand torment; nor are the seers Mopsus and Idmon now enough for me.

The master of the haruspices, Tagis. I think that Tagis can be kept, even in the nominative case, after the manner of the Greeks, among whom there occurs Tagis the Pythagorean, whom Stobaeus mentions; likewise Agis, Bacis, Betis, Datis, Lysis, Eupolis, and other names of men ending thus. But, to hide nothing, the word aruspicum is suspect to me as a gloss, in place of which I conjecture that in this passage there stood interpretum Tagis, or something of the sort: as in a very similar narrative, one usefully compared with this one, Prudentius, Apotheosis, verse 467:

And the skilful interpreter marked by their number and their end the last beats of the soul in the cooling heart.

Add to these what Gregory Nazianzen and Theodoret relate about the same Julian; from which it can be established that those impious rites of the pagans were quite often disrupted by the presence of Christians.

Profane men. What that most wicked impostor of whom Lucian writes did in a feigned matter, others did the same in earnest, so as to accuse the Christians, who alone are truly pious, of impiety and sacrilege. Thus against Flavius Clemens (Leunclavius's edition wrongly calls him Fabius), Roman consul, and his wife Domitilla, kin of Domitian's spouse, "a charge of impiety and atheism was brought against both": concerning their punishments one may consult book 67 of Dio; unless someone prefers to consult the Martyrologies of the Christians themselves. Add Baluze on the words of the third chapter, Ecclesia restituta.

On Chapter XI.

A worshipper of the gods of the mountains. The celebrated Baluze, to whose considerable service the republic of letters owes this book, as to its rescuer and first editor, does not doubt that these gods of the mountains, whom Commodian also touches on, the Deos monteses (for so he thinks it should be read), and also the Deos montenses, by whose prescription that altar in Gruter, whose inscription we shall give shortly, was dedicated to Jupiter, are the same; yet he confessed that it was not clear to him who they are, or of what names. And certainly the matter is not without obscurity. Let us see, however, what path our Cuper, a man of the most ample learning and dignity alike, here leads before us. From his notes on the Apotheosis of Homer, a work which, as I hear, is now hastening to its completion and is eagerly awaited by students of ancient refinements, this man of most celebrated humanity, in keeping with his kindness in other matters, has shared these excerpts with me. After he began to treat of the picture of Homer set on the summit of a mountain, "Mountains," he says, "were once held in great veneration, and on them altars and temples were built to very many deities, as is abundantly clear from history, sacred as well as profane. Hence in Philostratus the Indians call the Caucasus 'the house of the gods'; the Persians in Herodotus, 'ascending the highest of the mountains', sacrifice victims to Jupiter. Montinus, the god who presides over mountains, occurs in Arnobius; the mother of Galerius Maximianus is called by Lactantius a worshipper of the gods of the mountains, a very superstitious woman. The Dii Montenses are celebrated in an inscription in Gruter, p. 21; and because this was found at Rome, the gods seem to be meant who presided over the seven hills, and in whose honour perhaps the sacred rite of the Septimontium was instituted, which is celebrated by the montani, that is, those who inhabited the hills, but not by the whole people, as in Varro, book 5 On the Latin Language, one

may read: in seven places too, on the testimony of Festus, they used to offer sacrifice to the gods who, as I think, were their protectors; just as, in the same author, the Palatual flamen had been appointed to sacrifice to that goddess under whose guardianship they believed the Palatine to be. He then goes on to discourse on Mount Argaeus, on the Penine god, and likewise on Jupiter worshipped on mountains, matters which will more properly be sought from the book itself, which is shortly to come out for public use. But in another letter, which brought me those notes of the distinguished man which the readers here enjoy, he added the following. On this matter I wrote before: but since they venerated not mountains alone as gods, consider whether omnium ought rather to be read. Thus in c. 36: Who also performed sacrifices through all his gods daily. But perhaps she worshipped above all Elagabalus and other gods who were worshipped under the likeness of a mountain. For Elagabalus was so called as if 'god mountain' or 'god of the mountain', as Salmasius teaches, after Fuller, on the Historia Augusta; and it is evident from Herodian and from coins that his image was nothing other than a huge stone. To this belongs the Mother of the Gods, or Cybele, who is called the wild goddess of the mountains by Maecenas in Diomedes, bk. 3, p. 514, either because she was worshipped on mountains, or because she was a shapeless stone cut from a mountain. That the inhabitants certainly worshipped Mount Atlas as a god, and that for the Cappadocians a mountain was both god and oath and image, Maximus of Tyre writes, Dissertation 38. Many more things could be noted on this subject: but accept, on the occasion of the mother of the gods, two emendations, which I submit to your judgement. Strabo, bk. 10, p. 469, writes that the Phrygians call her pylēnē after a place: but Pylene is a city of Aetolia, on the testimony of Stephanus and Statius. I therefore write Sipylene, which name was given to the mother of the gods; and so on the Arundel marble the Magnesians and Smyrnaeans swear by the Sipylene Mother. The other passage is Varro's in Blessed Augustine, The City of God, bk. 7, c. 24. They say that the same great mother, in that she holds a drum, signifies the round of the earth; in that she has towers on her head, towns; in that seats are represented around her, that while all things move, she herself does not move. Restore the last words thus: in that she is represented seated, [it signifies that] while all things move around her, she herself does not move. That is, the goddess is represented seated, as is evident from very many coins, for this reason, that she herself, that is, the earth, does not move, while yet all things around her move. This is not the place to enquire into the tenets of the philosophers who taught either that the earth moves or that it stands immovable. But rightly in Lactantius, worshipper of the gods; and so Marticultores ['worshippers of Mars'] occur in an ancient inscription in Gruter. What follows I long ago emended thus: when she took part in banquets, she sacrificed almost daily, and furnished feasts to her deputies. From the last letter of the word cum, and from the abbreviated manner of writing ir for inter, this preposition was omitted; and that epulas must be read is evident from the very manner of speaking. To her deputies, then, that is, to the court officials, companions and prefects who were about her, she furnished feasts; and from these, as follows, the Christians abstained. That is, whenever she wished to furnish banquets, she also sacrificed, and ordered the remains of the sacrifices to be brought to the tables. These were idolothyta, and how the Christians ought to abstain from them Luke and Paul teach. Several things, and those not obvious to everyone, I could note on this matter: but time does not permit; and I shall only point out that Maximinus proceeded against the Christians with the same fraud, c. 37 below. Thus far the most eminent and most learned Cuper; and since these things offer a sufficiently clear explanation of this passage, and please greatly by their elegance, I shall draw my own little thoughts on them into a few words. Those two emendations, namely of the words of Varro in Blessed Augustine and of Strabo on the Idaean, or Sipylene, mother, please me greatly; nor do I doubt that they will go on to commend themselves to men far more learned than I. Nor does he seem to do ill in substituting, for montium, worshipper of all the gods; and indeed many altars were once dedicated to the gods and goddesses all, to Jupiter and all the gods, to Silvanus and all the gods, and very many like these. Yet since it is safer to keep to the reading of the ancient manuscript, I interpret gods of the mountains as gods worshipped by the profane Gentiles; for Moses himself says that these placed their gods upon the lofty mountains, and the hills, and under every

leafy tree, Deut. 12:2. Add 2 Sam. 17:11 and more; such testimonies and formulas of the sacred Scriptures seem to have been before the eyes of Lactantius as he planned a consoling work for Christians, since nothing is more effective for their consolation, nothing more powerful for softening the bitterness of events: for which reason he quite often conforms his style to them. Yet nothing in religion forbids us to include under these words either the gods of the Septimontium, whom Tertullian too mentions, To the Nations, book 2, chapter 15, "of Arquis, and of Janus, and of the mountains of the Septimontium" (where perhaps one should read "of the Septimontium"), or the gods of the Roman mountains, which were in Picenum in the region of Reate (concerning which Siculus Flaccus and the other writers on agrarian matters [write]); the gods, I say, of these or of other mountains: except that Silvanus, that guardian of boundaries, did not accept the sacrifice of that Romula; for it was forbidden for him to be worshipped thus by a woman. But I think Silvanus should by no means be excluded from the company of the Montensian gods of whom the inscription speaks, nor from the throng of those at whom Commodian points his finger; for that Exuperantius boasts himself a priest of Silvanus, and to me at least it seems likely that this petty sacrificer is here hinting above all at Silvanus and those who share his altars and temples, for instance Hercules Rusticus, Father Liber, the Nymphs and similar monsters, inasmuch as he both officiated at their rites and was most devoted to nocturnal admonitions given to himself or to others. But here is the inscription of that rough marble altar found on the Quirinal hill:

AN ALTAR TO JUPITER THE LIGHTNING-MAKER, BY THE COMMAND OF THE MONTENSIAN GODS, VAL. CRESCENTIO, FATHER OF ALL THE GODS, AND AUR. EXUPERANTIUS, PRIEST OF SILVANUS, WITH THEIR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, DEDICATED.

Here PATER for PATRI, through the stonecutter's fault, and other things occur, but easily detected. The form of the word MONTENSES, however, seems to designate here certain particular mountains, in the way they called Diana of Aricia "Nemorensis", and in the same form "Freteutes", "Fabricenses", "Comitatenses" are read in Ammianus. It therefore seems more certain to say that these gods were indeed indefinite, and gods into whose number or names they did not dare to inquire, and were worshipped in this way, yet on known mountains; as the CAMPESTRES in another inscription in Gruter, page 1015, no. 2, or as they everywhere venerated the Genius, the Tutela, and gods guarding places. To this refer the little story about Aius Locutius; likewise the formulas SIVE DEUS SIVE DEA, DIS OMNIBUS, DIS PRAESENTIBUS, DEO GENIO TUTELAE HUJUS LOCI, DIS PRAESIDIBUS H. L. and many others, in which care was anxiously taken that they should not wrongly pass any over. So, that my discourse may return within definite bounds, I judge that Lactantius and Commodian are alluding to all the gods of the Gentiles, especially those customarily worshipped at Rome, or to those of the Septimontium, whom we have seen Tertullian expressly call gods of the mountains; but that the altar of that inscription was dedicated only to the gods present on those mountains where the altar was consecrated. As for the words "Quae cum esset", I surmise that together with what follows they are sound, provided they are helped by punctuation, namely in this way: "Quare cum esset, dapibus sacrificabat quotidie." "Cum esset", that is, "when she ate" or "when she dined". So "ista non esses", in Valerius Maximus, book 4, chapter 3 at the end; so, according to Hyginus, Fable 139, Saturn asked Ops "that he might eat what she had borne". These two passages the illustrious Heinsius pointed out to me, on Ovid, Art of Love, book 3, line 757. And "to sacrifice with feasts", as in Lactantius, book 1, chapter 21: "In which the priests themselves sacrifice not with their own blood but with another's." And book 6, last chapter: "Therefore one must sacrifice to God with the word, since God is the Word." "If I had sacrificed to highest Jupiter with silver", you have in Plautus in the Mostellaria. "Vicarii", moreover, understand in the priestly sense. So the emperor M. Antoninus, in Capitolinus, chapter 2, is said to have performed no sacrifice through a deputy, except when he was ill.

For he was of such malice, Eutropius, book 9, chapter 16. "Diocletian was of crafty character; shrewd, moreover, and

very subtle in intellect, and one who wished to satisfy his own severity through odium falling on another." You may read similar things in the Excerpts of John of Antioch edited by Valesius. Diocletian seems to have had regard to the precept of Simonides which he gave to Hiero in Xenophon, but to have extended it more widely than was just: "For a man who rules, that which requires compulsion, namely punishing, must be assigned to others, but the bestowing of prizes must be done by himself."

And in what manner they felt. That one should read "And those who felt otherwise", the distinguished Baluze saw in his addenda.

Milesian Apollo. On the oracle of Milesian Apollo, or of the Branchidae, see Strabo book 9, and what the learned have gathered on the Oxford Marbles. Above all, however, Valesius on Ammianus Marcellinus book 29 is to be consulted, and Isaac Vossius on Mela, book 1, ch. 17, who offers few but excellent remarks.

On Chapter XII.

On the seventh [day before the] kalends of March. Consider whether an ellipsis of the little word diem [day] was to be tolerated here, an ellipsis which is common even today in ordinary usage. Furthermore, not only that calendar which Baluze mentions places the Terminalia on the seventh day before the kalends of March, but also others no less ancient, among them that most celebrated one edited by Ciacconius, by Paulus and Aldus Manutius, and repeatedly by others after them; and that some seem to disagree comes from the intercalation, which is known to have been made in that month. Again, those are not greatly mistaken who say that the churches were overthrown at the time of Easter. For the tyrants pressed fiercely on the persecution begun at the Terminalia as spring drew near, indeed throughout the whole year.

While the old men were holding the consulship. These words indicate with certainty the time about which certain of the learned inquire with no slight contention, as Baluze also rightly points out; the time, I say, of the beginning of the persecution, namely the three hundred and third year of Christ, as Scaliger and Valesius truly judged. See how this is inferred by Baluze, Pagi and others, who took it upon themselves to weigh these matters with care. This year was, according to Scaliger, the Antiochene 351 of Christ; the Dionysian, 303. Golden number 19, cycle of the sun 4.

Having set out to the church: one must certainly write praefectus [prefect], namely of the praetorium; otherwise the sequence of the words will be left hanging, gaping and broken off. What follows also proves it, where the praetorians are recorded as having demolished the church, while both emperors were on the lookout.

Yet that most lofty. I think one should write tutamen [protection]. Virgil, Livy and Arnobius, the teacher of Lactantius, used this word, in a sense not much different from his own in this place. He is speaking of animals, book 2, page 55, Leiden edition: Do we not see some building for themselves dwellings of nests in the most convenient sites; others sheltering and fortifying [them] with rocks and overhanging crags; others hollowing out the ground of the earth and preparing protections and lairs for themselves in dug-out pits? And page 17: Nor would they seek for themselves the protections and coverings of houses or of clothing.

On Chapter XIII.

Finally, that they should have neither liberty nor voice. A similar complaint of blessed Gregory Nazianzen, Invective 1: "These things were: that the Christians be deprived of all freedom of speech, and be shut out from all assemblies, markets, festivals, and the law courts themselves. For no one was permitted to make use of these who had not burnt incense on the altars set up in front of them, and paid so great a price for so great a thing." To these can be added what is narrated by our author below, ch. 15.

