Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| No people would ever have been, or could ever be, more blessed than that one, had they not of their own will cut their souls off from the Holy Spirit. And what could anyone say that would do justice to Moses? He brought an unruly people into order and furnished their souls with persuasion and a sense of shame; in place of captivity he won them freedom, and in place of gloom he made them cheerful. He raised their spirits so far that, through the very extremity of the change to the opposite condition and through their good fortune in their successes, the men's temper grew too arrogant. He surpassed in wisdom those who came before him so far that even the men whom the nations praise as sages and philosophers became emulators of his wisdom.
2| Pythagoras, for one, imitated his wisdom and became so famous for self-control that he made his own temperance a model even for Plato, the most temperate of men. And Daniel, who foretold what was to come, who practiced the loftiest greatness of soul and stood out for the beauty of his character and of his whole life: how great, and how harsh, was the trouble he overcame at the hands of the tyrant who then ruled Assyria?
3| That tyrant's name was Nebuchadnezzar. His whole line was wiped out, and that proud and enormous power passed to the Persians. The tyrant's wealth was famous then and is famous still, as was his ill-judged zeal for a worship that ought not to have been practiced, his lavish use of metals of every kind for fashioning his gods, his temples raised as high as heaven, and the laws he framed for that worship, terrifying and bent on cruelty. Daniel despised all of this because of his unstained reverence for the God who truly is, and he foretold that the tyrant's ill-judged zeal would be the cause of some great disaster. But he could not persuade the tyrant, for boundless wealth stands in the way of right thinking. In the end the ruler laid bare the savagery of his mind and ordered the righteous man to be torn apart by wild beasts.
4| Noble, too, was the steadfast agreement of the brothers in bearing witness. Those who later emulated them won surpassing glory for their faith in the Savior, for they were not consumed by fire, by the furnace, or by the horrors appointed to devour them, and with the pure touch of their bodies they drove back the fire shut up in the furnace. After the overthrow of the Assyrian kingdom, which was destroyed by strokes of thunderbolts, Daniel passed by divine providence to Cambyses, king of the Persians. There too he met envy, and besides envy the deadly plots of the magi and a succession of dangers, both great and many. He was saved from them all with ease, since the providence of Christ worked with him, and he shone out through the proof he gave of every kind of virtue.
5| For the magi, since the man prayed three times a day and accomplished great and extraordinary feats of virtue in deeds worth remembering, slandered out of envy the very success of his prayers. Accusing that great power of his of being extremely dangerous, they persuaded the ruler that Daniel, who had publicly brought the Persians so many blessings, should be condemned to be a feast for savage lions. So Daniel was condemned and shut up, not for his destruction but for his everlasting renown. Put to the test in the midst of the beasts, he found the beasts gentler and tamer than those who had shut him up; for prayer, joined with the virtue of decency and self-control, made all of them tame, raging as they were by nature.
6| When this became known to Cambyses (for it was impossible for the achievements of so great and so divine a power to stay in shadow), he was utterly astounded at the wonder of what was reported, and he regretted having been so easily persuaded by the slanders of the magi. Still, he ventured to become a witness of that sight himself, and he saw the man with both hands raised, singing hymns to Christ, while the lions lay crouched beneath him as if bowing down at his footprints. At once he condemned the magi who had talked him into it to the same punishment and locked them in the lions' den; and the beasts that a little earlier had fawned on Daniel went for the magi and mangled every one of them, as their nature is.
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