Paulus Baudri, Praefatio in librum de Mortibus persecutorum

Notes of Paul Baudri on the Book On the Deaths of the Persecutors.

Preface.

Behold at last, learned reader, a new edition of the little book On the Deaths of the Persecutors, which you will not undeservedly say with me has advanced at a tortoise's pace. For how long it has been since it was begun matters little to know, and many places in the work do not keep silent about the fact. But I will say boldly: I had scarcely begun when I would gladly, had I been able, have obeyed the counsel of Horace, "Let it be kept back until the ninth year." Nor was this my only reason, that it concerned the first offspring of my wit, which above all others ought not to be rashly brought forth into the light; but also that I had observed that it is arduous to begin, and difficult besides, lest in haste various things slip out which could better be reshaped at leisure, as I myself have quite often experienced in the course of this edition, with the printers pressing against my hope and wish. Above all there was the further fact that in the book which we had undertaken to illustrate to the best of our ability very many passages here and there were most obscure; these, like others of the kind, I am accustomed to compare to those darkest caves in which those who enter them see nothing at first, but at length see something more or less, if they linger longer and patiently look about with intent eyes. I would not indeed wish to boast that by meditating so slowly I have touched the matter well with a needle, as they say, or, to speak more plainly, have happily seen what lies hidden in such great darkness. Away with that, please. Very rarely do we claim so much for ourselves. But if it has not succeeded, then for that reason that well-worn saying must rightly be used the more often:

Either he sees, or thinks he has seen, the moon through the clouds,

I wished above all, studious reader, to succeed for your sake and mine; and though there was a less certain hope of a prosperous outcome, at any rate, because of the example of Peter, who, as John, the most devout companion of his running, testifies (John 20), beheld more in the sepulchre of Christ than John, who had run ahead, there seemed to be no danger in delay. All the more so because often, while I seemed to have cast this edition aside, it would happen that while doing something else (for we also digressed to other things, lest you be unaware, rather often, and, as friends partly know, seriously), it would happen, I say, that I came upon unexpected confirmations or explanations of Caecilius's narrative. But we are lingering too long over old delays.

That it is a golden little work, on which so many of the things contained in this volume were written, not only all who wrote on it but also those who read it have confessed, almost without any exception. And with what justice, both its matter, which is most weighty, and the author's diction, which is almost always polished and elegant, declare. But notable at present above all other testimonies, since it touches in a single embrace most of what pertains to the matter, is the preface of the first Oxford edition, which we shall therefore describe somewhat more fully. "We present," it says, "our Lactantius's book On the Deaths of the Persecutors, worth its weight in gold, which, missed for more than a thousand years, we have very recently recovered through the zeal of the most learned Baluze. And this, badly mauled and quite often gaping with lacunae, we have restored here and there partly by our own conjectures, partly by those of most learned men, the bishop of St Asaph and Isaac Vossius. Through the agency of this

treatise we are at long last freed from the inveterate error about the twenty-five-year pontificate of St Peter. Moreover, we distinguish the sequence and the times of the persecutions in the Church; and the fictitious martyrdoms which until now were laid to Diocletian's charge before his eighth consulship we wipe away and reject. Finally, we now for the first time obtain the state of the Roman empire through those deadly times, narrated with historical fidelity; and we understand that the purple, which we vainly believed to have been laid down of their own accord by the tyrants, was given up reluctantly and not without tears. » Here now indeed, besides the golden worth of the book and the weighty judgement on its worth, which we had stated, you see before all things how it was roundly assigned to Lactantius, the most polished writer of the third and fourth century, by the late most reverend bishop of Oxford, John Fell, the author of the preface; then how wretched the condition of this excellent offspring was formerly, and almost up to these times, in very many respects; thirdly, further, into what fortunate hands, skilled in healing, it at last came; and finally, what of excellence it briefly contains. As for us, and so far as one may treat here of matters which we have dealt with elsewhere in their proper places, or which it will be more fitting to speak of a little later, we do indeed believe, on account of the authority of Jerome cited at the title, but above all on account of the index which we began to compile for our own use, of the words, phrases and things which this author and Lactantius have in common, that the book cannot better be ascribed to anyone than to Lactantius; and yet, because of other things which we noted at the same title, we do not dare to place the matter more securely beyond all hazard of doubt. But as regards the error about that long pontificate of St Peter, mentioned just now as an old one, and from which error we have at last been freed by means of the work set below, it is worthwhile to learn what happened to me most recently. Philippe Labbe, a man of great industry, set down Dionysius in so many syllables in his Technical Chronology, at the year of Christ 33, [as saying] that the darkening of the sun, which the three evangelists Matthew, Mark and Luke mention (Matt. 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44), took place on the 3rd day of April of that year, as will be plain to those who consult the passage; and likewise the most distinguished Toinard maintains in the most explicit words, in this very work, that Christ was fastened to the cross in the year 33 of the common era, and indeed on the 14th day of the month Nisan, or the 3rd day of the month of April. But I, the day before yesterday, since I believed that my health, which I lost about three months ago through a very grave illness, could not be fully and well recovered if useful reading were lacking, began to inquire which of the ancients had joined the said darkness with the third day of April and at the same time with the day of the death of Jesus Christ: whether the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite? or his annotator Maximus? or his paraphrast Pachymeres? or Hadrian's freedman Phlegon? or those who cited Phlegon on this matter, Eusebius and Philogonus? or those who wrote the life of that Dionysius, Methodius and Metaphrastes? and so on with all the others who under any name could come to mind and to hand. But why say more? What alone I was seeking I have been unable to find anywhere so far; and what I was seeking about Peter's first arrival in the City, in the Martyrdom of Dionysius the Areopagite by Methodius, or, as others prefer, Methrodorus, against hope, and according to the very interpretation of Pierre Lanssel the Jesuit,