Although not rightly. There is no reason for anyone to think that by this formula something is disapproved only lightly. The old interpreter of the Bible uses it of things which depart furthest from what is right and pious, 2 Sam. 7:9: We are not doing rightly; for this day is a day of good tidings. Ch. 17, v. 8: And the children of Israel provoked the Lord their God with words that were not right. 2 Chr. 21, last verse: And he walked not rightly. Wis. 2:1: For the ungodly said, thinking not rightly. And ch. 6: Because, when you were ministers of the kingdom

of Him, you did not judge rightly. So too the older writers here and there, as Cicero, For Gnaeus Plancius, ch. 6: This man rather than I? Either I do not know, or I do not say; or finally, what would be most grievous for me to say, but which I ought nevertheless to be able to say with impunity, not rightly. Indeed Lactantius himself spoke thus above, ch. 7; but elsewhere he said not piously, not perfectly, not with an unimpaired conscience:

With great spirit, however. To the wise nothing is great unless it is also good; but they sometimes follow common usage, at least in speech. Thus Tullius in the speech for Milo praises greatness of spirit. Thus Livy is censured by Seneca for distinguishing a man of good spirit from a man of great spirit, book 3 On Anger, last chapter. And yet L. Seneca himself, To Marcia, ch. 16: The Gracchi, he says, even one who denies that they were good will confess were great. I think I have read similar things in Hegesippus, On the Destruction of Jerusalem. Well known, certainly, is that line of Naso: Yet he fell in a great venture. This seems to be drawn from that old senarius which is read in Dionysius Longinus:

To slip greatly is a noble fault:

where let the learned consider whether they would more rightly read,

To slip from great things.

Duly cooked. I judge that there is something in these words such as there is in those of blessed Lawrence in Prudentius:

Turn over the part of the body / that has been burned long enough continually, / and make trial what your / blazing Vulcan has done. / The prefect orders him turned. / Then he: It is cooked, devour it; / and make the experiment / whether raw or roasted is sweeter.

Duly, he says, cooked: that is, as I think it should be interpreted, in the lawful or customary manner of those who handle pagan rites, or even culinary ones. Our people would say, Van bleff steekt van ordinarie vviis, eller som en annan Steck [he was roasted in the ordinary way, or like any other roast]. So lawful rite, often in divine and human books. Lawful words in Naso:

Then the Curio Maximus proclaims the Fornacalia / with the lawful words.

Lawful trench, in Vegetius, book 1, ch. 24. Hence Lactantius himself said lawful rites, book 5, ch. 2.

On Chapter XIV.

He at once ordered all his own people to be tortured. Not ordered but began, Baluze admits, stands in that old codex. I judge that this was left by the author to bring odium on the tyrant: He at once began to torture all his own people. For he adds, He himself sat, and the rest. Interpret all his own people as the courtiers who served him; in ch. 15 he calls them domestics, as the most distinguished and most learned Cuper rightly points out. For the times immediately following called domestics, in a particular sense, the guards of the emperor's person, horse and foot, namely those who kept watch at home; those on campaign, protectors.

They will be vying. It is the figure of macrologia, or prolongation, on which see Buchner, On the Changed Manner of Speaking, book 1, ch. 21. In the Greek and Latin Bibles this kind is very frequent. And Lactantius too speaks thus, book 2, ch. 13: The nations began to be straying from the knowledge of God. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book 2, ch. 8: For all these are better than those which are lacking in them.

But it was noticed more quickly. In place of the word sed, which preceded, it seemed that id should be restored by no doubtful conjecture.

On Chapter XV.

With millstones tied to their necks. What, were those burned by fire the same who then, with millstones tied on, were plunged into the sea? No indeed, they were others. But the preceding words also hang together less fittingly. I think it should be corrected: Not one by one, since the multitude was so great, but in groups, a fire having been set around them,

they were burned: the household servants, with millstones tied to their necks, were sunk in the sea. So book 7, ch. 21: Then those whose sins prevail in weight or in number will be seared by the fire and burned. Cypr. On Works, etc.: And they will go into eternal burning. Amm. Marcell. bk 30: Burned within by an excess of heat. So an old inscription in Antonius Augustinus, Dialogue 10: WITH BODY BURNED, that is, burned up. And so others everywhere. If anyone, however, should say that, because many preferred fire to suffocation brought about by water, thinking that flame, being akin to souls, cleanses and purges them, whereas water crushes and extinguishes them, this was granted by the heathen emperors as a kind of indulgence to the household servants, that they should be consumed by fire, while the rest, as wicked and sacrilegious, were done away with by water, I will not resist strongly, nor refuse to concede that it can be read: The household servants were burned in crowds, a fire having been set around them; others, with millstones tied to their necks, etc. But for now I choose the former reading, since it does not displease the most illustrious Cuper.

Altars in the council chambers. A secretarium, or secretum, is the place in which judges sit on the tribunal. See Hesychius under Σέκρετον, and Suidas under Στήλη. Valesius on Amm. Marcell. bk 15: From this custom of secular judges it seems to have come about that bishops and presbyters had secretaria in the churches, where they might give their time to hearing the affairs of the brethren. Thus Valesius. Sulpicius Severus also mentions it, Dial. 2, ch. 1; likewise Epist. 1 and 3 on the Life of Martin, where consult also the Notes of Vorstius. Moreover, altars set up treacherously by the pagans are recorded in more than one place in the ancient Annals. So Symmachus laboured vehemently over the setting up of the altar of Victory in the Senate. So Julian, when about to distribute a donative to the soldiers, ordered that each, as he was about to receive the gold, should throw some grains of incense on the altars, so small that it deceived many of the Christians, who did not know what they were doing.

Letters pass to and fro. Symmachus bk 1, Epist. 91: Since my letters are welcome to you, they will pass to you more often.

But the true temple of God. Lact. Epitome, ch. 8: Let the breast be emptied of every stain, so that it may be a temple of God, which not the sheen of gold or of ivory, but the brightness of faith and chastity makes glorious. Jerome to Nepotian: Many build walls and set up columns for the church: the marbles gleam, the ceilings shine with gold, the altar is adorned with gems; and of the ministers of Christ there is no choosing.

On Chapter XVI.

Three most bitter beasts. So bitter truth, Lact. 4, ch. 26; bitter dominations, bk 6, ch. 6; bitter census, bk 7, ch. 9.

Then against Hierocles. This is that Hierocles who afterwards governed Egypt; and when he raged against the Christians in shameful ways, he was met with harsh words and struck with the fist by Aedesius, who among the other martyrs had confessed the Name. See Euseb. Hist. Eccl. bk 6, ch. 5. Different from him, however, and somewhat older, was that Hierocles of whom Dio Cassius speaks in the Excerpta Valesiana, the most foul creature of Elagabalus; and different again from both was Hierocles the philosopher, no fairer towards Christian truth, who under Julian the Transgressor spread most venomous writings. Consult Jonsius, On the Writers of the History of Philosophy, bk 3, ch. 18.

Priscillianus. Governor of Bithynia after those earlier ones. See the notes of Baluze.

Nine times you have conquered the adversary. Tertull. Apolog. ch. 27: And we never triumph over them (the demons) more than when we are condemned for our steadfastness in the faith. Similar things occur in Cyprian, Ambrose, Prudentius; likewise in the Martyrologies.

Zabolus with his attendants. The Aeolians change Δ into Z, as ζανυκτὸς for διανυκτὸς, ζαβάλλειν for διαβάλλειν; whence ζάβολος for Διάβολος, which Cyprian, Hilary and others also used. Indeed Paulinus hardly ever says anything other than Zabolus. And similar is zeta for diaeta. Thus Vossius, On the Art of Grammar, bk 1, ch. 21. Gronovius, Observations, bk 4, ch. 13, p. 208.

How pleasing that spectacle to God ... Cyprian, Epistle 9, to the Martyrs: O what a spectacle that was for the Lord! how sublime! how great! how acceptable in the eyes of God by the oath and devotion of His soldier! Add what Lipsius adduces from Minucius Felix, and likewise from Epictetus, at those well-known words of Seneca, book 1 of On Providence, chapter 2: Behold a spectacle worthy of God's regard as He looks intently on His own work; behold a pair worthy of God, a brave man matched against ill fortune.

When the rulers are ruled. Cyprian, Epistle 6: Now it is time for them to fear all the more the adversary lying in wait, who attacks each man the more, the stronger he is, and, made fiercer by the very fact that he has been conquered, strives to overcome the one who overcomes him. And Epistle 34, on Celerinus the martyr: He lay amid punishments, stronger than his punishments; shut in, greater than those who shut him in; lying down, loftier than those who stood; bound, firmer than those who bound him; judged, more sublime than those who judged him.

By an abominable command. So book 4 of the Institutes, chapter 15: He did it by word and command; book 5, chapter 13: They do not tremble at the commands of tyrants, nor at the swords of governors. More in Elmenhorst on Arnobius, book 2, p. 67.

And bugbears. On this word consult Nonius. Moreover, they cite from Naevius an empty bugbear, and from the lost works of Seneca: Mock all his bugbears. Indeed Livy too has it, book 34, chapter 11: That they had been moved by no threats, no bugbears.

With steadfast faith. I suspect that one word has slightly dropped out, so that it read: with steadfast faith and unconquered strength of mind.

Nothing [availed] the claws. Claws: a certain kind of iron pincers, formerly employed among the instruments of torture. See their form in Gallonius, or among the things appended to the book of Magius On the Rack, pages 176 and 81.

On Chapter XVII.

The day of the vicennalia. Although the origin and the nature of the solemn vows, namely the quinquennial, the decennial and so on, have been set out by the learned, I shall nevertheless briefly repeat them, for the benefit of those who cannot so easily have books of this kind at hand. Caesar Augustus, having presided for ten years over Roman affairs, which he had settled and ordered after the greatest upheavals and disturbances, whether he was seriously thinking of giving back the republic, worn down by weariness of long ill health and by the cares and labours of rule (which Suetonius seems to affirm, Augustus, chapter 28), or whether he merely made a show of this for reasons set out at greater length by Dio, convened the Senate and gave an account of his administration of the empire in such a way that, as though by the Senate's own decree, he nevertheless retained the power of ordering the commonwealth for the next five years. But when this had elapsed, another five years were decreed again, after that ten years, and when that period was finished, yet another again; so that, with the ten-year periods continued, he held supreme power for his whole life. His successors, following his example in a certain manner, although the imperial power was conferred on them not for a fixed time but for the whole span of their lives, nevertheless held a festival at each ten-year period for its renewal. This is roughly how Dio relates it in book 53, and the more recent writers after him. It was first done when Augustus was consul for the seventh time and Agrippa for the third. The succeeding Augusti, therefore, celebrated at each ten-year period these festivals, called for that reason decennial celebrations by Xiphilinus, at which vows were paid to the gods that had afterwards customarily been undertaken solemnly at the beginning of each decade; a donative was given to the soldiers, and a corn distribution and circus games to the people. Indeed this practice then began to be repeated at each lustrum as well, that is, every five years. Accordingly the quinquennial vows were made in the first year of the dignity entered upon, but they were paid when the lustrum was complete; then the decennial vows were pronounced, to be paid only when the second lustrum was completed. The vicennial vows were undertaken in the fifteenth year of the reign, but the festival itself was held in the twentieth, at which gifts too were customarily sent to the emperor; on these see Symmachus, book 10, Epistle 26. Moreover, accused persons were released from prison, thanks were given to God, money was distributed through the cities, and public rejoicing was made more manifest in many ways. These things are taught more fully from the coins by Adolphus Occo,

Erizyus and Chalucius, and others confirm or repeat it, as Charles du Fresne in his dissertation on the coins of the later age, page 29. With great care likewise Henry Noris treated the same subject in his Dissertation on the decennial vows, and Antoine Pagi in his Hypatic dissertation, or on the consulships of the Caesars.

On the twelfth day before the Kalends of December. On this passage Antoine Pagi should be consulted, in the work just mentioned, pages 90, 92 and 93, where he states that the vicennalia were celebrated by Diocletian on this day not because it was the birthday of his reign, but because Maximian Herculius had then been proclaimed Caesar. And this was done several times, certainly after the times of Constantine the Great, that when some cause intervened, a festival of this kind was celebrated not on the birthday of the first Emperor himself, but on that of his partner, that is, the day on which the partner had begun his reign.

That he was pressed in whatever way. I read, That by which he was pressed in whatever way.

His soul ... yet not the whole. That is, his life, or vital spirits. So the old translator of the Bible, 2 Sam. 1:9: For straits hold me, and yet my whole soul is still in me. The Martyrology of Usuard, on the day before the Kalends of February: And there they cast in the spirit which had remained in him. See Barth's Adversaria, page 1682.

On Chapter XVIII.

He said that it was unbecoming to him. Write, He said that it was both unbecoming, so that this clause may answer more elegantly to the following one, and less safe.

He had sought for himself the hatred of many. Lactantius, book 2, chapter 12: Through His divine and unique name he seeks for himself the mercy of men. And book 4, chapter 1: They sought for themselves everlasting death with the gods and with bodily goods. Add Gronovius on Seneca, Hercules Furens, line 285.

But Nerva reigning for one year. The rule of syntax proves that one must write Nervam vero uno anno imperantem.

He himself had already gaped ... I read, He had already gaped with hope, since he saw that from it either nothing but the name, or not much, would accrue to him. It seemed nothing, or too little, to Galerius if the two seniors kept the supreme power, while he, content with the name of Caesar, held the third or fourth place.

That fifteen years had already flowed by. Lactantius, book 3, chapter 17, according to the mind of his opponents: Let us allow no day, in short no moment of time, to flow away from us without pleasure.

Fifteen years, in Illyricum. He seems to have had in view the words of Livy, book 7, chapter 38: Was it fair that those who had surrendered to them should enjoy that happiness (the Leiden edition of the year 1634: that those who had surrendered to them should enjoy that fertility and pleasantness), while they, worn out with soldiering, struggled on the pestilential and dry soil around the city?

To be named sons. Institutes, book 1, chapter 8: Whom the ignorant and foolish both name and adore as gods. So book 4, chapter 4: To name as father, to name as lord, in a somewhat different sense. For here to name is to proclaim Caesar, and so to call to the inheritance and to the right of one day obtaining the empire.

