Romanus, valiant champion of Christ the God, move as my patron the organ of a tongueless mouth, bestow a polished song on one who is utterly speechless, grant that I may sing the wonders of your praises! For you yourself know that the dumb can speak. The savage torturer tore out for you the plectrum of your palate and your jaws, nor yet imposed silence on the mouth by which you confessed God. The voice that is witness of truth cannot be extinguished, not even if it throbs with severed passages. So our clinging speech stammers with a feeble tongue and labors with discordant measures; but if you sprinkle the liver with heavenly dew and water the breast with spiritual milk, the hoarse voice will loose its hindered sounds. The Evangelist wrote that the Messiah himself gave such precepts to the apostles:
'Do not, when my sacrament is to be proclaimed, seek words with forethought; I will suggest to the unprepared what they should speak.' I myself am dumb, but my tongue, Christ, mighty in eloquence, will discourse splendidly. He himself will unfold what tumults the demon stirred up with his last breath, while he was being subdued—a pestilence worse in fury at the very end. So a serpent, wounded by the dart's stroke, bites back at the iron and, fiercer with pain, by shaking lingers with its teeth pressed in, but the fixed spear-shaft remains the deeper, nor does it feel the empty perils of its bites. Galerius, as it chanced, was ruling, the leader stationed over the Roman world, as antiquity records, harsh, savage, rough, implacable. He had sent his edicts far and wide into all the world: that whoever preferred to live should deny Christ.
These things that serpent dictates with kingly mouth, who, coming forth from the tombs of the dead, cries out: 'Why before the time, by your swift coming, do you dissolve my realms? Spare me, Son of the Most High, or else bid me possess the hearts of swine.' The prefect Asclepiades, pressing on with these affairs, orders his soldiers to go and snatch from the sacred shrines, all the way, the assembly of the Church, and the people to be consigned to chains, unless it spurn the Nazarene discipline. Soon he himself, planning to break into the temple and eager to scatter the holy of holies, profane, with impious arms made ready to overthrow the altar's mound from its very foundation, and to dissolve into ruin the very doors.
Romanus, a keen hero of surpassing excellence, runs ahead as a herald when these things are suddenly learned, announces that the foes are coming in arms, and, forestalling the timorous spirits with exhortations, that they may stand ready and not yield to the whirlwind. The Christian flock, allied in one spirit, conspires—an undaunted army of mothers, men, little ones, virgins; and the resolve is fixed and settled in all, to defend the faith or gladly to die. The soldier, repulsed, reports to the benches of the magistrates that the Roman leader is a rebel: that all are ablaze with persistent boldness, that they obstinately offer their bared throats, so that the brave may meet a glorious death. Headlong Romanus is then bidden to be seized, and alone, as the instigator and torch of all, to plead the cause on behalf of the defiant people.
He goes, not resisting, and asks to be bound, and of his own accord twists his bent hands behind his back. Love of the crown almost forestalls the executioner's savage art, as he willingly offers his bared ribs to be cut by the two-pronged claws. He bursts in at the lofty threshold, and, while the heralds are struck dumb with amazement, he himself drags the torturer along. To him standing before his face the tyrant thus begins: 'Infamous monster, vile, abominable, you fanner of the city and fickle storm of the mob, you disquiet the unstable, wavering minds, lest the ignorant crowd should submit itself to the laws. By devastating something under the color of glory, the unlettered throng has believed that they shall consecrate themselves through the ages, if they wage wars against the gods like the giants, and, conquered by flames, are buried beneath mountains.