I found it thus: 'In the eight hundred and eighth year,' he says, 'after the founding of Rome, when Nero Caesar, the fifth from Augustus, had obtained the empire, the blessed Peter the apostle was sent, together with the other apostles also, to preach the Gospel to the whole world. After many years of his preaching, the supreme city of Rome having been occupied and chosen, he there received by divine appointment the office of preaching, so that, having been made as it were the summit and chief of the holy apostles in the order of the apostolic office, he might be the first at Rome to become a companion and sharer in the contests of those things which Christ had suffered. For that city, just as it was caught up in great errors, so it needed greater remedies, that it might be corrected; so that where error was most grievous, there also the greatest grace might abound. Then the tyrant and impious Nero, who hoped to subdue land and sea to his tyranny, driven into rage by the fury of his cruelty and the force of his madness, blazed out against the servants of Christ, and in the fourteenth year of his tyrannical rule condemned the blessed Peter and Paul to an unjust death.' This passage certainly, to remark it in passing, as other things often do elsewhere, not only unexpectedly and wonderfully confirms that the apostle Peter came to Rome when Nero was already reigning, as will be related below in the second chapter, but also clearly shows that we could have done without this little book On the Deaths of the Persecutors for rejecting that contrary opinion, since by following Methodius we could already have condemned it. And indeed, if according to Methodius the apostle Peter, when Nero was already reigning, was sent with the other apostles to preach the Gospel through the whole world, and was beheaded in the city of Rome only in the fourteenth year of Nero, after first proclaiming the Christian truth elsewhere for many years, by what means could he have acted as bishop of Rome for more years than about six or seven? We come closer to the matter.

Very many hold that, when some newly found book of the Ancients, such as ours now is, has to be printed from a single and not very sound manuscript codex, it should be published in every respect just as it stands written, so that the truth of the matter may not be hidden from anyone in even the smallest part, and so that, through readings published in the author's words in place of faults and gaps, one may not be less free to think of new ones; for otherwise, namely, it will come about, as Johann Friedrich Gronovius, a very great man, declared in almost exactly so many letters (in his Observations on the Ecclesiastical Writers, chap. 8, p. 72), that suitable signs towards a cure and towards the true hand of the author will be lacking, and that not seldom it will happen that better conjectures than the earlier ones of certain persons cannot be put forward by others. His words are: 'Although I would not praise bold conjectures, by which some have too much transformed the ancient writing, and although to cling to the parchments is the safest course, yet if they present anything rough, scaly and thorny, I prefer it, not so much because I hold it certain that it is Minucius's' (for he is treating of the dialogue of Minucius Felix against the pagans), 'as because I do not despair that from it what was the author's can more easily be drawn out. For ancient codices are not without faults, even monstrous ones; and it goes splendidly with us when the signs towards a cure and towards the true hand of the author are sufficiently plain and certain: the rest a divine mind, very much zeal for learning, and a thorough knowledge of the writer's character and nature will supply.' And what he adds immediately: 'And in that which is our business, it very often happens, I admit, that we are deceived, all of us who handle these letters above the common level; but meanwhile we also dig out many excellent things; and as of old a colleague usually lightened the unjust marks of the other censor, and against a tribune threatening force in place of intercession a tribune was a help to others: so if we have pieced anything together badly, there arises and comes forth from this very order someone to amend our errors. In short, time does the business; what is not today will be tomorrow: thus life is pushed along.' These things, I say, ought so little to deter us from having books of the Ancients like ours reproduced in good faith with all their faults, that it is plain they ought all the more to be reproduced. But now, since I felt exactly the same, I had thought that the little work could not

be better communicated by our care to learned men than if it were struck off as closely as possible to the old exemplar, with whatever readings Baluze, the first and most distinguished editor, testified in his notes had been rejected by him as corrupt being restored for that reason to their places; for it was not permitted to consult the manuscript codex, which was kept at Paris, in any other way. But why do I delay? So much right over another's work was not granted to one asking by letter. Hence we now renew for you, before all else, the Paris edition pure and simple, just as it first came out, or altered only in those things which Baluze himself changed, as far as concerns the author's text. Do not, therefore, when, for example, almost at the threshold of the book, in place of the manuscript's reading, qui illustrati erant Deo, jacent ("those who had been made illustrious by God lie prostrate"), you find printed afresh from the correction of that most learned man, qui adversati erant Deo, jacent ("those who had been adversaries of God lie prostrate"), refer the matter to anything other than what we have said. Now concerning the notes.