A most holy young man. That is, of a most upright and most innocent life. So Lactantius of the pagans, book 5, chapter 10: Who, although they live with holy morals, in the highest good faith and innocence, yet because they worship the gods are strangers to justice and to the name of true piety. This word is very frequent in Symmachus, who, as I think, was imitating the Christians. See how often he repeats it in the fifth book alone: Letter 15: To the holy Lampadius, your brother; Letter 20: The holy Aurelius; Letter 29: Of the holy Asclepiades the philosopher; Letter 39: The holy Sabius; Letter 49: From your most holy and most eloquent mouth. I gather no more.

He faithfully supplied. The former interpretation of this passage in Cuper is entirely true. So in the Latin Bible, 2 Chr. 31:18: To the priests by families and to the Levites food was faithfully supplied from those things which had been sanctified. Ammianus Marcellinus, book 28: Because they refused to supply necessaries for the uses of the expedition. So they used to say, to supply what is fitting, to supply what is due, the yearly, the daily, and the like. Lactantius, Institutes, book 4,

chapter 8: "That we may render just and due works to God Who begets us."

That he might be clothed by him. Others said "to clothe", as Ammianus Marcellinus, book 26: "If you love your own, best emperor, you have a brother; if the commonwealth, seek someone to clothe [with the purple]."

The young man Daia. I think he was so called because he drew his origin from the people of the Dahae, not so much that one which was situated near the Caspian Sea, known through the writers of the history of Alexander, as the European one, and indeed the Germanic. See what Cluverius in his Germania Antiqua, Freinshemius on Curtius, and Dausquejus on Silius Italicus have collected about it.

On Chapter XIX.

On the Kalends of May. Baluze noted that Zozimus and the Idatian Fasti say this was done on the Kalends of April, and that others depart even further; that the Kalends of May are nevertheless to be held with Lactantius, Antonius Pagius also thinks not to be doubted. See the same, page 239 of the dissertation mentioned, and in some other places.

And the former ones of the soldiers. I think one should read "the foremost of the soldiers", as Livy, Tacitus and others say very frequently. Lactantius too said "the foremost of the Jews", book 4, chapter 16; Hegesippus, On the Destruction of Jerusalem, book 2, chapter 15: "Even some of the foremost of the soldiery having been afflicted."

The old man says. I have emended to "in which the old man", namely in the assembly; "recipit", which a certain most learned man suggests, cannot fit aptly here with the following "alloquitur".

He addresses the soldiers. Properly said, as has been noted by others; hence the "allocutiones" often on coins.

All on the tribunal. Punctuate: "All are stupefied. On the tribunal Constantine stood up above." For not only those who stood on the tribunal were stupefied, but the rest too. You have "susum" in Plautus, Cistellaria, act 2, scene 3, line 78:

Why now, face upturned, do you look up above to the sky?

So indeed two ancient manuscripts have it, on the witness of Pareus in his Analecta, and so too Gruterus twice published it. Cato also uses it, On Agriculture, chapter 157, towards the end. So in the arbitral decree on settling the boundaries between the Genuates and the Veiturii, which is read in Gruter's Collection, page 204: "There a boundary-stone stands. Thence by the river upwards towards the river Lemuris. Thence by the river Lemuris upwards as far as the stream Comberane. Thence by the stream Comberanea upwards as far as the valley Caeptiema." The same word remains in compounds, sustollo, suspendo, suscipio, sustineo, and any similar ones there are. More in Du Cange in his Glossary.

Straightway a scutarius, forthwith a protector. These are grades of honoured military service, about which learned men have treated abundantly. Above all see Valesius on Ammianus Marcellinus, book 14, who teaches that of the schools of the scutarii, among the Palatine ones, some were of archers, others of clibanarii; and that the protectores guarded the side of the prince, and that some remained in the retinue, others were sent into the provinces with the counts and masters of the soldiers. Constantius Chlorus, nephew by his brother of the deified Claudius, the best of princes, was first a protector, thereafter a tribune, afterwards governor of the Dalmatias, as the Excerpts published by Valesius teach.

On Chapter XX.

Which he both willed and did. I think "effecit" was written by the author. So in the Divine Institutes, book 6, chapter 14: "We shall soon see whether they bring about what they wish." An inscription of the same times in Adolphus Occo, page 11, number 3, in Commelinus's edition:

To the Emperor Maximian Herculius Caesar Augustus, Constantius having been made Caesar in the West, and the empire of the commonwealth having been increased far and wide, and [he] having also been made colleague at one time with Diocletian, the unconquered prince.

He gave himself out to be lord. That "esse" I suspect was added by a copyist. Velleius Paterculus, book 1, chapter 11: "Who gave himself out as Philip and of royal stock." Tacitus, Annals 1, chapter 2: "giving himself out as consul."

His son as Caesar. Candidianus, born of a concubine, but whom his wife Valeria had also adopted, as will be related

by our [author] below, ch. 50. I judge that Baluze has interpreted this rightly so.

On Chapter XXI.

Se addicant. Divine Institutes, book 2, ch. 1: "They give themselves over wholly to lusts." Book 6, ch. 20 and 23: "Because they had given themselves over to the body, in which death has power." On this institution, or custom, of the Persians, Brisson should be read.

Sic agebat. Unless you add "secretly he acted thus", or "by the arts customary to him", or something similar, there will be nothing that plainly corresponds to what precedes.

Egregii ac perfectissimi viri. Not only the decurions, who indeed were not styled "eminent and most perfect men", but also those of higher rank than they, such as were the duumvirs and the defenders of the cities, likewise the priests, the curials, and any from among these, or besides these, who by codicils granted by the emperors had obtained the honours and insignia of the eminent and the most perfect, were subjected by him to tortures, no account being taken of those same dignities, and these being thus lost. More on these and the other titles in Panciroli on the Notitia imperii.

Defixi in stabulo. Understand "stabulum" here as a stable not of horses but of racks and of scaffolds of that kind, and a place where men stood fixed to stakes and almost hanging. In the same way you have "stabulum ferriterium" [a stable of the iron-chafed] in Plautus, Persa, act 3, scene 3, line 13, according to the emendation of Gronovius.

Quid lusorium. "Lusorium", that is, the amphitheatre, if we follow Saumaise on Spartianus. From this passage, however, you might gather that by this word is meant a building set apart especially for the emperor's amusement in watching the despatching of wild beasts, or the butcheries that were done by them. The scholiast of Juvenal on Satire 4, line 100: "In Caesar's lusorium this young man often killed bears as a hunter." Salvian too lists the Lusorium as distinct from the amphitheatre, in the words cited by Du Cange, in whom see more. Indeed Seneca too, Epistle 80: "I reflect how many exercise their bodies, how few their minds; what a throng gathers to a spectacle that is untrustworthy and made for sport; what a solitude there is around the good arts."

Habebat ursos. Marcellinus tells not unlike things of Valentinian, book 29: "Since he had two she-bears, savage devourers of men, Golden Crumb and Innocence, he took strenuous care to place their cages near his bedchamber, and to assign them trusty keepers, who were to watch anxiously that the baleful fury of the beasts should by no chance be broken. Innocence at last, after the many burials of corpses mangled by her that he had seen, he let go unharmed into the woods, as one who had deserved well."

Et exilii. The passage is difficult, and one I would rather, and gladly, see restored by others; nevertheless I too shall make an attempt. I think that the abbreviation "cros", which ought to have stood for "caeteros", was changed into "Christianos"; and that "exilii" was written in place of "exilium", as in the next chapter "beneficii" for "beneficium", and "imperii" for "imperium" in Aurelius Victor, On the Caesars, ch. 35, as Schott rightly conjectured, the copyist's hand, that is, sometimes slipping. These points observed, I write: "For those not holding rank the penalty was fire"; or, if a mention of the Christians seems altogether necessary, since it is chiefly with them that the matter deals: "For Christians not holding rank the penalty was fire; exile he had allowed to the leading men (the Romans, suppose; for the decurions of the municipalities were dealt with earlier); against the rest, laws having been issued, that after tortures they should be burned with slow fires." Cyprian, Epistle 82, recounts a not wholly dissimilar series of punishments, which you will read more correctly there.

Cum per multum diem. It had already been printed thus at Åbo, by the conjecture, as I think, of the most learned man who did not grudge to preside over this work there, so that this little work might be correctly edited. Afterwards the letters of the most distinguished Cuper confirmed it. In the Paris manuscript it was "Quod postremo accedebat. Tunc per...". In place of "in flumine ac mare", likewise, "in flumina ac mare" has perhaps rightly been restored; for I would readily believe that Lactantius wrote so. Yet "jactabantur in flumine" is not altogether unheard of. For in the passion of Savinus, bishop and martyr, chapter 10, you have "he ordered everything to be broken up and thrown in the river": as also

Lactantius [does] not seldom, as I shall show below. "Mare" for "mari" was also said by Naso in several places, and before him by both Varros, as has been observed by others. I shall therefore not object if anyone contends that the reading of the first edition should be kept.

On Chapter XXII.

No punishment with him was light. I agree with the celebrated Baluze, on the ground that the manuscript had "poenis", which points to "penes". But since the word "poena", on his own testimony, is read further down, I think these words should be arranged thus: "Nulla penes eum levis poena".

They were corrected with the lance. I judge this kind of punishment to have been a species of cudgelling, which our Cuper also thought: but that the lance was used in place of the cudgel, as less ignominious. Apuleius, book 10, ch. 1: "A lance conspicuous for its very long shaft, which he had of course arranged not then for the sake of discipline, but for terrifying wretched travellers". "To correct the Roman state by laws", "to correct cities by judgements", you have in Horace and Quintilian.

In place of a benefit. That the word "loco" need not be inserted, and that "beneficium" should be written, I said on the preceding chapter. Dio, book 58, p. 634 of my edition: "And he made life a punishment for some, and death a benefaction." And so others.

A good death. That is, an easy one, and free of torments. Pliny, book 2, last letter: "How long will you torment the wretched man? Why do you begrudge a good death to one to whom you cannot give life?" Where add what Gruter and Buchner have. Publilius Syrus:

A good death for a man is that which takes away the evils of life.

On Chapter XXIII.

With census-takers spread everywhere. What I have written on the method of the provincial census, or assessment, and on its difference from the city census, haste does not allow me to bring forward. That Augustus too registered the provinces in this way is unknown to no one. Vespasian, Constantine the Great, Arcadius, Justinian and others also did so afterwards, as the laws plainly teach.

All the market-places. So I have corrected, with the most learned Cuper's approval. In the Paris manuscript it was "foras omnia".

They themselves were tortured against themselves. That is, they were driven by torments to this point, that they as it were accused themselves and convicted themselves. Lactantius loves such subtleties. So Divine Institutes, book 1, ch. 18: "Lesser or uglier than himself"; ch. 22: "But though he deceived others, he nevertheless did not deceive himself"; book 2, ch. 1: "To bring themselves back into favour with themselves, lest they despise themselves so greatly"; ibid.: "they themselves therefore renounce themselves." Still more to the point are these, book 3, ch. 27: "So uncertain were they, and often arguing in contradiction of themselves"; book 5, ch. 2: "Himself a stern censor against himself, and a most bitter accuser"; book 6, ch. 6: "And they cut away the steps by which they climbed, lest anyone should be able to imitate them against themselves"; book 7, ch. 2: "Opinions contrary to themselves." Others too have similar things; among whom Ovid says shrewdly:

Against yourself, nature of men, you have been clever; / and all too ingenious for your own losses.

Cicero too, quite similarly, and likewise in a judicial matter. Speech for Roscius the Comedian, ch. 6: "What of you, Saturnius, who come against this man, do you think otherwise?" ch. 15: "You, you, I say, Fannius, I shall call up from your own benches as a witness against you", ch. 14: "He will never give testimony against himself." And similar things elsewhere. And the little word "contra" is most usual in lawsuits, and smacks of a formula. Julius Capitolinus in Antoninus Pius, ch. 6: "He willingly heard those complaining against his procurators." So too the older writers often; as when Cicero says "to defend a cause against another advocate", "to argue against", and the like.

Which the ancients against the conquered. Read with Baluze in the addenda: "which conquerors against the conquered".

Were paid for heads. It is well known that the ancient Romans did not reject the poll-tax, among whom the poorer were the "capite censi". Constantine exempted only the Roman common people from this tribute. See François Baudouin, On the Laws of Constantine the Great, p. 154 of my edition.

Nor even to die for nothing. He alludes to the proverb 'to carry something off even from a corpse', which you have in Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2, ch. 6, otherwise 14.

And yet an impious man. Others would prefer to write it everywhere as two words, at quin. See Brisson in the Parerga, or Isaeus on Lactantius, book 1, ch. 4. Lactantius likewise, book 4, ch. 12: And yet the prophet comprehended both His comings in a few words. So the codex of Franc. Penia, on the testimony of Servatius Gallaeus. More necessary is a correction at book 5, ch. 9, where it now reads: Equally it cannot happen that those who err in their whole life are also deceived in religion. Where one should perhaps read, are not also deceived in religion. Unless, following the traces of the Bologna book, which has atquin in place of aeque, one should write, But it cannot happen that those who err in their whole life are not also deceived in religion. The sense in any case is that those whom error drives through their whole life cannot keep to the right path of religion either. Further, since the tyrant is here held up to ridicule disparagingly, it is likely that he was called not an impious man but a pious one, by irony. For it is well known that in that age princes were called pious in the sense of merciful or well-disposed, as in that line of Claudian:

Be pious above all; for though we are surpassed in every gift, clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

On this manner of speaking see Augustine, On the City of God, book 10, ch. 1, and among more recent writers Scaliger on Ausonius. A similar irony in Terence, Andria, 5, 2: O Chremes, the piety of the son!

So merciful a man. Lact., Div. Inst., book 1, ch. 21: That men were so barbarous, so savage, that they called their own parricide a sacrifice. Cic., book 5, letter 11: A grave man and an outstanding citizen. See more in Gronovius on Seneca, Consolation to Marcia, ch. 9.

Thus, while he was taking care (cavit). More correctly cavet; for subterfugiat follows.

Against every right of humanity. Lact., Div. Inst., book 5, ch. 19: Is there an evil mind in those who are torn to pieces against the right of humanity, against all divine law! Ch. 22: Nor does he covet anything belonging to another, lest his speech harm anyone against the right of humanity. He treats of the same right at greater length in book 6, ch. 10 and 20.

On Chapter XXIV.

The judgement of God. He seems to have had in mind that passage of 2 Maccabees 9:4: The heavenly judgement pressing him on; and v. 18: For the just judgement of God had come upon him.

