For when any one at that time had become powerful for any reason, and having almost royal authority and being consumed with longing to seize the goods of others, accused some clearly guiltless person, he was welcomed as an intimate and loyal friend,Of the emperor. The text and exact meaning are uncertain, although the general sense is clear; regio imperio prope accedens can hardly mean having access to the court, or hastening to the court, as the vulgate reading regiae prope accedens did. who was to be enriched by the ruin of other men.

For the emperor, rather inclined himself to do injury, lent his ear to accusers, listened to death-dealing denunciations, and took unbridled joy in various kinds of executions; unaware of that saying of Cicero’s which asserts that those are unlucky who think that they have power to do anything they wish.

This implacability in a cause which was most just, but where victory brought shame,Cf. Cic., De Off. ii. 8, 27, of Julius Caesar, ergo in illo secuta est honestam causam non honesta victoria. delivered many innocent victims to the torturers, either placing them on the rack until they were bowed downWith sub eculeo locavit incurvos cf. xxviii. 1, 19, quamquam incurvus sub eculeo staret. In both passages sub eculeo is to be taken with the adjective (incurvos), which is proleptic, meaning under (the torture of) the rack. It cannot be taken literally with locavit and staret, since the eculeus was a wooden instrument shaped somewhat like a horse (ecus, equus) on which the victim was placed with weights on his feet. There he might also be flogged or tortured in other ways. Though commonly translated rack, the eculeuo was not like the medieval rack. or exposing them to the sword-stroke of a cruel executioner. It would have been better for them (if nature allowed it), to lose even ten lives in battle, rather than though free from all blame, with lacerated sides, amid general groans to suffer punishment for alleged treason, with their bodies first mutilated, a thing which is more awful than any death.

When finally ferocity was overcome by the grief that it caused, and had burnt itself out, the most distinguished men suffered proscription, exile, and other punishments which seem lighter to some, terrible though they are; and in order that another might be enriched, a man of noble birth and perhaps richer in deserts was deprived of his patrimony and driven headlong into banishment, there to waste away from sorrow, or to support his life by beggary; and no limit was set to the deadly cruelties, until the emperor and his nearest friends were glutted with wealth and bloodshed.

While that usurperProcopius. of whose many deeds and his death we have told, still survived, on the twenty-first of July in the first consulship of Valentinian with his brother,365. horrible phenomena suddenly spread through the entire extent of the world, such as are related to us neither in fable nor in truthful history.

For a little after daybreak, preceded by heavy and repeated thunder and lightning, the whole of the firm and solid earth was shaken and trembled, the sea with its rolling waves was driven back and withdrew from the land, so that in the abyss of the deep thus revealed men saw many kinds of sea-creatures stuck fast in the slime; and vast mountains and deep valleys, which Nature, the creator, had hidden in the unplumbed depths, then, as one might well believe, first saw the beams of the sun.