Of these, as may be seen throughout the whole work, countless ones are rather brief, or at any rate not too long to be conveniently placed beneath the text, as they call it. On the other hand, others, and by no means few, were found to which the same place could not be assigned, either because they were rather lengthy philological excursuses, or because, although they discussed some difficulty of the author more closely, they too were rather prolix; or finally because from single disquisitions of this kind, or from several together, it seemed easy to compose Caecilian dissertations after the model of the Cyprianic ones, and of Dodwell's De Ripa Striga, in the prolegomena, and especially in the second part of the book. But now, for this to be done, three great bodies, with the weightiest men disapproving, and, I think, with their authors also not going to approve, were they living, would have had to be torn into parts and particles: the notes, I mean, of the most learned men Baluze, Cuper and Columbus. Wherefore presently, having changed our view, we handed them over to the typesetters to be printed each one entire as far as was possible (for the most ample Cuper had already separated his own from those of Columbus), namely so that not only should the latter part of this edition consist of all these, and of Dodwell's dissertation De Ripa Striga, and of all similar things which might afterwards be found, and such as afterwards did in fact appear at Paris in the year 1690, the notes of the most distinguished Toinard on our little book, and the preface of the most learned Ruinart to the Acta martyrum sincera, as he calls it, and selecta, but also that references to that part, edited in the first place, should be made in their order and in due manner in the former volume, which the French call by a singular name des renvois.

Nor indeed were we unaware at that time how great a crop of such things would afterwards spring up from this. But besides the fact that we had already resolved, lest it be too dry or tiresome, always to set something in front, if any place were given, whence also rather trivial things have sometimes been prefixed, we wished that you should be able quickly and easily, while reading the former part of the work, to read at the same time, for example, if you pleased or the matter required, the notes of the learned which related to the sequence of the little book or to the same passages of the author. Moreover, these most learned observations, which today we publish collected together for the first time, are commended not only by their old value: but this further surplus accrues to them anew, that, as commonly happens in second editions, the most learned men Baluze, Cuper and Toinard have greatly enlarged their own, whether by annotating new things, or by reshaping old ones, or finally by arranging them otherwise, as will be clear to those who compare. For how could we now better point everything out to you?

Into the other part we gathered all the things which, thought out in various ways for the understanding of the author, or contributing to it, remained to be placed beneath the text. These are, first, what the most erudite and at the same time most friendly men John George Graevius, that illustrious parent of so many weighty and exquisite labours, and Elias Boherellus, from whom you may deservedly expect excellent things day by day as well, brought out from their own store at our urgent request; next, what from the most distinguished Thomas Gale, Peter Allix and Paul Colomesius, through our Boherellus, while he was still living in England, was most kindly