That his affairs were slipping away and ebbing. He has in view that well-known line of Virgil, Aeneid 2:

From that time the hope of the Danaans ebbed and, slipping back, was borne backwards.

Often in ambushes. The word in would perhaps more correctly be deleted.

The hand of God protected the man. Lact., book 2, ch. 15: Whom the powerful and lofty hand of God protects.

On the very hinge. So Div. Inst., book 2, ch. 8: This therefore is the hinge of things; on this all things turn. Similarly book 3, ch. 7, and On the Anger of God, ch. 6.

When now for a long time to kill (necare). Baluze in his second thoughts rightly emended to negare. And perhaps besides, in place of diu, one should write diutius.

He gave him a seal. Sigillum: an order, a letter, a diploma, the document itself secured with a seal, as Bulla is a diploma furnished with its bull. The Greek-Latin glossary: synthema, sigillum, evectio. These things and more Charles Du Fresne, a man exceptionally versed in these studies. Nor is it to be denied that the diplomas by which the public post was granted were, in the time of Augustus and the emperors nearest him, signed by the emperor himself or by one of the proconsuls or governors. Yet that at some period they were only certain tokens, with the seal of the emperor, Budé seems not wrongly to have established; to whose opinion our Scheffer, a man of untiring labour in advancing letters while life and strength lasted, confessed himself inclined, in the first book On Vehicles, ch. 18, p. 264; Jerome calls it synthema, in the letter to Julian. Already, he says, when the synthema had been sent down, a public horse was saddled, and a noble

young man clothed in a crimson tunic a baldric encircled. Livy calls the synthemata, also mentioned by Polybius (although these are without doubt different from those), secret marks by which the orders of the sender might be recognized to be genuine. Add Lipsius on Tacitus, Annals 13, ch. 2, Casaubon on Aeneas Tacticus, Salmasius on Julius Capitolinus, Pertinax, ch. 1. Nor would anyone say absurdly that in these there appeared the kind of marks which are called sigla by the Emperor Justinian, which the sign-writers, or shorthand-writers, used. For those who understood by those sigla the single letters, about which Valerius Probus [wrote], Nicolaus Heinsius, an illustrious man, refuted in a letter to my father-in-law, of blessed memory, long since kindly communicated to me by him, which, if the matter had been in my power, would long ago have been given to the light of the public. And I would wish this said also of not a few other things which now lie hidden in the cabinets of my late father-in-law, I indeed being altogether unwilling and reluctant.

The rest of life, as he wished. The author of the Life of Metrophanes and Alexander, in Photius, reports his most elegant words: Now death is sweeter to me than life, since I have received your rule as the greatest funeral honour, my son. For to leave behind on earth an emperor able to wipe away the tears of the Christians and to stop the unjust slaughter which Maximian does not cease contriving against the Christians already grants me the blessed lot.

To render to his God. That he might render to his God, perhaps more elegantly.

Of holy religion restored. So I think it is rightly emended, since in the Paris [edition] it is restituta. So below, ch. 48, the sanction of this our benevolence. That age very frequently uses this manner too. Yet it could be read (if this brevity does not please anyone enough): this was his first sanction, holiness restored to religion. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 1, ch. 4: Holiness is the knowledge of worshipping the gods; book 2, ch. 2: the worship of the gods and the sanctities of religions, he likewise joined them. Indeed Lactantius himself similarly at the beginning of the Divine Institutes: Through whom justice and holiness have been restored to human affairs. In the same author holy religion, man a holy animal, holy letters and the like are frequent enough.

On Chapter XXV.

His laurelled image. Manifold was the use of laurelled [images], or, as they were later called, laurata: but chiefly at the inaugurations of emperors. For as soon as they had attained the august dignity, their statues were sent into the provinces, as a sign of the dignity attained, and so that they might be received by the peoples. Philostorgius, book 12, ch. 10: And the images of Constantine, as was the custom for those newly come to the throne to do, are sent up to the East. Ducange [gives] these and more to the same effect in his most learned glossary, to which somewhat more could be added from others, if there were need. See below at ch. 42.

His accounts thrown into disorder. To accounts disordered or confused are opposed clear and settled ones. So turbare censum, turbare peregrinas delicias, in Petronius; on which see Gronovius, Observationes 3, 11. Unless you prefer to refer this to the disordered accounts of lands, on which the writers on agrarian matters [treat], and on them Rigaltius and Goesius, most learned men.

But this he devised. Lactantius, On the Workmanship of God, ch. 3: For what will he devise? what will he do? what will he contrive?

On Chapter XXVI.

To devour the world. The old translator of Isaiah, ch. 24, v. 6: For this reason a curse will devour the earth. Lactantius, [book] 7, ch. 16: They will destroy all things, and crush them, and devour them. And so too [the author] of the Epitome, ch. 11, speaks twice, to pass over older writers for now.

They were registering the common people. Lactantius, Institutes book 1, ch. 22: He distributed the gods by families. A most usual word for the census, or assessment; as also among the Greeks, ἀπογραφή and ἀπογράφειν.

Having obtained an opportunity. Nancti, which is in the Paris edition, I would not wish changed. And so in Livy the more learned

have taken care to have it written thus: Having got Mericus without witnesses, book 25, ch. 30. The glossaries: nanctus, δραξάμενος. In old books it appears in other authors too.

Too greatly terrified. Nimium, that is, very much, ἄγαν. Divine Institutes, book 5, ch. 10: If they are too pious; On the Workmanship of God, ch. 9: If you bring something too close; where one should read nimio propius. So Livy, book 1: Far more than was safe enough for the neighbours. Horace:

And Glory lifting its empty head far too high.

Plautus said nimio satius, and others said things not unlike it.

He was asking quatenus. In that age quatenus more often means "how". Lactantius, Divine Institutes, book 1, ch. 21: The Egyptian rites of Isis are about how she lost and found her little son; book 4, ch. 27: Whoever has seen it will know how, adjured through Christ, they flee from bodies; book 7, ch. 6: How, or for what reason, men were brought into being.

That he might fortify himself against the impending danger. Lactantius, Epitome, ch. 6: Our life is fortified by the strictest laws; On the Workmanship of God, ch. 4: That he might fortify his frailty against harmful things; ch. 10: That the eyes might be better fortified against injury.

Severus meanwhile goes. This wording, Severus goes, and approaches the walls, seems hardly to match the elegance of our Firmianus. I think one should write: Severus meanwhile invades Italy. Nor is it an obstacle that these words are repeated a little later, namely in the next chapter. For we see that Lactantius makes frequent use of customary turns of phrase, at least where this seemed possible without wearying his readers.

And the garment and the purple. Is it ἓν διὰ δυοῖν? I would rather believe that both the inner and the outer garment are meant, since each bore some insignia of imperial majesty.

To persecute his own beginning with this head. Even the most learned men admit that it is hard to say where these mutilated words point. I tentatively suspect that the author of this work says that Maximianus Galerius began persecuting his own with Severus, whether you take caput for the man or for the beginning. So Ovid:

I, looking up at her, and from her viewing the Capitol.

Curtius, book 5, ch. 2: After these came Antigonus, and after him Amyntas the Lyncestian. Florus, book 3, ch. 18: That Rome, conqueror of Asia and Europe, should be attacked from Corfinium. And others not rarely use it thus.

On Chapter XXVII.

The city fortified, and hostile to the undertakings. It seems to me to have been: the city fortified, and made hostile by the undertakings, preparing the war diligently, he sets out for Gaul. By the undertakings, understand those begun by Severus and, after he was killed, by Galerius: by these undertakings, that is, schemes, he made the city hostile. You find instruere certamen in Lactantius too, book 6, ch. 22.

And with spirits dismissed. More fittingly, I think, demissis ("downcast").

With huge promises a fortunate mind. One should write with Baluze: Until with huge promises he bent their minds; or, as I would prefer: until, the minds of some having been bent by huge promises, he turned the standards back.

But a Dacian. In the Paris edition it was Daciscum, which I would not have changed rashly. For you find Daciscos for Dacians also in Vopiscus, Aurelian, end of ch. 38; in the same way, Salmasius shows, they also said Hunnisci, Teotisci, Maurisci.

On Chapter XXVIII.

The other Maximianus. Herculius, who, as was said above, ch. 26, held the resumed imperial power jointly with his son Maxentius.

The originator of calamities. So Jupiter the originator of religious rites, Divine Institutes, book 1, ch. 21, and in the same place the Curetes the first to understand divine things; the Pythagoreans, Stoics, Peripatetics, leaders of every school, book 2, ch. 8.

Which the commonwealth was to bear. Divine Institutes, book 6, ch. 8:

on account of which it is worth so much both to give up pleasures and to endure all evils; ch. 18: Let us bear with one another, and let us endure the evils of this life with mutual aid.

On Chapter 29.

When he had stayed a little while, having set out. Punctuate: when he had stayed a little while, he set out... or he set out against the enemy of his son... Below, I think that substituto in Severi locum was written, not loco; although I am not unmindful that examples of the other are also found.

Which he had not done before. Antonius Pagius, in his Dissertatio Hypatica, p. 245, takes the word ante of the time at which he proclaimed Severus Augustus, or Licinius Caesar. I, moved by the authority of the things which the most distinguished Cuperus has cited on his own behalf, do not think that Licinius was declared Caesar in such a way as to be fully adopted into the nearest hope of the empire. That he is nevertheless said by Schott's Aurelius Victor, ch. 40, and by the unknown author of the Life of Constantius Chlorus and of his son Constantine the Great, to have been made Caesar by Galerius, I conjecture to be of the same kind as what is said above of Maximinus, ch. 18: Diocletian had already partly changed his name for him too, namely that some rank was given to him through Galerius, who favoured him so much, but that he was not declared Caesar in full.

Thus at one time there were six. From this one may gather that Diocletian, or Diocles, is not to be counted among them; whom Antonius Pagius nevertheless supposes to be said by Aurelius Victor to have held the empire for twenty-five years because in this year too he took part in public counsels, as is sufficiently clear from this passage. Without him there were certainly six, namely, as the celebrated Baluze also lists them, Maximianus Herculius, Galerius Maximianus, Maximinus, Constantine, Licinius. Herculius, it is true, was not at that time ruling in good faith; yet I should believe that he, rather than Diocles, completes that number.

Full of evil contagion and of crime. This manner of speaking is frequent in sacred and in outside writings. Thus in Josh. 7 Israel is said to be polluted by the accursed thing, and Achan contaminated by crime. Lactantius said to be contaminated and bound fast by inexpiable crime, bk 5, ch. 1, and Epitome ch. 6. Somewhat differently Solomon, Prov. 5:22: His own iniquities take the wicked man, and he is bound tight with the cords of his sins. Which the Greeks put very elegantly: Transgressions hunt a man down, and he is bound tight with the cords of his own sins. Add Salmasius on Solinus, p. 1091.

He flies back with his army. Lactantius, Divine Institutes bk 2, ch. 12: Until, released from the prison of the body, it flies back to its own abode.

He hears the crimes which he has committed. Said elegantly of one who is liable. Thus Divine Institutes bk 5, ch. 19: He hears what God threatens him with.

On Chapter 30.

He summons his daughter Fausta. Her likeness on a coin you have in the most illustrious Spanheim, On the Use and Excellence of Coins, p. 639. She afterwards died in a bath heated beyond measure, which the pagans charged was done by her husband's order. But the most distinguished Cellarius, not without reason, holds this suspect in his Notes on Eutropius, bk 10, ch. 4, no. 13. Those auspicious names, as Tacitus calls them, were indeed greatly loved, not only among men but also among women. Hence Felicitas, Fausta, Faustina, Faustilla, Fortuna, Felicissima, Tyche, Callityche, Profutura, and others already listed before by distinguished men.

He promises a worthier husband. You would not be at all wrong to take this of the dignity of honours. Thus Lactantius, 3, 11: But nothing more beautiful than virtue, nothing worthier than wisdom can be found. Usuard in his Martyrology: And he was buried at the church where he had been appointed a worthy minister. And so both others and, most frequently, ecclesiastical writers. In our own tongue too the ancients spoke similarly, as also King Birger, who in the Preface to the Laws of Uppland elegantly calls the archbishop Baerdogan Verra. In this passage of Lactantius, however, we shall perhaps more correctly interpret dignum as referring to this condition of marriage, as

in Tibullus, book 4, elegy 7:

let me be said to have been a worthy woman with a worthy man.

Qua manifesto facinus teneretur ("by which the crime would be caught in the open"). What manifesto teneri means, the jurists teach. See Brisson and others.

Haeret manifestarius homicida ("the murderer, caught in the act, is held fast"). Lactantius, book 1, chapter 7: "As though all ways had been withdrawn and used up, he halts, sticks fast, fails." The old glossaries: haereo, ἅπτομαι, ἐνέχομαι. Manifestarius fur ("a thief caught in the act") occurs in Plautus, in the Aulularia and the Trinummus. Later writers preferred to say manifestum; the Greeks, ἐπαυτοφώρῳ.

Viginti annorum vota ("the vows of twenty years"). Against Noris, Antoine Pagi teaches, in the Dissertatio Hypatica, p. 157, that Maximian did not anticipate his vicennalia but celebrated them at the proper time, since he was named Caesar two years before he was named Augustus. Let him be consulted.

Morte finivit ("he ended by death"). Others, and Zonaras especially, give accounts quite consistent with these, so much so that even the points which he thinks caused the older writers to disagree among themselves are plainly true, and from this so clear a narrative they become much clearer. But to bring them in here would be too lengthy a business.

On Chapter XXXI.

De agendis et ipse vicennalibus ("[thinking] about holding vicennalia himself too"). Not that their time had then come for Galerius, but because the emperors thought they needed a preparation of several years for them. Consult Antoine Pagi, just cited, who treats this subject carefully, Dissertatio Hypatica, p. 188. The same writer shows, p. 247, that this passage is excellent for demonstrating the size of the expenditures which they made on occasions of this kind.

Qui jamdudum ("who long since"). In this small gap I think there is missing ut diis suis ("that to his gods"), namely that he might render what he had promised; these words follow shortly after.

Securim alteram afflixit ("he struck a second axe-blow"). A most learned man thinks we should read securum alterum ("a second carefree one"), namely the emperor; which I confess I do not follow, since the matter here is not the emperor Diocletian but the provinces. Nor do I doubt that he had in view that passage of Cicero's Pro Cn. Plancio, chapter 29: "For what heavier axe could those judges inflict on the commonwealth than when they cast out of the city him who as praetor had freed the commonwealth from a neighbouring war, as consul from a domestic one?" Moreover, although what is now printed is much more usual, I would still prefer that, following the usage of that age, the reading of the French edition, securem, had been kept. For so too Prudentius in the passion of the martyr Prudentius, line 328:

Does soft leniency so blunt the public axe?

