Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| The first of the martyrs of Palestine, then, was Procopius. Before he had any experience of prison, from the moment he first entered, he was brought before the governor's tribunal and ordered to sacrifice to the gods so called. He said that he knew of only one, to whom it was fitting to sacrifice in the way that he himself wishes. And when he was further commanded to pour a libation to the four emperors, he uttered a saying that was not at all to their liking, and his head was cut off at once. What he had said was that line of the poet: "Rule by many is not good; let one be ruler, one king."
2| It was on the seventh day of the month Desius, which the Romans would call the seventh day before the Ides of June, on the fourth day of the week, that this first sign was accomplished at Caesarea in Palestine.
3| After this, in the same city, a great many of the leaders of the local churches contended eagerly through terrible tortures and displayed to those who watched the record of great struggles. Others, their souls numbed beforehand by cowardice, gave way readily at the very first assault. Of the rest, each passed through different kinds of torment: at one time countless lashes, at another the rack and the tearing of the sides, and unbearable fetters, by which some even had their hands disabled.
4| Yet they bore the outcome that befell them in accordance with the hidden judgments of God. One man, while others held both his hands and brought him to the altar and thrust the foul and accursed offering into his right hand, was let go as though he had sacrificed. Another had not touched it at all, but when others declared that he had sacrificed, he departed in silence. Another, taken up half dead, was thrown aside as though already a corpse and released from his bonds, counted among those who had sacrificed. Another shouted and protested that he would not comply, but he was struck on the mouth, silenced by the many hands of those assigned to this task, and forcibly driven out, even though he had not sacrificed.
5| So important was it to them to seem by any means to have achieved their purpose. Out of so great a number, then, only Alphaeus and Zacchaeus were deemed worthy of the holy martyrs' crown. After scourgings and scrapings, cruel bonds and the pains that followed them, and various other examinations, their feet were stretched through a night and a day as far as the fourth hole of the stocks, that instrument of punishment. Then on the seventeenth of the month Dius (by Roman reckoning, the fifteenth day before the December Kalends), simply because they confessed one God and Jesus as Christ and King, as if they had spoken some blasphemy, they too were beheaded, in the same way as the former martyr.
Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/eusebius/012-the-martyrs-of-palestine-chapter-1#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.
← All of Eusebius of Caesarea: The Works of Eusebius of Caesarea