obtained, and indeed for the most part laboriously copied out, we received: third, all the little notes which the same Colomesius, also with his own hand, most carefully reproduced from the margin of Vossius's copy, and in his kindness sent on to us again through the same friend; then the things which, sooner or later, we had from elsewhere, by the favour of the most courteous Toinard, or through the efforts of our bookseller, from those most learned men Jacob Tollius and the Abbé de Saint-Hilaire, canon of Beauvais: finally, whatever we were able to contribute ourselves by our own effort, and from the already published labours of others. And indeed, since among these the three English editions, both on their own account and on account of the notes added to them, could by no means be passed over, and since two most highly praised translations likewise stood out for such reasons, one French, by the most distinguished Maucroix, canon of Reims, and the other English, by Gilbert Burnet, now the most reverend bishop of Salisbury, and since, finally, the most erudite Cyprianic dissertations of Dodwell, and also the most learned Critica of Pagi on the Annals of Baronius, contained a great many things which could most suitably be referred to particular passages of the following little work, what else, I ask you, were you to expect in a book of this kind than that you should see those works repeatedly praised or copied out? We hasten on to the other matters that remain. We do not deny that, without consulting their most distinguished authors at all, we published the dissertation on Ripa Striga, the preface to the Acts of the Martyrs, and moreover the individual pieces which we have excerpted in so many places from Dodwell and Pagi. But, not to use many words, we thought it in no way unfair or discourteous to reprint and bring together, even without the knowledge of those who had published them, things which had already earlier been made public separately and which in any way bore on our subject, although at times they would set learned men against one another in no slight way; for in this way it will sometimes appear better where the truth lies hidden or lies open. Nor do I think it should be passed over in silence that the chief instigator of the reprinting of the preface was the most eminent Cuper, who advised the printer, who had not expected it, about this matter for the sake of a fuller investigation of the truth. And we had indeed almost given it the title On the Multitude of the Martyrs; chiefly because (owing to some things that were to be deliberately suppressed in their places, in which Ruinart gave a particular account of his latest edition of the Acts of the Martyrs) only those things would remain which served to assert the multitude of the martyrs with all their might. But lest the plan of that preface should perhaps seem to have been rashly interpolated by us, the old title was kept, and nothing else, I can solemnly say, was thrown out of the whole work except that harsh designation, among learned men, and at the very least among men of either side of a controversy, of heretic, with which Ruinart several times wished to defame his opponent, and in place of which we, more humanely, substituted the most certain and not odious appellation of most learned, or something of the kind. Receive now in this manner, together with the noble monument of a most ancient Father of the Church, the fullest collection of all the things that in any way pertained to it; and if you think that any diligence in this matter is hardly worth mentioning, on account of the great delays that have intervened, at least hear further with what good faith we have wished his own to be given to each. First of all, since the observations on the first part which we received from others did not all come into our hands at the same time, but some sooner, some later, we have generally placed the earlier in the earlier position, unless by chance they were criticisms of the later ones. Next, we copied out each thing that was to be copied from whatever source with such care that we did not omit even the circumflexes of ablatives and the graves of adverbs, whenever we saw that they had been used by the learned; but we added none whenever, on the contrary, they had been left by them, with Johann Friedrich Gronovius (in the Observata ad Ecclesiasticos Scriptores, ch. 14, p. 152 and following), to beginners, or to boys, or even to old men; each one's own method of writing being preserved, that is, even though from this exactness two kinds of writing, for the most part utterly different and wholly incompatible, would be seen in this book. Then again, carefully also

the names of the authors, where it was possible, we have appended to their notes. And finally, since from none of the three English editions was it clear enough which parents the little notes placed beneath nearly all the pages should rather acknowledge, we have named the editions themselves in place of the parents of the notes. All the more so because, although in the earlier Oxford edition, which is the mother of the other English ones, the most reverend author of the preface named above wrote simply that he had from time to time restored Lactantius's book On the Deaths of the Persecutors, as being badly mauled and very often gaping with lacunae, partly from his own conjectures, partly from those of most learned men, the bishop of St Asaph and Isaac Vossius, he not only, for example, failed to distinguish his own accurately from those of Vossius, but, beyond all expectation, mixed in some of Spark's, as it would be easy to prove; and indeed several of Gale's, as I legitimately suspect, since we found not a few in Gale's transcript, with which that most distinguished man has blessed us through our Boherel, deleted in no other way than that in which each man is wont to condemn his own. Add that the Cambridge edition, although more notes are in it than in the two Oxford ones, is at any rate the work of an anonymous editor, or ownerless (adespoton).

For the rest, I know that we, however great our scrupulousness in these matters may have been, will doubtless seem too little scrupulous in places where we have so often tried to cast suspicion on the words of Caecilius, or to call into doubt and overturn the conjectures and opinions of others, after putting forward and confirming our own to the best of our ability. But I will say it in a word: as in religion, after the example of the first Christians, we are not worshippers of the cross, so neither are we [worshippers] of cruxes in authors; and as, again, in religion we pursue truth above all things, so also always in matters of criticism and in the sciences. Do you imitate us, even at the cost of our labour, if we have erred. For our own words are not oracles to us, and we all owe our sacrifice to truth alone; and as we quite often rebuke ourselves freely and candidly in the study when occasion is given, so we most willingly allow ourselves to be led back by others from an erroneous path into the way, if candour and reason are kindly present, and we greatly rejoice. Indeed, be confident that if, by bringing forward some weightier authority or reason, you show why I have gone astray here or there, you will gain as much gratitude from me as I would wish to have gained from you if, even on account of the notes of the learned alone, which we have collected in such great number, partly recent, partly old, and have now at last published, you would have to cry out happily and safely on every side:

One man by delaying has restored our affairs for us.

But how much it is to be feared, however highly they are to be esteemed, that this work cannot be brought to completion unless new manuscript codices become available! Farewell; and while we labour, I hope, at better things, give us courage, if you can. For as we do not say beforehand certain things whose reason is easy to guess, so, I will say again, we do not wish all our work to be thought highly commendable; and we shall always love to follow what we shall see and approve as better. Further, something that had almost slipped my mind: to our little notes or longer comments we do not append our name. But commonly the figure of a cross is prefixed; for the printers have omitted it in very many places.