Also Ammianus, book 30, p. m. 430: "Papirius Cursor, dictator at that time, ordered the axe to be made ready by the lictor." But such things are not to be imitated by our young people; although sitem is also read in Prudentius and Boethius, cutem in Cornelius Celsus, and indeed even turrem in Maro, if we follow Charisius, and other such forms in other authors.

Exactio celebrata sit ("the exaction was carried out"). Optatus of Milevis, book 3: "If ever in the public courts some action has been carried out"; book 5: "When he saw such great mighty works performed by the Son of God," that is, such great works of divine power brought forth; book 7: "No trial was held, but the effect of a sentence was brought about."

Veniam non habentibus, nullas. Read with Baluze, at the end of the second volume: Venia non habentibus nulla abstinendi multiplices cruciatus ("for those who did not have [it], no leave to refrain from manifold tortures"); or Venia a non habentibus, which I would prefer; so that the sense is that the magistrates sent for this purpose were not permitted to withhold tortures from the provincials, even though they had nothing to pay.

Nullae areae sine exactore ("no threshing-floors without an exactor"). The ancients kept their grain on the threshing-floors for some time, until, threshed out and cleaned, they stored it in granaries and storehouses. See the writers on agriculture. Also Livy, book 34, chapter 9: "It happened to be the time when they had the grain on the threshing-floors."

Quae quam tolerabilia sint ("how tolerable these things are"). Correct with Baluze: Quanquam intolerabile sit eripi ab ore hominum cibos ("although it is intolerable that food be snatched from the mouths of men

sought out by toil"); except that quaestos might seem defensible as an archaism. Similar, as far as the figure of speech goes, is that passage of Lactantius, book 5, ch. 9: "But this is beyond telling, that it is done against those who do not know how to do wrong"; and as far as the sense goes, that of Livy, book 21, ch. 13: "Although these things are grievous and bitter, your fortune urges them upon you."

O most demented man. This passage recalls to my mind another, which as it now stands in Lactantius is beyond doubt corrupt. Namely Divine Institutes, book 5, ch. 10: "What can be more demented than this piety: than to sacrifice human victims to the dead, and to feed fire with the blood of men as if with oil?" Here, first, dementia is ill set against piety; then these two words, hac pietate, cause the following member, quam mortuis humanas, etc., to have nothing to which it can fittingly correspond. Servatius Gallaeus attests that in one old codex inclementius is read in place of dementius; from which I gather that the true reading is this: "What can be more unmerciful than this piety? What more demented than to sacrifice human victims to the dead, and to feed fire with the blood of men as if with oil?" so that he means this: nothing is more unmerciful, and so nothing more unworthy of Aeneas, who boasted himself pious (for mercy too is called piety, as was shown earlier), than to slaughter and cruelly burn innocent men; nothing more unbecoming for a skilled and prudent leader than to believe that the dead are fed on human blood. Let others judge whether Lactantius can be seen to have written thus.

Overthrown from his goods. He imitates Cicero, who himself likewise says "to overthrow someone from his goods, or from his fortunes," as has been noted by others.

On Chapter XXXII.

He therefore often sends envoys to him. Galerius, that is, to Maximinus. See Eusebius, book 8, ch. 13, whose words many others have already cited.

By the prior claim of time. Because Maximinus had assumed the purple long before Licinius.

Overcome by obstinacy. I am surprised that Antonius Pagi takes these words of Maximinus Daia, or Daza, when the sequence of the words and the matter itself show that Galerius is to be understood. For how could Galerius, by now a veteran emperor, be called obstinate towards the newcomer Daia? Obstinacy is surely that of an inferior towards a superior. Then there would have been nothing of a sound mind in Maximinus Daia, if while Galerius was alive he had tried to abolish the name of the Caesars and, alone, to throw everything into confusion at his own discretion rather than to administer it. But Pagi presses: What then became of Maximinus? Did Galerius cast him down from every rank? First, I could answer that he was not named for the present, being by then hostile to Galerius and thoroughly hated by him; that mention of him was made afterwards, when account of him could no longer fail to be taken. Then, if you wonder that Daia was passed over by Galerius, how much more shall I wonder that Galerius was passed over by Daia? yet could he on that account cast him down from his eminence? But to treat the matter more seriously, I think that here the name of Maximinus Daia has been omitted by a drowsy copyist, and that we should write, "Maximinus, Maxentius, and Constantine, sons of the Augusti." Thus at any rate everything will be perfectly plain, and it will be clear that Baluze truly interpreted these words of Galerius. What follows confirms it: "He orders all four," says Lactantius, "to be reckoned emperors": that is, Licinius, Maximinus, Maxentius and Constantine: all these four he proclaimed emperors; for about Galerius himself, who had already reigned for so many years, no one was in doubt. I hope that those who weigh these things more carefully will side with me in this, and you above all, most distinguished and most learned Cuper; and if that should happen, I shall not take it ill that some dissent.

Sons of the Augusti. So in Julius Capitolinus, in the Verus, ch. 3: "Nor was any other mark of honour added to his name than that he was called son of the Augustus."

On Chapter XXXIII.

Already the eighteenth year. The eighteenth year of Galerius Maximianus began on the kalends of March of the year 309: as this

was ending, or thereabouts, he was afflicted with that disease, up to the end of the following year and the beginning of the year 311, in which, after the Kalends of March and after taking up the tribunician power for the twentieth time (see the Inscription of the edict which you have below in the next chapter, in Eusebius, book 8, ch. 17 of the Ecclesiastical History), he sent out the edict in favour of the Christians; and after the Kalends of May of the same year, when the Vicennalia were due on the Kalends of March of the year 312, he breathed out his wretched soul. These things and more [are in] Ant. Pagi, Dissertatio Hypatica, p. 159, whom I think should be followed in this.

God struck him with an incurable blow. He had in mind that passage of 2 Macc., ch. 9, v. 5: But He Who looks upon all things, the Lord God of Israel, struck him with an incurable and invisible blow. So Eusebius and Nicephorus say of Herod: "The scourge sent by God, having seized him, drove him on to death." And this is what those whom he consulted about his disease declared to Herod: "That God was exacting from the king this penalty for his great and impious [conduct]" (delete the particle καί with Nicephorus and some books, [reading] τὸ πολὺ δυσσεβές, "much impiety"; see whether it was τὸν θεόν); that God was demanding from the king this penalty for manifold impiety. Very many examples show this: that this is the customary penalty either of monstrous sacrilege and impiety or of other atrocious crimes. I shall now, in haste, recount a few. Pheretima, more than a woman in exacting punishments from her enemies, seethed alive into worms, as Herodotus witnesses at the end of the fourth book. Pherecydes of Syros, of a tongue most unrestrained and most foul against the gods, how foully he perished, whether by lice or by serpents born from his very body, Aelian will relate, Varia Historia, book 4, ch. 28, and Pliny 7, 51. Sulla, a man most notorious for cruelty, perished of the lousy disease, as Plutarch reports; and of the same disease Eunus, the conjuring slave, the dread firebrand of the atrocious war of the slaves in Sicily against their Roman masters. Herod the Great, of whom I began to speak, was removed from the midst by inflammation of the liver and putrefaction of the private parts engendering worms, plainly twin to these ills of Galerius; on which Eusebius, and Josephus, who is older than he, are to be consulted. His grandson Agrippa also died "eaten by worms", who was himself also called Herod, Acts 12:23. Claudius Herminianus in Cappadocia, when he had treated the Christians cruelly, and, alone in his praetorium, ravaged by plague, had boiled over alive with worms, said: "Let no one know, lest the Christians rejoice in hope." Afterwards, having recognized his error, in that by torments he had made some fall away from their resolve, he died almost a Christian; the account is Tertullian's, book To Scapula, ch. 3, where you may see more. The head of the heretics, Arius, seized by a foul kind of disease, when not even the sewers could bear its stench, belched out his impure soul, his intestines burst and poured out: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 1. To these is to be added also Julian, uncle of the Apostate, concerning whom see the authors cited by Baluze. More will be supplied by Plutarch in the Life of Sulla; Helladius in Photius, p. 870, Schott's edition; and Schott himself in his notes on Aurelius Victor's Sulla. More again by Samuel Bochart, "the admirable", Hierozoicon, part 2, book 4, ch. 18. Blessed Jerome follows up these and similar stories with weighty judgement on that passage of Zechariah, ch. 14, v. 12: Their flesh shall waste away, etc. "But we shall say," he says, "that all the persecutors who afflicted the Church of God, to say nothing of future torments, have received even in the present age what they did. Let us read the ecclesiastical histories: what Valerian, what Decius, what Diocletian, what Maximian, what Maximinus, most savage of all, and lately Julian, suffered; and then we shall prove by facts, even according to the letter, that the truth of the prophecy too has been fulfilled, that their flesh wasted away and their eyes rotted." To these I shall now add just that passage of Blessed Gregory Nazianzen, Invective 2: "The just diseases of the impious (by a strange error Herwagen's edition has 'of the pious'), and the ruptures not hidden, and other manifold blows and scourges like those they had dared [to inflict], and deaths that came about not in the usual way, and the confessions made in the very midst of the horrors, and the unprofitable repentances, and the chastisements through dreams, and the apparitions in waking, who could worthily recount as tragedy

A malignant ulcer. Eusebius, book 8, ch. 16, says that it was first an abscess, then an ulcer fistulous in its depth. He himself [gives] more.

The physicians cut, they cure. These words are rather feeble, unless you write, The physicians cut, they burn, they cure. Cornelius Celsus, book 6, ch. 18, no. 3, where he speaks of ills of this kind in those parts: If the medicines are overcome, here too whatever is corrupted must be cut away with the scalpel, in such a way that it draws some of the sound part with it. This too is equally constant, that once the cancer has been excised the wound must be cauterized. Add what follows, where he speaks of motion and of the blood flowing from it. St Pacian in the Exhortation: Sensible sick men do not fear the physicians, not even in the hidden parts of their bodies, even when they are going to cut, even when they are going to burn. We remember that certain men, not blushing even at the remote and shameful parts of their bodies, held out under the knife and the cautery and that most grievous biting of the powder. And how great a thing is that which men have endured? Will the sinner be afraid? Will the sinner blush to buy eternal life at the price of present shame? And will he withdraw his badly covered wounds from the Lord when He offers His hands? Further on, too, he often uses the same comparison.

The wound tears open the scar. Baluze testifies that in the old book there stood, but when a scar had already formed, the wound tears open, where he judges that one should write, is torn open. I would rather [read], tears itself open, as Virgil [has], the cloud tears itself open.

With a slight m of the body. Baluze seems rightly to restore motion; but the syntax requires more, namely that you write, wounded: that is, when Galerius was wounded more blood flowed down.

He himself grows white. That is, he grows pale, just as a whitening pallor is spoken of in the book On the Anger of God, ch. 5.

He is wasted away. As Virgil [says]:

But they themselves willingly waste the herds with leanness.

The masters gave way. The most distinguished Cuper writes, in his commentary on the Apotheosis of Homer, that he emended it thus, and that the sense is this: the best masters, who were present, could not cure Galerius, and therefore others were brought in from other regions. And so too, elsewhere, the same author called the master of the haruspices of his own time Tages, by the name of the inventor, or at any rate of an ancient haruspex. I confess that I too at first sight recognized those Virgilian verses which are read near the end of the third book of the Georgics.

Noble physicians are drawn from every side. Lactantius, Institutes 6, ch. 4: Whom desire or pleasure drags headlong. Ammianus, book 28: On account of various prejudgements many are drawn from the most widely separated regions.

Apollo and Asclepius. The eminent Gronovius, Observations on the Ecclesiastical Writers, p. 182, has pointed out that Lactantius, in his published works too, preferred to use the Greek name rather than the Latin. This in itself seems to do something towards vindicating this writing for its author, since in it we see that word recur in the same way, Asclepius, not Aesculapius.

The evil falls back inwards. Lactantius 6, 17: For nature does not seem to admit that anything should fall back into its contrary.

Odoritatem. It seems to me that in Lactantius there stood, a smell so foul, or the stench of the smell. Hegesippus, book 5, ch. 2: All the limbs of the slain citizens stank with a dreadful smell.

Eaten by worms. Baluze reads... and of the urine eaten by worms, that is, the passages. But the most distinguished Cuper [reads], he is eaten by worms: and in... To me these words seem more fittingly joined to what follows, if we write is eaten; for this corresponds better to the words, is dissolved and removes. Cicero too used comest as an active, on the testimony of Nonius, in whom see more. The grammarian Diomedes teaches that the passive also, which I have now employed, was in frequent use. In the passive, he says, it is declined edor, ederis, estur; likewise ambedor and comedor. The simple estur occurs in Plautus, Ovid and Columella.

Cooked and warm creatures. Perhaps one should read, uncooked and warm creatures, that is, still alive, but by cutting

laid open, such as I recall are sometimes applied by physicians. But I do not fight hard for this.

Inaestimabile [beyond reckoning]. So Lactantius, book 1, chapter 16: "Since the multitude of men is beyond belief, their number is beyond reckoning." So "heaps beyond reckoning", "a mass of barbarians beyond reckoning", and other expressions very frequent in the writers of that age, for whom aestimare is sometimes nearly the same as to count, or rather to make a conjecture about a number; as in Ammianus Marcellinus, book 31: "They were so cut down that out of the aforesaid number no more than five thousand, as was reckoned, escaped."

Tabescendorum viscerum [of the bowels to be wasted]. On what principle or by what analogy tabescendus can be said, I do not see. In its place someone might perhaps prefer tabidosorum, a word which occurs in Tertullian's Apology, chapter 14. But Lactantius, who long professed the art of speaking, wrote in most things far more correctly. I therefore conjecture that tabescentium may more truly be restored; as Cyprian also writes in On the Good of Patience: "There is added the vastness of the wounds, and the devouring torment of worms also consumes the wasting and dissolving limbs." Or, if not even this is satisfactory enough, tabe exesorum.

Pernicies fecunda [a fruitful ruin]. Elegantly and properly said; for pernicies is so called from the utter killing either of parts or of the whole body: hence it is often joined with pestilence, and is opposed to health. So Divine Institutes, book 6, chapter 24: "Therefore it is better either to pour out the conscience, or of our own accord to open the mind, and to pour out the ruin by cutting open the wounds."

