Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| As for everything else that happened in the meantime: how certain of those who presided over the churches, having presided unlawfully over the rational sheep of Christ, were appointed by divine justice, which condemned them as though they deserved nothing better, to be keepers, instead of shepherds, of camels, an irrational animal and, in the very build of its body, the most crooked of creatures; how it sentenced them to be put in charge of the emperor's horses; what insults, disgraces and tortures these same men endured at the hands of the emperor's procurators and the governors of the day over the church's sacred vessels and treasures; and besides all this, the ambition of many for office, the reckless and unlawful ordinations, the schisms among the confessors themselves, and all that the young agitators eagerly contrived against the remnants of the church, piling novelty upon novelty, adding without restraint to the miseries of the persecution, and constructing evil upon evil as a siege-wall against it: all this I think I shall pass over, judging that it does not become me, since I decline and avoid, as I said at the outset, any account of such things. Rather, whatever things are honorable and of good report, in the words of the sacred text, and if there is any virtue and any praise, these I hold it most fitting to tell and to write and to set before faithful ears in the history of the wonderful martyrs. And with the peace that after this shone upon us from heaven I think I shall adorn the close of my whole account.
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