This spectacle of bloody slaughter you have prepared, you lost wretch, for the destruction of the citizens, whom, as profane and guilty of an impious age, it is necessary, with you as their master, to put to death. You are the cause of their death, you the standard-bearer of evils. Unless I am mistaken, it is just that, since as a wicked instigator you compelled many to suffer, as their executioner, it should rebound upon you, and that for so great slaughters as are soon to come, you first should pay the destruction and bear it yourself, what you had urged must be borne.' To these things that man replies with free voice: 'I embrace it, O prefect, nor do I withdraw myself, that for the faithful people I alone may be sacrificed, worthy to undergo all things—if you ask me—whatever your cruelty shall command. It is not permitted to the slaves of idols and demons to enter the holy house of our salvation, lest the pure place of prayer be polluted;
I am confident in the Holy Spirit that it shall never be granted you to set your foot upon that blessed threshold, unless perchance, being made one of us, you should earn to be taken into our flock — which may God the Father bring to pass.' Inflamed by these words, Asclepiades had ordered the body to be disembowelled, to hang stretched far out upon the rack, and to be stretched ever wider with hooks and bonds. But the officers suggest to the raging man that he is noble by ancient lineage and, by his many merits, foremost among the citizens. He orders the deadly stake removed, lest a plebeian punishment condemn so illustrious a man. 'Let his back be beaten,' he says, 'with thick blows, and let his neck, lashed with lead, swell up. Each person is fittingly punished, and it matters greatly whether he be base or noble;
the manner of torment is meted out to the accused according to his rank.' So the martyr, smitten by that hail of blows, after he had sung a hymn amid the leaden strokes, stood upright and began: 'Far be it that the blood of my forebears or the rank of the senate-house should make me noble; it is the high-born sect of Christ that ennobles men. If you would recount, in the text of a genealogy, what is the first origin of our beginnings, we took our descent from the very mouth of God our Father. Whomever each man serves, he is truly noble; the rebel against his Father is found to be degenerate. Then a new honour accrues to one's lineage, and a vast splendour, as when a magistracy is conferred, if the branded wounds of iron and fire seal one a worthy witness in confessing the Name, and a glorious death follow the violence of these pains. Beware that you be not perversely kind, nor spare me with gentle leniency;
press hard upon my limbs, torturer, that I may be noble! If, enlarged by these, I may enjoy such successes, I shall reckon my father's and my mother's stock not worth a straw. These very heights of your dignities — what do you think they are? Do not the rods, the axes, the curule chair, the bordered togas, the lictor, the tribunal, and three hundred insignia (in which you swell up and then straightway deflate) pass swiftly away? When you enter the consulate, as house-born slaves are wont — I am ashamed to confess it — you feed chickens with spelt; the bearer of the ivory eagle takes on arrogance and swells, puffed up by the bone of a beast that has the form of a bird. Now if you lie beneath the altars at the feet of little images, thirsting below the carved oak, what should I judge you to be but more abject? I know that togaed nobles bare their soles before the carriage in the rites of the Idaean Mother.
A little black stone, to be carried in a chariot, enclosed in silver, with the face of a woman, sits enthroned; and while you lead it forth, going before it on foot, your shoes removed and your feet chafing, you come all the way to the brook of Almo. What of that disgraceful procession? Surely it shows us to be base, when you Luperci run about. Whom among the little slaves would I not count the vilest — if, naked and dashing through every street, he should strike at the girls, smitten with a playful lash? I pity your rites and your princes and your morals, O Rome, the supreme head of the age. Come, let us unfold, if you please, your mysteries, prefect: now you must hear, whether you will or no, what filth you worship. Nor does that frenzy frighten me, in which you swell — that with grimacing face, with haughty bearing, with rigid mien you menace the torments of a cruel death;
if you strive to move me by any of these things, contend with me by reason, not by fury! You bid me, leaving the sacred rites of my Father and of Christ, to worship along with you a thousand females and males, gods and goddesses and offspring of both sexes, grandsons, great-grandsons, brought forth — and a whole foul progeny of so many debaucheries. The girls marry, are often beguiled by tricks, are crushed by the frauds of their lovers; incest seethes, the adulteries of paramours grow hot, the husband cheats, the wife hates her rival, chains bind the adulterous gods. Show me, I pray, at which altars you bid the sod smoke with a slaughtered ram? Shall I go to Delphi? But there forbids the corrupted fame of that wrestler-boy whom your god unmanned by the license of the wrestling-school. Soon the foul one wept for the youth he had slain with a heavy discus and consecrated his flowery minion;
the same one, hired, fed another's herd, and then, suffering the theft of his lost flock, that sluggish cowherd even lost his very weapons. Or shall I go to Cybele's pine-grove? But the cock-priest stands in the way, for his lust's sake, safe — through a grievous wound and a shameful gelding — from the embrace of the unchaste goddess: a eunuch to be bewailed amid the Mother's many rites. But perhaps, I suppose, I shall embrace the threshold of great Jove, who, if he were arraigned as a defendant under your laws, entangled in the snares of the menacing Julian law, would, convicted, pay the stern penalty — and, with you as judge, deserving by the Scantinian law to go to prison. What — do you think the founder of the golden age must be worshipped? whom you do not deny was a fugitive and lay hidden by stealth while he dreaded harm; whom, if Jupiter hears that he lives in bliss, he must needs strike down — the accomplices of his concealment.