Inflata discreverat [the swollen part had diminished]. That is, it had decreased, having become more contracted, or shorter. The old glosses: discrescere, ἀπομειοῦσθαι [to be diminished].

Annum perpetem [a whole year]. Lactantius, book 7, chapter 26: "Then for seven whole years the forests will be untouched." You also have it in Sulpicius Severus, Dialogue 1, likewise in Mamertinus several times in the panegyrics, and in others.

Novi doloris urgentis [of a new pain pressing]. I think one should write: Nova vi doloris urgentis [by a new force of pressing pain], or, urgente per intervalla [pressing at intervals]. Cyprian, To Demetrianus: "Then I ought to have been tortured, then driven to the confession of the crime by the force of pain." Ammianus Marcellinus, book 29: "He perceived, with an immense force of diseases pressing upon him, that the decree of final necessity was at hand."

Satisque pro scelere facere [and to make satisfaction for the crime]. Lactantius, book 5, chapter 13: "That he might make satisfaction for his misdeed"; book 7, chapter 1: "Let us satisfy this part also."

On Chapter XXXIV.

Primi.... constituerant [had first established]. Not that they had been the first authors or founders; but that they had previously confirmed and ratified these things together with the rest; for this is often what constituere means: to set back in place whatever has been scattered, and to strengthen it in a firmer state. Hence Eusebius also renders it: "which perhaps their parents too had formerly established."

Sibimet leges facerent [they made laws for themselves]. There are two heads of the charge which he brings. The first, that in divine matters they followed certain laws of their own, the public ones having been rejected and condemned. The second, that they formed associations, or assemblies, in themselves indeed entirely harmless and holy, but nevertheless utterly hateful to the emperors, to whom nothing was more suspect than a gathering of men made without their command, under whatever title at all it might be held. And I agree with the most distinguished Cuper that in the preceding words the subject is the separation made from the heathen; but in the following, "nor did they observe the God of the Christians", the reference is to the heresies.

Quas observarent [which they observed]. This word relates to divine matters. Cyprian, Epistle 10: "The law and observance of the Lord being despised, which the same holy martyrs and confessors command to be kept." Arnobius, book 1: "Without any careful observance of sacred rites at all." See the notes on that place by Hérault, p. 41 and 42 of my copy.

Multi periculo subjugati [many subjected to danger]. Eusebius: "Accordingly, when such an order of ours had followed, that they should [betake] themselves to the things established by the ancients, very many were subjected to danger, and very many were thrown into disturbance and endured deaths of every kind." Here "those subjected to danger" are not those exposed to perils, as

they render, but as Lactantius, or rather Galerius himself, has it, "subjugated by danger", that is, utterly overcome, and thrown down from their position of steadfastness, and shamefully subdued. For that is sometimes the meaning of ὑποβάλλεσθαι, as is also clear from Pollux, who joins ὑπωθεῖν, ταπεινοῦν, ὑποβάλλειν, book 4, chapter 6. And examples of those who speak thus have been shown by others. In the same way the ancients use the verb deturbare ("to throw down"); among them Ammianus Marcellinus, book 29: "He departed unharmed, the philosopher Pasiphilus clearing him; who, though cruelly tortured so that they might pervert him into an unjust lie, could not be thrown down from the state of his steadfast mind." The others, harassed, afflicted and troubled (for so I think τοὺς ταραχθέντας should be interpreted), remained in their state: or, as he himself says, παντοίους θανάτους ὑπέφερον; which it is permissible, I think, to render simply "they underwent various deaths", or, if you prefer, "they underwent various punishments". But since it is not likely that Eusebius, who expressed the rest of this edict so aptly, departed far from it in this one place, I judge that instead of deturbati we should read indeturbati ("not thrown down"), or at least that some words have dropped out.

"Consideration of our clemency." Cyprian, letter 54: "Which we believe will please you also in consideration of fatherly mercy." Pacian, letter 1: "Let no one despise a bishop in consideration of the man; he is assessed by the merit of his office." And so they spoke everywhere in that age.

On Chapter XXXV.

"And Maximinus for the second time." To reconcile this passage with the other writers, of whom some say that Maximianus Galerius was sole consul in this year, others that he had Licinius as colleague, I have not yet found anything more fitting than what Antonius Pagius records, who inquired carefully into these matters. If, then, it pleases us to follow him in these things, Galerius must be said to have entered office as sole consul at the beginning of the year; but a little later to have joined Licinius to himself as colleague; and on the kalends of May to have taken on Maximinus; namely because the consulship had to be a kind of accession to the imperial majesty; and so this consulship was not ordinary but suffect, as was that of Licinius before it. Indeed, the earlier consulship of Maximinus too was suffect, and was held after Constantius Chlorus and Maximianus Galerium, the new Augusti, and the ordinary consuls in the year 306. Whether, I say, we accept all of this or part of it, there still remains this novel and almost unique feature in this passage, that account is taken of a suffect consulship in such a way that on its account Maximinus is called consul for the second time. But of these matters perhaps more laboriously elsewhere.

"A prison... in place of a dwelling." Lactantius, book 6, chapter 10: "But they would have leaves and grass in place of beds, caves and grottoes in place of houses."

"Handed over in the hand." In the old Latin version of the Bible this construction is very frequent. Gen. 30:35: "But the whole flock of one colour he handed over in the hand of his sons"; chapter 39: "Who handed over in his hand all the prisoners who were held in custody"; 1 Sam. 24:11: "That the Lord had handed you over in my hand"; 2 Chr. 34:10: "They handed it over in the hands of those who were over the workmen." It is also well known that Cicero said veni in senatu ("I came in the senate"), and Varro qua in Coelio monte itur ("where one goes in the Caelian hill"); such things, however, are not to be rashly imitated by young men. These were much more frequent in later centuries; and Vorstius notes a good many in that very elegant writer Sulpicius Severus. Hence Lactantius too did not shrink from it, book 3, chapter 3: "Which fall in the nature of things"; book 4, chapter 17: "Thrown down in the earth with his whole body and face"; On the Workmanship of God, chapter 2: "They have been relegated in that region."

"The limbs would waste away." Institutes, book 3, chapter 1: "But falsehood pleases by a borrowed appearance; because, corrupt in itself, it vanishes and wastes away unless it is adorned from elsewhere"; chapter 20: "The body, left by the soul, wastes away."

"At Nicomedia of the same month." Read: "And this was known at Nicomedia in the middle of the same month." The illustrious Cuperus afterwards confirmed the same in his letters.

"The kalends of March being at hand." Baluze rightly holds that what is to be understood

as he teaches, is the kalends of March of the following year, if indeed we warrant that the narrative presented in this chapter is complete. For if the horrible death of Galerius was known at Nicomedia in the month of May, then certainly the kalends of March could have been impending for longer in that year. That I should note this came about through the doubt of a certain most polished man, but one hasty in this matter, as he himself admits. And it may be that I have not yet sufficiently grasped his meaning.

On Chapter XXXVI.

For the present. Lactantius, book 7, ch. 6: And the other things which avail only for the present; ch. 10: All vices are temporal; they are stirred up for the present; ch. 15: Although for the present he showed the power of God to men; On the Anger of God, ch. 21: He does not punish each guilty man for the present.

He removes the tax. I thought sustulit should be restored, since ut conciliaret precedes. Yet I now judge that it matters little, since the same verb is very much in use with Lactantius; as in book 2, ch. 5: And so many of the philosophers removed religions; book 3, ch. 5: Rightly therefore he removed the disciplines of the others.

Armed men held the opposite banks. Note that the shores of the Propontis are called banks, especially at the narrows of the Bosporus. So Pliny, 9, ch. 15: The tunnies enter by the right bank and go out by the left. See more in the illustrious Heinsius, in the added notes on Ovid, Epistle 6, line 54.

By common tutelo. Baluze on these words: I have not found this word elsewhere; perhaps it is corrupt. I too judge it to be altogether corrupt, and that titulo should be written in its place. For this peace was given to the Christians in the common name of the emperors, as is clear from the edict in Eusebius at the end of the eighth book. Ovid:

It is enough for you to have the title of my death.

And elsewhere:

Let the profit be yours: let the title be given to your mistress.

The author of the elegy to Livia:

And the general bore off the title of the war, with his brother as general.

You have the titles of laws passed in Cornelius Tacitus, Annals 1, ch. 8; the title of administration in Symmachus, book 10, letter 4, and similar things in others.

High priests. I was preparing to set out somewhat more fully who the Asiarchs of those or of the preceding times had been, who were the crown-bearing chief priests (στεφανοφόροι ἀρχιερεῖς), or high priests: but other academic labours, which now hold me engaged, do not permit it. And much in these matters was accomplished long before by men by far most learned: Selden on the Origins of Eutychius and on the recension of the Smyrnaean donations, and others on the Arundel, or Oxford, marbles; Dionysius Gothofredus on Law 8, Digest, the title On the Exemption and Excuse from Public Duties; Panciroli on the Notitia of the Eastern Empire, ch. 105.

He set over the provinces. This verb was very frequent in that age; it occurs also in the most elegant Minucius Felix, p. 152: That Epicurus nevertheless sets nature above.

In appearance only. Nothing is more frequent in Lactantius than these words joined thus; nor is there any need, I think, to copy them out. On this kind of cruelty, however, which a false appearance of clemency flatters, the same author says more, book 5, ch. 11.

On Chapter XXXVII.

That all animals. He said all expressly. Earlier rulers too used such tricks: but they nevertheless admitted other meats as well; this one admitted none but those defiled by superstition. In view of this matter he is said to have been the first to devise this.

Storehouses. To the ancients an apotheca was a larger wine cellar, or some other more capacious store. You have storehouses of grain, wine and oil in 2 Chronicles 32. Arnobius also uses it, book 8. Others have collected more instances from older writers.

With which he had so corrupted them. I read: with which he had so corrupted his own men. I soon did not hesitate to restore milites,

understanding namely the more distinguished men, or palatines, in which sense most learned men have already shown that this word was often used at that time. Moreover, he says that the soldiers were corrupted by the daily sacrifices, on account of the sacred feasts, fattened on which they disdained the cheaper and truly military fare. Nazianzen plainly reports the same of Julian; nor have I any doubt that that deserter, or turncoat if you prefer to call him so, imitated many things of Diocletian and of the contemporary princes; and this is clear from the invectives of that holy Father whom I have mentioned. Further, that expungeret should be written (as was long ago printed under my care), not expugnaret, the most illustrious Cuperus also saw. Now that names, or debts, are "expunged" when they are paid, and that men themselves are "expunged" in this way, is known from Tertullian, who speaks thus very frequently, and from others still more ancient as well; and the great man taught it in his Observation on the ecclesiastical writers. So too St Cyprian, letter 38: "And when I had sent you as my deputies to discharge the needs of our brethren from the funds...; he intervened so that no one could be discharged, nor could the things which I had desired be distinguished by careful examination: he also threatened our brethren who had been the first to come forward to be discharged."

On Chapter XXXVIII.

I do not know what to say. Lactantius, book 1, ch. 21: "For concerning the infants who were sacrificed to Saturn out of hatred for Jupiter, I do not know what to say"; book 6, ch. 23: "With what words, or with what indignation, shall I pursue so great a wickedness? The magnitude of the crime overcomes the office of the tongue."

To express in proportion to indignation. I read, "that these be expressed in proportion to indignation." Cuperus. — This conjecture, which seems true and certain, can indeed please well enough: but the words "in proportion to its indignation" stand in the way; for it would not be said fittingly enough: "Cupidity cannot be expressed in proportion to its indignation", unless perhaps for indignatione we read indignitate. But it seemed to me that it should be read with a smaller change (provided we remember that for his there was written ais, that is, animus): "And yet the mind cannot express the thing in words in proportion to its indignation": or, "the mind in these words"; and in place of the little gap, "a most foul thing", or something of that kind. So I had it before the letters of this excellent and most learned benefactor of ours arrived. Now I hand the whole judgement over to him and to the readers.

Noble women. It increased the indignity of the matter that they were noble. For to be examined thus was altogether servile, and detestable to free persons. Slaves were accustomed to be set out thus by the dealers to be inspected by the bidders. See what the most learned and celebrated Mr Rappoltus brought forward from Suetonius and Martial on Horace, p. 600, to this effect.

Virgins violated. Baluze in his last book emends to invitas, "unwilling", which does not meet with my approval. For Lactantius too, concerning that filthy Jupiter of the pagans, book 1, ch. 10: "I pass over the virgins whom he violated"; and you will find similar things in Plautus, and in Roman law. Indeed Cicero himself said "to violate and impair right and duty".

Under such a prince they imitated. Supply "the example", and "of friends" (Cuperus), or, "the master's manners, and they violated with impunity the beds of their own people". So Lactantius of the same Jupiter, book 5, ch. 6, and of his household: "Since to imitate the manners and vices of a king is judged a kind of compliance, all cast off piety, lest they should seem to reproach the king with his crime if they lived piously."

On Chapter XXXIX.

Whom he had lately called mother. For Valeria's husband, Maximianus Galerius, had adopted him, as we saw above, ch. 18. And so she hoped that she would have safer protection with him than with Licinius, to whom she had been commended by Galerius. The likeness of this Valeria, daughter of Diocletian, is preserved for us by coins, one of which the most illustrious Spanheim displays in his work On the excellence and use of coins; another Mr Patin, among the coins of the Roman emperors in middle and small bronze, p. 452, etc. In her honour a part of Pannonia was named Valeria, as Ammianus Marcellinus witnesses, book 19.

In matrimonio postulat [he asks in marriage]. So Sulpicius Severus: "And asking her in marriage from her father, he bound himself over to seven years of servitude." Here a learned man restores in matrimonium, though he admits elsewhere that such things are frequent in Sulpicius. See what I noted above on ch. 35: in manu traditis.

Amicas ejus [her friends]. Just as one speaks of the "friends" of emperors, so one may note that the "friends" of empresses are spoken of here. Go back to ch. 6. The "companions" (comites) mentioned below point the same way.

On Chapter XL.

Cujus consilio sibi neg. The most distinguished Cuper seems to emend rightly: Ejus consilio negatam [refused on his advice].

Praesidi Eratineo [to the governor Eratineus]. Perhaps Eratino, so that it is the Greek ἐρατεινόν, which is the same as ἐράσμιος [lovely].

