Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| Maximin Caesar, the moment he came to power, displayed to everyone the marks of his inborn hatred of God and of his impiety, and he threw himself into the persecution against us with more vigor than his predecessors.
2| Great confusion hung over everyone. Some scattered in one direction, some in another, all doing their utmost to escape the danger, and a harsh upheaval gripped the whole world. What words, then, could suffice for us to give a worthy account of the divine love and of the boldness in confessing God shown by the blessed martyr, truly a guiltless lamb, I mean Apphianus, who was set before the gates as a spectacle for all the people of Caesarea, a marvelous example of piety to the one and only God?
3| He was not yet twenty years old in bodily age. At first, for the sake of a Greek secular education (for he happened to be among those who are richly blessed with this world's wealth), he spent most of his time at Berytus. And, remarkable to say, in such a city he rose above the desires of youth, and, his character corrupted neither by the vigor of his body nor by the company of other young men, he embraced self-control, ordering and training his own life with decency, dignity and piety, according to the teaching that befits Christianity.
4| If we ought also to mention his homeland and to honor it as well through the noble athlete of godliness who came forth from it, this too we shall do with good reason.
5| If anyone knows Pagae, a city of Lycia of some note, it was from there that the young man set out. After he returned from his studies at Berytus, while his father held first rank in their homeland, he could not bear living with his father and his kinsmen, since they did not choose to live by the laws of godliness. Held fast, as it were, by a divine Spirit, and moved by a philosophy that came naturally to him, or rather one that was inspired and true, he set his mind on things higher than the glory the world esteems, and he spurned the pleasures of the body. He slipped away from his family in secret, and, giving no thought even to his daily expenses, in hope and faith toward God, he was led by the hand of the divine Spirit toward the city of Caesarea; there the crown of martyrdom for godliness had been prepared for him.
6| He came to live with us, and for a short while gathered himself as fully as he could in the divine Scriptures, and prepared himself most eagerly with fitting disciplines. Then, who could have seen the end he displayed and not been struck with amazement?
7| And who, merely hearing of it, would not rightly marvel at his courage, his boldness, his steadfastness, and above all at his daring and at the very deed itself, which gave proof of a zeal for godliness and of a spirit truly beyond the human?
8| For when Maximin raised a second attack against us, in the persecution's third year, in our time, letters from the tyrant were circulated for the first time ordering that absolutely everyone, the entire population, should sacrifice, with the city magistrates seeing to it diligently and zealously. Heralds throughout the whole city of Caesarea, at the governor's command, were summoning men together with women and children to the idols' temples, while in addition the tribunes were calling out each person by name from a register, and an unspeakable flood of evils was pouring in on every side. Then, fearlessly, the young man of whom I have spoken, with no one knowing what he was about to do, slipped past both us who lived with him in the same house and the whole band of soldiers around the governor, and went up to Urbanus as he was pouring a libation. Undaunted, he seized him by the right hand and stopped him on the spot from sacrificing, and, with a kind of divine composure, earnestly counseled him to cease from his error, for it was not right to abandon the only true God and offer sacrifice to idols and demons.
9| This, it seems, was undertaken by the youth because the divine power that drove him to it was all but crying out through what took place that Christians, those who truly are such, are so far from changing their minds about the piety toward the God of the universe, a piety of which they have once been counted worthy, that they not only rise above threats and the punishments that follow them, but speak out still more boldly, use the freedom of speech of a noble and fearless tongue, and, if it were possible, urge even their persecutors to turn away from ignorance and acknowledge the only God who truly is.
10| Upon this, the one of whom we are speaking was at once torn apart, as might be expected after so daring an act, by the governor's attendants, as if by wild beasts. He endured countless blows all over his body with the utmost courage, and for the time being was immediately handed over to prison.
11| There he was left for a night and a day with both feet stretched apart in the torturer's stocks, and the next day he was led before the judge. Then, when the judge tried to force him to sacrifice, he showed complete endurance in the face of pain and horrifying agony. His sides were raked, not once or twice but again and again, down to the bones and the very entrails; and he took so many blows to the face and neck that his face swelled up and even those who had long known him well and closely could no longer recognize him.
12| But since he did not yield even to all this, the torturers, on orders, wrapped his feet in linen soaked with oil and set fire to it underneath. What agonies the blessed man endured at this, I think, passes all description. The fire, in fact, ate down through his flesh and reached his very bones, so that the moisture of his body melted and ran out and dripped away like wax.
13| But since he did not yield even to this, and his adversaries were by now defeated and all but exhausted by his more than human endurance, he was dragged off in chains. On the third day he was again brought before the judge, and when he confessed the same resolve, though by then half dead, he was handed over to be sunk in the sea.
14| What happened immediately afterward will, when told, quite likely be disbelieved by those who did not see it with their own eyes. Although we know this perfectly well, reason still does not allow us to do anything but hand the story down in full to the written record, all the more because the witnesses of the event were, quite simply, all the inhabitants of Caesarea. Indeed, no age was missing from this extraordinary spectacle.
15| For at the very moment when they seemed to have cast that truly holy and thrice-blessed man into the endless depths of the open sea, a sudden and extraordinary convulsion and upheaval spread through the sea itself and all the surrounding air, so that both the earth and the whole city were shaken by what had happened. And together with this extraordinary and sudden earthquake, the sea, as if it could not bear to carry him, cast the divine martyr's body up before the gates of the city. Such, then, were the events concerning the inspired Apphianus, who was perfected in the month Xanthicus, on the second day, which would be the fourth day preceding the Nones of April, a day of Preparation.
Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/eusebius/015-the-martyrs-of-palestine-chapter-4#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.
← All of Eusebius of Caesarea: The Works of Eusebius of Caesarea