What — do you think one ought to act amid the altars of warring divinities? Mars's offended valour will be indignant if the Lemnian (Vulcan) is worshipped; whoever should consecrate Hercules with image or shrine will feel Juno's wrath. You say that the poets freely color these tales — but they too are themselves devoted, along with you, to such mysteries, and they worship what they describe. Why do you so gladly read over the sacrilege? Why, in the theaters, with you looking on, is it applauded? The Swan-seducer sins upon the stage; the player dances the bull-horned Thunderer; the chief pontiff, spectator of these things, sits and laughs, and even by his not denying clears nothing away, while the repute of so great a divinity is defiled. Why do you, consecrated priest, dissolve into peals of laughter, when the god feigns himself the husband of Alcmene?
The stage-harlot openly bewails the wounded Adonis with lustful passion; and does the brothel of the holy Cyprian (Venus) not move you? What of the truth that lies plain beneath the very images, shaped in bronze with the traces of crimes? What does that emblem mean, ever fixed to Jove — the bird, his minister? Surely a swift armor-bearing pander, who carried off the catamite to the tyrant. Ceres holds out a torch, her robe ungirt: why, if no one among the gods ravished the maiden, whom the sleepless mother wanders through the night to seek? We behold the Tirynthian (Hercules) twirling spindles: why, if he was not a plaything to Neaera? What — shall I detest the gods that are monsters of rustics, the Fauns, the Priapi, the patrons of the pan-pipes, the swimming nymphs and the watery dwellers, set in the deep after the manner of frogs in a pool — divine right resting in worthless seaweeds?
To worship these things you summon me, good censor? Can you, if you are sound of mind, deem anything of the sort holy? Does not derision shake your lungs as you gaze on these follies, which drunken old women fashion in their dreams? Or if there is anything anywhere of mystic vanity that we ought to worship, do you yourself begin first. Adore them all indiscriminately, whatever sacred thing is on earth — the Latin gods and the Egyptian gods, to whom Rome pours libations, to whom Canopus makes supplication. You pray to Venus — pray also to the ape; the sacred asp of Aesculapius pleases — why then do the crocodile, the ibis, and the dog displease? Set up devout little altars to leeks, worship the bitter onion, the biting garlic. Are the sooty household-gods appeased with incense, while the consecrated little vegetables are spat out?
Or whence is the majesty of the hearths believed to be greater than that born in the hoed gardens, if there is a deity in pots and a deity in leeks as well? But the carved form in bronze is a beautiful thing: what shall I imprecate against the workshops of Greece, which made gods for foolish peoples? The forceps of Myron, the hammer of Polyclitus — these are the nature and origin of your heavenly ones. Art, skillful at sowing errors, while it twines the stiff beard about Jove, while gently shaping his flowing hair files into curls and clusters the locks of Liber, and while it roughens Minerva's breast with serpents, has cast a black terror upon the affrighted, that they shudder at the bronze as at the Thunderer's bolt, that they tremble at the venom of the hissing Gorgon, that they think the youth (Bacchus), after his Indian triumphs, can strike with his thyrsus though he be drunk.
Then, because they see Diana lightly girt, they dread the bow of the hunting virgin; if perchance the molten mass has fashioned the visage of a more grim-faced Hercules with curling locks, his club is believed to threaten unless he be worshipped. Now what terror lurks in the hearts of the fearful, if it should have polishedly expressed Juno's wrath — as though, gazing with eyes twisted askance, she turned her face away from the sacrificing victim, the stone with stern brow counterfeits her menaces. I marvel that you have not also consecrated Mentor himself, and that Phidias himself has no temple and altars — these makers of gods, or rather parents of the divinities; who, had they plied the furnaces more sluggishly, there would be no cast-bronze Jupiter at all.