Non minus Augustae proxima [no less close to the Empress]. In the Paris copy, wrongly, non nimis. And proxima as in Lactantius, bk 1, last ch.: "Ulysses was next in the same degree." So also in Apuleius oppido proxima humanitas [a humanity very close], and the like. See the notes of my late father-in-law, of blessed memory, on the line of Phaedrus,

She denied that she was close to guilt.

Dum quae jussus. Perhaps the words jussus a mala bestia erat, loqueretur [while he said what he had been ordered by the evil beast] have fallen out. Cuper.

Promoti militari modo [brought forward in military fashion]. I used to think these words should be joined thus, as if he were saying that they were led out in military manner, just as soldiers under a tribune or a centurion used to lead the condemned. Now I shall not object if anyone prefers militari modo instructi [drawn up in military fashion], on account of what follows.

Bile mens essagitarii. The first conjecture of the distinguished Baluze, milites et sagittarii [soldiers and archers], refutes itself well enough, since there would have been no point in saying that soldiers were brought forward or drawn up in military fashion in such an action; for this could easily be understood of itself. The second, velites et sagittarii [light troops and archers], I admit I held for some time, because both Pacatus in his panegyric, ch. 35, and Ammianus Marcellinus in several places mention them, as troops of whom even in that age no small use was made in war. Above all, it seemed relevant that that historian, bk 24, pp. 264 and 271 of my copy, says that Julian's bodyguards were light troops. For the present, however, I prefer militari modo instructi vigiles et sagittarii [watchmen and archers drawn up in military fashion], or vigiles et Cretenses (or something else in its place) sagittarii. The watchmen were collected from various guilds of craftsmen, as is clear from the Roman laws, which you have in Panciroli on the Notitia of the Eastern Empire, ch. 27, and in other jurists: they are therefore fittingly said to be brought forward or drawn up in military manner, since they themselves were not soldiers, yet had archers attached to them. And I seem to have read elsewhere that half of those who kept watch or manned the frontier posts in the provinces were Roman soldiers, and the rest were gathered from townsmen or other provincials. But now I hasten to other matters.

On Chapter XLII.

Senis Maximiani [of the old Maximian]. Just as the images of those who had already taken up imperial power were sent into the provinces and received with veneration by magistrates and peoples, as was said above on ch. 25, and could be confirmed by more instances (as when Zosimus says, bk 2, ch. 9, that Constantine's image, shown at Rome κατὰ τὸ σύνηθες, "according to custom", stirred Maxentius' anger; and the same writer relates in ch. 12 that Maxentius, when he thought his rule firmly established, sent men into Africa to carry his image about; and whatever else could be brought forward from other writers), so it is handed down by no fewer writers that the images of those whose conduct gave great offence, and whose memory was condemned after death, were torn from the military standards and their statues thrown down. Herodian relates this of Maximinus Thrax and his son, bk 8, ch. 5, and following him Julius Capitolinus in the Maximini, ch. 23, and in the Gordians, ch. 9. Eusebius reports it of Maximian Herculius, bk 8, end of ch. 13, as if this disgrace had befallen him first; but Valesius thinks this is to be understood of the emperors of those times. In the same way, then, it will be possible, I think, to defend what

our [author] should say that this happened first to Diocletian, that while still alive he saw his images and statues abolished. For that this is not simply true is evident even from the fact that Tacitus, Histories book 3, ch. 13, relates that the images of Vitellius were torn down, and in ch. 85 that Vitellius himself, among the other insults, was forced to watch his statues falling. But to deal rather with this, which seems pressing, I do not think these words escaped unharmed from moths and decay. For the same thing is said twice, that the images of both were taken down, nor does the rest seem sufficiently apt and well ordered. They will be somewhat better if we read "His images, with whom he had been painted"; and instead of "And because", "for indeed because the two old men had for the most part been painted together". And perhaps at the beginning too, instead of "and at the same time" (eodemque tempore), "at the same time also" (eodem quoque tempore) should be written.

Cast down into hatred of life. Certainly Lactantius by no means wrote "cast down into a humble life" and "cast down into hatred of life" in one and the same place. Sleepy copyists sometimes repeat words when another of similar sound ought to have followed. In the latter place, therefore, restore "adductus" (brought) or "deductus" (led); just as Cicero too said "to lead someone into weeping and into pity".

On Chapter 43.

One now remained. That Maximinus is meant is clear enough from what follows. But whether the reasoning of Antonius Pagi is convincing, that Maximinus perished in the year of Christ 313 and not, as others say, in A.D. 314, because Lactantius treats of the death of Maximinus only after narrating the end of Diocletian, whom it is established that Maximinus survived, I should like others to examine. Consult, if you have leisure, the work cited, page 248.

Since he had rivalry. Lactantius, On the Anger of God, ch. 13: Unless wisdom is added, through which they may have rejection of evils. Jerome to Nepotian: Have prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude. Spartianus, Hadrian, ch. 5: He had such great zeal for clemency.

And he himself envoys. I suspect it was: "Therefore he himself also sent envoys to the City secretly." "He himself", that is, no differently from the way Constantine and Licinius had amicably conspired together.

On Chapter 44.

He had lately drawn out from the Moors and Italians. More usual is "contraxerat" (had gathered). Yet I think the other too has its place somewhere.

Ready for either. It is Virgil's:

Confident in spirit and ready for either.

Aen. 2, line 61. The other:

. . . . Neither to these was flight known, nor to those.

which follows a little after, you have at Aen. book 10, line 755.

Constantine admonished in sleep. The most excellent Cuper [wrote] much on this passage, and since I do not doubt that it will please curious readers, so much the fewer will be the things now added by me. And I would not wish to draw the saw of a long dispute with anyone about the truth of this story, being well mindful of what Eusebius relates that he heard from Constantine himself; likewise of what is piously said by those who advise that it should be held sufficiently probable that God, as He aided the first origin of the Christian religion with very many miracles, so aided the progress of its being spread most widely under Constantine at least with this one, if not with more. Nevertheless in such matters I think one must look solely not at what seemed good to men but at what seemed good to God; and so at what is related to have truly happened in histories of undoubted credibility, not at what the weakness of human judgement may judge would have been fitting. Therefore if, with the good leave of those who think otherwise, I may be permitted to venture some opinion on this, I consider that two apparitions, greatly differing in place, manner and time, are being mixed into one. When Julian, the wicked deserter of the heavenly sacrament, was laying waste the Lord's flock with cunning and utmost cruelty alike, and was also stirring up the fury of the Jews against it, not only on the garments of men, as very many testify, but also in the sky the sign of the cross, and this

indeed had flashed out most splendidly into view, as authors of no slight credibility relate. Of these let us hear, if you please, one, namely Nazianzen, a Father of known holiness and constancy. In the second Invective against Julian he speaks thus: "But what is still more marvellous and more conspicuous than this" (the word τούτου is missing in the Greek-Latin edition, Paris, 1630), "a light stood in the sky outlining the cross, and that which formerly on earth was dishonoured by the godless, both its figure and its name, is now shown in the sky to all alike, and becomes a trophy for God of His victory over the impious, a trophy" (the same edition has at this place τροπαίου instead of τρόπαιον) "loftier than all things. What will the wise of this age say" (the same edition has φήσουσι) "to these things?" If Gregory had written this with the truth protesting against it, almost at the very time at which the events were reported, how badly he would have served Christian piety! My opinion therefore is that Constantine did indeed also see the figure of the cross, in a dream to be sure, and assuredly by divine agency. But if he had also seen it in the sky, Nazianzen would hardly have kept silent about it at so fitting a place; Lactantius would hardly have omitted it; or at least he would have narrated it more clearly and lucidly. It could also be said that it seemed enough to God to admonish and urge on the pious emperor, who was tirelessly doing everything to foster the holy religion, by a gracious apparition during his sleep; but that for pagans and Jews there was need of greater terror to disrupt their impious attempts. But let those accustomed to probe and examine these things more deeply grant me pardon, if I seem to deal with these matters not skilfully enough. When I happened to read Eusebius treating more fully of that vision, I seemed to myself to see the time at which it befell Constantine designated by Eusebius himself in clearer words than has seemed so to the interpreters, men far more learned than I. Eusebius says in book 1 of the Life of Constantine, ch. 28, that this was shown to the emperor "about the midday hours of the sun, when the day was already declining". Not much otherwise do Nicephorus, or Socrates, or Zonaras. To them these two things seem to conflict, "at midday", or "about the midday hours", and "with the day declining towards evening", although they are the same. For Isidore, book 20, ch. 3, says expressly that that time too is called midday which is after the middle of the day; and Censorinus, On the Birthday, last chapter, says that a thing is said to have been done "at midday" which was done before the last [hour], that is, as most have explained, before sunset. For in the Twelve Tables too it was written, "Let sunset be the last time." The Plaetorian [law], however (some read lex praetoria), ordered that to be the last time at which the praetor proclaimed the last [hour] to the people in the comitium, as Varro attests, On the Latin Language, book 5. Hence the day is said by Ammianus Marcellinus to "verge towards midday", book 16, in the Address of Julian. The same, book 31, p. 455 of my copy: "And when battle had been joined, with the day verging towards midday, the darkness of night took hold." From these it is clear that Eusebius did not write contradictory things there, but that among the ancients the hours closely preceding sunset were also called midday. But I would wish these things to serve only this end, that they make clear what time is designated by Eusebius: to treat more at length of the vision itself there is no leisure at present, nor perhaps is it pertinent.

"And when suddenly the people." What the most distinguished Cuperus notes had, I confess, come into my mind before his letter arrived: except that instead of Cumque [I had] cum, with the enclitic particle deleted, and in place of erant, which that most learned man restores, my conjecture gave me suggerebat, or edebat. If the latter should be approved by anyone, then for debita perhaps elata or sublata voce should be read. The circus games, moreover, [were] a solemn show on the birthdays of the emperors, whether the emperors themselves gave them to the people, or the senate and people dedicated them in honour of the emperors. Julius Capitolinus in Antoninus Pius, ch. 5: "He did not reject circus games dedicated to his birthday, though other honours were refused."

"The hand of God was over the battle line." This seems to be a biblical phrase. See Ps. 38 (Lat. 37):2; Ps. 39:11, etc.

"Is frightened off." I for my part think that the word miles should be restored here.

"The title of the first name." Of the conjectures of the most distinguished Cuperus on this place I embrace the one which assigns

to Constantine and to his name the first place among those Augusti.

On Chapter XLV.

While winter was raging at its very fiercest. More often, with that quam removed or understood, they say cum maxime, which means "at present, at this time", as most learned men hold. Yet I think this reading too can be tolerated, elliptically that is, for hyeme tam saeviente quam cum maxime ("winter raging as fiercely as it ever does").

With the stages doubled. That is, so that each day they covered as much of the journey as they otherwise would in two days. For a mansio was taken for the most part for one day's journey, namely because the changes of post-horses and the lodgings where they were to stay were so arranged according to a fixed reckoning of distance that the journeys of the individual days corresponded to the individual stages; except that the watering-places of the camels sometimes varied this. But see Salmasius explaining these things more fully, Plinian Exercitations on Solinus, pp. 494, 495.

Force or promises. I suspect that Lactantius wrote: "Nor yet did either force or promises avail anything."

While [he] was already holding the second stage. The most renowned Baluze would prefer: "while [he] was already holding the second stage, distant". I by no means agree; for I take the other, "Licinius holding the second stage", as said in the manner of that passage of Livy, book 32, chapter 7: "Where the rocks were sheer, a post of a few armed men held [the ground]." The great Gronovius showed, on book 24, chapter 3, that Livy spoke in this way elsewhere too. In the rest the conjecture of the first editor seems somewhat happier; and I think this whole passage should be recast thus: "For he could not [go] further, since Licinius was already holding the second stage, at a distance of as many miles; here therefore, having gathered from nearby as many soldiers as he could, he went on to meet Maximinus." Quantis for quot; as they said very frequently not only in that age, but Propertius too in his own, book 1, Elegy 5:

But how many thousands of cares will she give you?

On Chapter XLVI.

He ordered a notary. That in that period those of the Augusti were called notaries, and those who wrote down the acts of governors exceptores, the most accurate Valesius teaches on Ammianus Marcellinus, book 14; see more in him.

Highest God. Unless I am mistaken, Constantine looks to this in Eusebius, in the fourth book on his Life, chapter 19, when by an enacted law he commanded the soldiers who had not yet received the saving teaching of the Christian faith to go out on the Lord's days into an open plain and, at a given signal, all together to pour out to God a prayer which they had learned beforehand. The sense of the form of prayer is certainly not far off: "Thee alone we know as God, Thee we acknowledge as King, Thee we call upon as Helper, from Thee we have won our victories", and the rest.

In several little books. Libelli are shorter papers; and in this age they were sometimes put for letters, as has been observed by the same Valesius on Ammianus Marcellinus, book 16, otherwise than they used them in the time of Cicero, as Paulus Manutius points out on his letters (book 2, letter 11).

Through the commanders. Most learned men think that these commanded cohorts, just as tribunes did, but were held inferior to the tribunes, which they gather from Vegetius, book 2, chapter 12. Josephus renders [the word] chiliarchs; and likewise Apuleius, "leaders of a thousand armed men". Others [say] more.

The emperor fixed the battle for the day of the Kalends of May. Perhaps he meant "for the day" (in diem or ad diem). What if we were to read, "the emperor fixed for the battle the day of the Kalends of May"? Yet I think that statuere illi diei praelium can also be tolerated somehow, in place of "to appoint the battle for that day".

Whom they call Serene. That is, calm, quiet; free from winds. Claudian, On the Rape of Proserpine, book 3, line 232:

When the serene field grows white with dew.

Where likewise serenus is explained by Gulielmus Pyrrho as placidus. So also the old Glosses: Serenus, νήνεμος [windless].

Said three times. The early Christians seem to have loved the number three in their prayers, not so much out of a perverse imitation of the pagans as in remembrance of the most holy Trinity in God; this Cyprian states expressly in On the Lord's Prayer, and I think I have read it in others as well. That boy, too, heard it sung three times, the one whom Nicephorus mentions in book 14, chapter 46: after dreadful terrors from earthquakes, when the Christians had gathered for supplications, he was caught up on high, and a little later was returned to the company of mortals, but was snatched from it again by death; three times, I say, he had heard these words sung: Holy God, holy Mighty One, holy Immortal One, have mercy on us. Nearly the same is sung even today by the Orthodox Church, and in our own language. The Latin Church had it too.

