Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| After so many brave deeds by the magnificent martyrs of Christ, the persecution had slackened, and its blaze seemed to have been quenched by their holy blood. Relief and freedom had already been granted to those toiling there in the mines of the Thebaid for Christ's sake, and we were about to breathe a little clean air again, when, I do not know how, through some fresh stirring, the man who had been allotted the power to persecute was inflamed against the Christians all over again.
2| Suddenly, then, letters of Maximin against us went out again everywhere, province by province. The governors, and in addition the man appointed to command the armies, pressed the city curators in every city, together with the magistrates and the record-keepers, by proclamations, letters and public ordinances, to carry the imperial command through to the end. It ordered them to rebuild with all haste the fallen temples of the idols, and to take care that the whole population, every man together with women, household slaves and even children at the breast, should sacrifice and pour libations and actually taste the accursed sacrifices themselves; that the goods for sale in the market should be defiled through libations from the sacrifices; and that guards be stationed at the entrance of the baths, so that those who washed there might be polluted with the utterly abominable sacrifices.
3| While these things were being carried out in this way, our people, as was only natural, were again gripped by the deepest anxiety, and even the unbelieving pagans were condemning the absurdity of what was happening as harsh and by now quite excessive, for these things seemed wearisome and burdensome even to them. Yet while the greatest of storms hung over everyone everywhere, the divine power of our Savior, on the contrary, breathed such courage into its own athletes that, though no one drew them on or dragged them forward, they trampled underfoot the threats of such great men.
4| So three of the faithful, banding together, rushed at the governor as he was sacrificing to idols, crying out to him to stop his error, for there was no God other than the Creator and Maker of the universe. Asked who they were, they boldly confessed that they were Christians.
5| At this Firmilian was provoked to sharper anger, and without even torturing them he handed them over to capital punishment. Of these, the elder was named Antoninus; the second was called Zebinas, a native of Eleutheropolis; and the third bore the name Germanus. Their martyrdom took place on the Ides of November, the thirteenth of the month Dius.
6| On that same day a woman from Scythopolis named Ennathas became their fellow traveler, she too adorned with the crown, though she had not done what they did but had been seized by force and led before the judge.
7| After the scourging and terrible outrages that one of the tribunes stationed in the neighborhood dared to inflict on her, without even the sanction of higher authority—a man named Maxys, worse than his name, foul in every other respect, of exceedingly violent character, truly terrible in every way and of ill repute among all who knew him—this man took off every garment of the blessed woman, leaving her covered only from the waist down to the feet, while the remainder of her body was naked; and he took great pains to lead her around the whole city of Caesarea and to have her beaten with thongs, dragged through every marketplace.
8| After all this, when she had shown the boldest resistance even before the governor's tribunal itself, the judge handed her over alive to the fire. He also pushed his inhumanity further, carrying his rage against the godly beyond the laws of nature, and was not ashamed to begrudge burial to the lifeless bodies of these holy people.
9| He ordered that the corpses be carefully guarded night and day under the open sky, to be food for wild beasts. For many days one could see no small number of men serving this savage and barbarous design. They kept watch from a lookout, as if it were something worth their zeal, so that the dead might not be stolen, while wild beasts and dogs and the flesh-eating birds tore the human limbs this way and that.
10| The whole city round about was strewn with human entrails and bones, so that nothing had ever seemed more dreadful or more horrifying even to those who had formerly been hostile to us. They lamented not so much the calamity of those to whom this was being done as the outrage against themselves and against the nature common to all.
11| For close by the gates lay a sight greater than any words or any tragic tale can tell: human flesh was being devoured not in one spot but scattered in every place. Indeed some have said that they saw limbs and whole pieces of flesh, and certain parts of entrails, even inside the gates.
12| While these things went on for a great many days, something extraordinary happened. The sky was clear, the air bright, and the weather as calm and fair as it could be. Then, all at once, most of the columns throughout the city that held up the public colonnades began to let fall drops like tears, and the marketplaces and streets, though not a single drop of rain had come from the sky, grew wet as if sprinkled with water from I know not where. So the word spread at once among everyone that the earth had wept in some inexpressible way, unable to bear the impiety of what was being done in those days, and that, to shame the unyielding and unfeeling nature of human beings, stones and lifeless matter had lamented over what had taken place.
13| To those who come after us, I know well, this account may perhaps seem idle talk and a fable, but not to those for whom the occasion itself confirmed its truth.
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