Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| The seventh year of our ordeal was drawing to its close, and things around us had quietly settled into a kind of calm that no one disturbed, and so they passed on into the eighth year. At the copper mines in Palestine a sizable crowd of confessors had gathered, and they were acting with such freedom and boldness that they even put up buildings to serve as churches. The governor of the province, a harsh and wicked man, as the things he did against the martyrs have shown him to be, came to the place, learned how the people there were living, and reported it to the emperor, writing down whatever he thought would serve to slander them.
2| Then the officer placed over the mines arrived and, as though acting on an imperial nod, split up the crowd of confessors. Some he assigned to live in Cyprus, others in Lebanon, and others he scattered across various districts of Palestine, and he ordered all of them to be worn down with labor at one task or another.
3| Next he picked out four of them who seemed most to be their leaders and sent them on to the commander of the troops stationed in that region. They were Peleus and Nilus, bishops from Egypt, another man who was a presbyter, and besides these Patermuthius, who was very well known to everyone for his devoted care for all. The commander demanded that they deny their reverence for God, and when he did not get it, he handed them over to be made perfect by fire.
4| Others again happened to have been allotted a separate place there to live in by themselves: those of the confessors who had been released from service in the work because of old age, or mutilation, or some other bodily weakness. Their leader was Silvanus, a bishop who came from Gaza, a man of real piety who bore in himself a genuine pattern of Christianity.
5| This man, one might say, had distinguished himself throughout the whole of that time, beginning with the first day of the persecution itself, in struggles of confession of every kind, and he had been kept until that moment so that he might become the final seal set upon the entire contest in Palestine.
6| With him were also a number of those from Egypt, among them John, who in power of memory surpassed everyone of our time. He had already been deprived of his eyesight before this; nevertheless, for the confessions in which he had distinguished himself, he too, like the others, had a foot destroyed with branding irons, and the same branding fire was applied to his eyes as well, though they no longer saw, because the executioners pushed the cruelty and inhumanity of their methods to the point of utter mercilessness and lack of feeling.
7| Such was the man. Why should anyone marvel at his character and his philosophic way of life, when these did not show him to be as extraordinary as did his power of memory? He had whole books of the divine Scriptures written down, not on tablets of stone, as the divine apostle says, nor even on the skins of animals or on papyrus, things that moths and time destroy, but truly on fleshly tablets of the heart, in a clear soul and in the purest eye of the mind, so that he could bring out by mouth whenever he wished, as if from some treasury of words, now a passage of the Law or the Prophets, now one of the histories, and at other times a passage of the Gospels or the apostolic writings.
8| I admit that I myself was astonished the first time I saw the man standing in the middle of a large congregation of the church and going through some parts of divine Scripture. So long as I could merely hear his voice, I supposed that someone was reading, as is the custom in our assemblies; but when I came close and saw what was happening, everyone else standing round in a circle with sound eyes, and this man employing solely the eyes of his mind and speaking out plainly like some prophet, far surpassing those who were strong in body, I could not glorify God and marvel enough. I seemed to see clear and firm proof in the facts themselves that the true human being is not the one recognized in the visible body, but the one in soul and mind; for even with his body mutilated, he displayed a virtue greater than his own strength.
9| But as for those I have mentioned, who were living in the place set apart for them and carrying out their usual practices of fasting, prayer, and the other disciplines, God himself judged them worthy to attain the perfection that brings salvation, extending to them his right hand to hear them. Their enemy and adversary, on the other hand, could no longer bear them as they armed themselves against him at their leisure through their prayers to God, and he resolved to kill them and remove them from the earth as a nuisance.
10| God permitted him to carry this out too when he attempted it, so that he would not be held back from the wickedness he had chosen, and so that they at last might receive the prizes of their many and varied contests. So in this way thirty-nine of them, by order of the utterly abominable Maximin, were beheaded on a single day.
11| Such, then, were the martyrdoms completed in Palestine over eight full years; such, in our time, was the persecution. It started with the demolition of the churches and swelled to great proportions as the rulers rose up against us time after time. In the course of it, the many and varied contests of those who fought for godliness produced a countless multitude of martyrs in every province, throughout the regions stretching from Libya and all Egypt, from Syria and the lands of the East, and round about as far as the region of Illyricum.
12| For the lands beyond those I have named, all Italy and Sicily, Gaul, and the countries toward the setting sun, reaching Spain, Mauretania and Africa, endured the war for only the first two years of the persecution, and were very quickly granted God's visitation and peace; for heavenly providence was sparing the simplicity and faith of those people.
13| Something never recorded in all the earlier history of the Roman Empire has now happened for the first time in our day, beyond all expectation: in the persecution of our time the empire was divided in two, and the brothers who lived in the one part, which I have just described, enjoyed peace, while those throughout the rest of the world endured countless thousands of contests.
14| But when divine grace at last showed us too its kindly and merciful visitation, then indeed our own rulers, the very men through whom the wars against us had long been waged, changed their minds in the most astonishing way and sang a recantation, quenching the fire kindled against us with kindly proclamations and gentle edicts concerning us. This recantation, then, must also be set down in writing.
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