On Chapter XLVII.

He was being mown down by a few. I consider this reading plainly correct. Lactantius, book 7, chapter 15: Then disaster will travel through the world, mowing down everything, and laying all things low like a harvest. Jerome to Heliodorus: Behold the twice-sharpened sword, proceeding from the mouth of the king, mows down whatever is in its way. Virgil, Aeneid 10:

He mows down all that is nearest with the sword, and, blazing, drives a broad path through the column with the steel.

More in the illustrious Heinsius on Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 5, line 104.

No one mindful of his name. In battles commanders used, wherever they saw the business being carried on too sluggishly, to address their men by name, to show that each one of them was known to them, and that praise and rewards would not be lacking, according as each man's valour and merit were observed. But here, since all were trembling with a terror sent upon them by God, that device achieved nothing.

In one night and one day. Add fugiens [fleeing]; for without it, or a similar word, these words will not cohere with what follows, where he is said to have reached Nicomedia on another night, that is, the second or next.

On Chapter XLVIII.

Which indeed divinity. That this is not sound can be seen even from the fact that the words do not agree: Which indeed divinity may be appeased and propitious. I think one should write: So that whatever there might be of divinity in the heavenly seat. In Eusebius the passage now reads: So that whatever divinity and heavenly thing there is may be able to be well disposed towards us and towards all who live under our authority. When I had pointed out to the most distinguished Cuper that here it seemed one should read, whatever there is of divinity, and had admitted that I was in doubt whether it could in some way be tolerated in Lactantius, so that whatever divinity there was in heaven, this might be propitious to us, as if he were saying: Whether one must hold the opinion of these or of those about the nature of the deity, the deity would at any rate be propitious to us, he replied to me in this manner: « You have rightly perceived that a sore lies hidden in the words, which indeed divinity. And in the first place, the genius of the Greek language persuades one that Eusebius wrote nothing other than θειότητος [of divinity]; next, in Lactantius, following in your footsteps and in the words of Eusebius, I restore: so that whatever of divinity in the heavenly seat. For if the word divinitas is retained, appeased and propitious cannot be referred to any word; and the emperors speak thus because they mean both the God of the Christians and the gods of the heathen. So a little later: That the supreme divinity, whose worship we follow with free minds, may be able to show us in all things its accustomed favour and goodwill. That is, Christ as much as the deities of the Gentiles. » So he writes. But Nicephorus raises another difficulty, who, as he follows Eusebius in most other things, so in this edict too, which he reports in book 7, chapter 41, departs from him rather seldom. He, then, frames these words thus: whatever there is of the most divine and heavenly thing. But I lean rather to this, that in Nicephorus too θειότητος should be read; for I see that he is corrupt in very many places, doubtless through the fault of copyists; and I marvel

that those who published it so splendidly did not collate it more carefully with Eusebius, nor at least correct the places in which the errors are obvious. But this is to be reckoned a lighter loss in a writer not everywhere of the best faith. Let us return, then, to Lactantius. In him let younger readers note that the word divinitas, by the usage of that age, is employed for God, or a deity. This is very frequent in the books of Tertullian, especially in those found later, which he addressed To the Nations. Thus on the triumphal arch Constantine wrote that he had, BY THE PROMPTING OF THE DIVINITY, AVENGED THE COMMONWEALTH WITH JUST ARMS UPON THE TYRANT AND ALL HIS FACTION. Among very many others Salvian too, book 2 On the Government of God, speaks thus: The regard of a propitious divinity is the gift of human preservation. I shall add also this passage of Tertullian, just mentioned, Apologeticus ch. 34, because it also bears on the matter itself: See whether this too does not contribute to the charge of irreligion, to take away freedom of religion and to forbid choice of divinity, so that I may not worship whom I wish, but am forced to worship what I do not wish. The same was the judgement of the emperor Jovian in Socrates, book 3 of the Ecclesiastical History: that it be permitted to worship as each wish. But to discuss this question more fully belongs to others; and so I refrain from bringing forward more about it.

All conditions whatsoever having been removed. What are here called conditiones are called αἱρέσεις by Eusebius, as was excellently observed by Baluze, whom see.

Now to provide and simply. The attentive reader will easily recognize that these words too are corrupt, indeed also mutilated. Their sense, however, is this (for I would not dare to vouch for the words, since all the learned would by no means approve if anyone were preparing to thrust his own words in place of those of the ancients): Wherefore it is fitting that your Devotion should know that it has pleased us that, all conditions whatsoever having been removed which, in the writings given earlier to your office concerning the name of the Christians, seemed altogether perverse and foreign to our clemency, you now provide that freely and simply, and the rest. Here I have taken care to have printed in a different style, that is, in another form of letters, only those words which have been added from the Greek. That it may be the clearer whether this has been done fittingly, I shall set out a little more of the Greek: Which things it was consistent for us to write back as pleasing us thus, so that, the conditions which were contained in our former letters sent to your Devotion concerning the Christians being entirely removed, and whatever seemed quite perverse and foreign to our mildness, these should be taken away, and now each of those who have adopted the same purpose of observing the religion of the Christians should freely and unwaveringly observe this very thing, without any molestation.

Which .... to honour. Or because, etc. I conjecture it was: Which has been done by us, so that nothing may seem to have been taken away or diminished by us from any honour or from any religion, or at least something to that effect. The Greek of Eusebius: And this has been done by us, so that nothing may seem to have been diminished by us from any honour or any religion.

At an earlier time something. Aliqui is to be written. Eusebius: so that any who either from the treasury.

Let them restore as quickly as possible. Two very great men, Vossius and Borrichius, held the word quantocius to be among non-Latin words. It is read, however, in Sulpicius Severus, Dialogue 3, ch. 4: Depart as quickly as possible, lest on account of the injury done to you the heavenly wrath consume me. The old interpreter of the Bible also has it, Gen. 45:9. In the Glosses of Labbe: for quam ocius, τὴν ταχίστην, write quantocius.

Even either those who bought. I separate this from what precedes, and put each thing back in its own place thus: .... let them restore as quickly as possible. Even those who either bought or had obtained as a gift (erant, not erunt), if they think [they may obtain] something from our benevolence, let them petition the vicar; so that for them too.... Postulare in this sense is to set out one's own desire, or a friend's, before him who presides over the jurisdiction, as Ulpian teaches, book 1 On Petitioning. See Brisson, On the Meaning of Words.

On Chapter XLIX.

But Licinius following. It seems necessary that we read shortly after, he made for the narrows; and with fortifications....

With unsustainable grief. So in book 7 of the Divine Institutes, chapter 16: He will harass the world with unsustainable domination. Lactantius luxuriates in such words; in him you will likewise find inextricabilis, inexcogitabilis, illibabilis, inviolabilis, ineluibilis, incomprehensibilis, cruciabilis, dissipabilis, ineloquibilis, and many others, some of which are found in other writers too.

On Chapter L.

When she learned that he had lived. An awkward expression: when she learned that he, Candidianus, had lived, she mingled with his retinue, in order to watch over the fortune of Candidianus. For otherwise you cannot take the "had lived" except by euphemism, of Candidianus as already destined for death; but the rest protests too strongly against this. More correctly, therefore: when she learned that he, Licinius, had decreed this, she mingled with his, that is, the emperor's, retinue. Next, if you read Who, because he had presented himself at Nicomedia, those words too will be clearer.

Spending eight years. Perhaps one should read: Spending eight years in Cilicia. Lactantius certainly uses the word so: as in book 5, chapter 22: He who lives in prosperous circumstances is impatient; book 6, chapter 2: As if to one living in darkness; On the Workmanship of God, chapter 1: Your affairs, in which you are now engaged. "He spent his life in so many years" you have in an ancient inscription:

To Tigrinianus, her well-deserving husband, Profutura made [this]. He lived with me 25 years, and he spent his life in 58 years. In peace.

She was thrown headlong into the Orient. From a letter of the most illustrious Cuper to a man likewise most resplendent with his own distinctions and those of his family, Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the most exalted Prince of Orange. When a few days ago I was enjoying conversation with you and your brother, and we were talking together about various antiquities, there came up, as tends to happen, mention of Lactantius's book On the Deaths of the Persecutors, which Étienne Baluze inserted in volume 2 of his Miscellanea, having deserved very well of Ecclesiastical History on this score alone. Your most learned brother asserted that a dispute had been raised in France against the man over these words of chapter 50, But first their mother was thrown headlong into the Orient, since the sense and what follows plainly suggest that a river is indicated here, and that one should read into the Orontes. I at once judged that the matter needed further deliberation, and I asserted that I had read that the Orontes had been called the Orient. But since I had retained only the numbers, receive what I had noted at home on that passage. I have certainly never doubted that Lactantius, the most eloquent of the Fathers, wrote Orontem; but Oriens crept in by the copyists in place of Orontis, beyond doubt in that age in which people spoke so; nor did the most learned man do so badly in retaining the reading found in the old parchments. For one and the same river is meant; and Hegesippus in book 3, chapter 5 of the Destruction, and Isidore in book 13, chapter 21 of the Origins, testify that this river was called the Orient; whence also Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, on Dionysius's Periegesis interprets Orontes as Anatolikon. "Others say that Tiberius Caesar renamed it from Drakon to Orontes, which signifies to the Romans the Anatolikos." But though it is foreign to the truth that Tiberius, successor of the Emperor Augustus (unless, however, some later one is to be understood), named this river, which is already mentioned in Polybius, Orontes from Drakon, yet he beyond doubt has the word Orient in view; and together with other authors he excuses in some measure the common reading, which clearly shows that Hegesippus and Isidore are not without reason in reporting that the Orontes was called the Orient. Thus far there. And in a letter sent to me last autumn the most learned man added this. What I think about this passage I sent you before. Propertius, to add this, celebrates Orontean myrrh, because it was carried from Arabia to Antioch, the most famous market of Syria, situated on the river Orontes. Caspar Hofmann (book 3, chapter 4 of his Variae lectiones) thinks the myrrh is named not from the river Orontes but from Cyprus, in which Cinyras, father of Myrrha, reigned; and that Cyprus moreover was once part of Syria, on the testimony of Pliny 2, 88, and that hence he, in Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, rewrites:

. . . . Chosen from everywhere, / the nobles desire you, and the youth of all Orontes,

for Oriente; and that no one ought to be troubled because the first syllable in Orontes is short; and finally he reckons that this spice was always sought from the Arabs; that the Orontes, on the testimony of Pliny, 6.26, are Arabian peoples, and that myrrh was named after them. I shall not waste time refuting these things. But the Orontes are not peoples in Arabia, but the nearest neighbours of the Gordiaeans in Mesopotamia. And although Arabs lived in that region, and the name of Arabia sometimes extends as far as that, yet myrrh is not produced in it. In Columella, book 10, Achaean myrrh is celebrated, because, on the testimony of Dioscorides, it grows in Boeotia too; which, as you know, comes under the name of Achaea together with the adjacent regions. So far the most eminent Cuper. But lest the studious reader should miss anything that can be brought forward at present, I shall bring forward the words of Hegesippus from book 3, chapter 5, where he describes Antioch: A river cuts through the middle of it, which, rising from the sunrise, is buried in the sea not far from the City; and from the course of its origin the ancients called it the Orientes, so that it is commonly thought to have given its name to the places, although it received it from there. By the very force of its rather cold streams, and by the zephyrs blowing constantly through those places, the whole city is cooled at almost every moment, so that in the parts of the East it hides the East. You may read the same in Isidore, book 13, chapter 21. These things, then, having been splendidly explained by a man of the most ample dignity and the most copious learning, I have nothing to add except applause. The words of Eustathius I judge to be without doubt corrupt. Strabo relates that the Orientes was called Typhon; but that the name of Dragon was given to it I do not remember having read anywhere except here. For my part a conjecture is at hand: ἐξ Ὀρόντου αὐτὸν Ὀριέντην μετωνόμασε ("from Orontes he renamed it Orientes"). But since it is credible that Cuper easily saw this too, but rejected it as too bold, we shall perhaps more rightly expect more certain help from others. Concerning the name of that tract which Hegesippus mentions, everything can be learned from Constantine, On the Themes.

On the Last Chapter.

He would not corrupt the truth. Ne preceded; wherefore the τό

non, added by a copyist, I judge should be deleted.

He looked upon the earth. Not only in the writings of outsiders, as learned men have sufficiently shown, is this elegant manner of speaking very common, but also in the sacred ones. Deut. 26:7: Who heard us, and looked upon our lowliness, and our toil, and our distress; and verse 15: Look down from Thy sanctuary, and from the lofty dwelling-place of the heavens, and bless Thy holy people. Thus the Virgin Theotokos in that wonderful hymn: "For He has looked upon the lowliness of His handmaid", where Price has collected many [examples]. Eusebius too uses it of this very peace restored to the Church, of which this writer treats, Ecclesiastical History, book 8, chapter 16: "For when the divine and heavenly grace showed its kindly and gracious oversight towards us." Unless you prefer that the metaphor there is drawn from inspection, or visitation, such as the harmosts carried out, that is, those who were sent to examine and settle the affairs of the allies or of the provincials. On which the most learned and most celebrated Buchner [writes] on the Nativity Hymn which Prudentius sang to Christ the Saviour.

That flourishing, of the church, with perpetual quiet. Two very learned men thought it should be read: That He may guard the flourishing churches with perpetual quiet. To me it seems that, from the usage of those times, it could rather be written: That He may guard the perpetual quiet of the flourishing Church. For he speaks only of that one and true Church. The rest too would thus be more suited to the style of Lactantius; as book 6, chapter 10: That he might make the quiet of the night safe for himself; book 7, chapter 2: When the souls of the pious have been recalled to the blessed life, a quiet, tranquil, peaceful, and finally golden age, as the poets call it, may flourish, with God Himself reigning. The lovely name of quiet greatly pleased the Romans and the princes of the Romans, as is clear from coins, and as others have shown. Among others Constantine the Great too loved it (not to speak of the pagans), who on the triumphal arch and on coins is called LIBERATOR OF THE CITY, FOUNDER OF QUIET, and elsewhere displays the most sweet names OF PEACE, or OF PUBLIC QUIET. May GOD, BEST AND GREATEST, grant that the whole Christian name, with solid and lasting peace and quiet, and specifically that, together with a pious, brave and fortunate KING, our fatherland may flourish for ever with the goods already named and with other goods proper and perpetual.