Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| The persecution had now dragged on into its fifth year when, in the month of Xanthicus, on its second day, which corresponds to the fourth day preceding the Nones of April, on the Lord's day itself, the day of our Savior's resurrection, at Caesarea once again, Theodosia, a Tyrian virgin, a faithful and most modest girl not yet fully eighteen years old, went up to some prisoners who were themselves confessing the kingdom of Christ and were sitting in front of the court. She greeted them warmly and, as was natural, begged them to remember her when they came to the Lord.
2| Because she did this, soldiers seized her as though she had committed some unholy and impious crime and took her to the governor. He at once, like a man possessed and utterly savage in his rage, tortured her with dreadful and most horrifying torments on her sides and breasts, down to the very bones. While she was still breathing, and in spite of everything standing there with a glad and radiant face, he ordered that she be cast into the sea's waves. Then he turned from her to the others and gave his order: he handed them all over to the copper mines at Phaeno in Palestine.
3| After this, on the fifth day of the month Dius, which by the Roman reckoning is the Nones, in the same city, the same governor sentenced Silvanus and his companions to the labors of that same copper mine. Silvanus was at that time still a presbyter and had made his confession; not long afterward he was honored with a bishopric and was perfected by martyrdom. They had shown the noblest steadfastness on behalf of godliness, and before sending them off he ordered the sinews of their ankles to be disabled with branding irons.
4| Along with the sentence against them, he delivered to punishment by fire a man who had distinguished himself in countless other confessions: this was Domninus, known to everyone throughout Palestine for his extraordinary boldness of speech. After him the same judge, a terrible inventor of wickedness and an innovator in schemes against the teaching of Christ, devised punishments against the worshipers of God that had never even been heard of before. Three he condemned to fight as boxers in single combat; Auxentius, a venerable and holy old man, he handed over to be food for wild beasts; others, men in the full maturity of manhood, he castrated and made eunuchs and condemned to the same mines; and still others, after harsh tortures, he shut up in prison. Among these was Pamphilus, of all my companions to me at least the most dearly loved, a man who for every kind of virtue was the most illustrious among the martyrs of our time.
5| Urban first made trial of his skill in rhetorical discourse and philosophical learning, and afterward tried to force him to sacrifice. When he saw him refuse and pay no heed whatever to his threats, he finally flew into a rage and ordered him to be tortured with still more severe torments.
6| And when that most savage of men had very nearly glutted himself on the tortures inflicted on his sides with relentless and contentious scrapers, but had in the end covered himself with shame before all, he enrolled him too among the confessors in the prison.
7| What recompense he will receive from divine justice for his cruelty against the saints, after his drunken violence against the martyrs of Christ, is easy to discern from the preludes he met with here. Through them divine justice pursued him at once, and not long after his outrages against Pamphilus, while he still held the governorship. So suddenly did it strike that the man who only yesterday sat judging high up on a lofty tribunal, guarded by a troop of soldiers, commanding the whole military body, the intimate and table companion, as a dearest friend, of the tyrant himself, was stripped by it in a single night and left bereft of all his great honors. It poured dishonor and shame on him before those who had formerly stood in awe of him as their ruler, and showed him cowardly and unmanly, voicing womanish cries and supplications to the whole body over which he had command. And Maximin himself, in whom he had once proudly exulted as though Maximin loved him especially for what he did against us, divine justice set up as a harsh and most cruel judge over him in Caesarea itself, so that Maximin passed the sentence of death against him, after the great shame of the outrages of which he was convicted.
8| But let this be said by us in passing. There may come a fitting occasion when our account will take up at leisure the ends of the impious who campaigned most fiercely against us, of Maximin himself and those around him, and the overthrow of their lives.
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