Are you not ashamed, you fool, given over to the village-cult, always to have wasted such great victuals — which, witless, you offered to such gods as a ladle, a basin, a flagon, frying-pans, broken and melted-down little vessels contributed? Yet I forgive these things in the common simpletons, whom the dyed wool upon a post frightens, whom the lying mountebank often deceives, to whom everything is holy that the dreadful sing-song of the toothless hags has commended as awful. But you — learned and erudite men I marvel at, men whom a weighed rule of life governs, that you do not know by what law things divine or mortal subsist, what great Majesty rules whatever has been created, which made all things.
God eternal, a Reality beyond all reckoning, is not enclosed by thinking nor by seeing; He exceeds every measure of the human mind, nor can He be comprehended by our sight; outside and within He fills and overflows. Timeless, before the first day, He alone holds it to be and ever to have been; He Himself is the true Light, the Author of the true light: when He was Light, He poured forth His own Light, and from that Light the Brightness here begotten is the Son. One is the power of the Father, and one the power of the Son, and one Splendor sown from one Light shone forth in the full deity of brightness; the simple nature of the one God prevails, and whatever exists anywhere, one Power founded:
the heaven and the earth, the force of the sea's flood, the spheres that preside over days and nights, the winds, storms, lightnings, rains, clouds, the seven plough-oxen (the Great Bear), the evening stars, the tides, snows, springs, frosts, and metals and rivers; the cliffs, the plains, the mountain valleys, the wild beasts, the birds, the creeping and the swimming things, the beasts of burden, the cattle, the yoke-bearers, the brute beasts, the flowers, the shrubs, the buds, the herbs, the trees, both those that are for fragrance and those that grow green for food. These God wrought not by labor and craft, but by a command which His power brought forth He bade to be; the things that were not were made; by His Word He created the all-formed engine of the world; the Father's power was always in the Word.
You have come to know Him; now learn the rite and manner of worshipping, of what kind the temple should be, what offerings He has ordained to be dedicated, what vows He requires, what priests He wills, what nectar He commands to be immolated there. He has Himself founded for Himself, within the mind of man, a temple living, serene, sensible, breathing, incapable of being dissolved nor destructible, fair, comely, towering at its summit, overlaid with diverse colors. There the priest stands upon the consecrated threshold, and the maiden Faith guards the foremost doors; her tresses bound with royal fillets, she requires that victims be offered to Christ and to the Father, such as she knows to please Him — white-robed and unblemished:
modesty of brow, innocence of heart, the calm of peace, chastity of body, the fear of God, the rule of knowledge, the sober frugality of fasts, hope that does not lie prostrate, and a hand ever generous. From these victims a pleasant vapor rises, surpassing the fragrance of balsam, of frankincense, of saffron, the moist breezes of Persian spices; lifted from there it is borne up to the very heavens and, prospered, delights the sweet God. Whoever, in enmity, forbids this discipline forbids the approved life and the following of holiness, forbids the vigor of the mind to reach high, and calls the keenness of our fire down to the earth, nor allows the power of prudence to be roused.
O blindness of the heathen, sunk in mire! O fleshly breasts of the nations! O dense error, O benighted race, friendly to the earth, given over to the corpse, ever gazing on things below, never above! Is it not the height of madness and the utmost folly to deem those gods who are begotten by marriages, to seek a spiritual thing in an earthly way, to consecrate the elements of the world upon altars, to believe that to be the Creator which has been created, to make supplication to a hewn log, to sprinkle inscribed stones with the blood of a boar, to entreat altars with morsels of beef — when you know that those whom you consecrate were once men — to lick the carrion urns of the accused dead? Cease, O judge of this world, to bid so great a wickedness upon brave and free men! Nothing is loftier than the love of truth;
to those who assert the name of the eternal God there is nothing for fear; death itself lies subject to them. For a long while Asclepiades, as the martyr discoursed, had been seething within with cunning wrath, fuming with deep gall, while he kept long silent and conceived bile in his hidden breast; at last he vomited out the force of his lurking fury: 'By Jupiter! What is this that I hear from this man? He stands amid the altars and the images of the gods and — what I am forced to confess — in the midst of the forum, with my own self silent, the lost wretch holds forth, defiling with his impious mouth whatever is sacred. O law of our forefathers! O state of the ancient custom! The inventions of the Pompilian kings for the public welfare our age now carps at. What new error has imported these sophists, who argue that the gods are not to be worshipped?
Now this Christian doctrine is born to us, after a thousand consuls have at last rolled by since the City of Rome — not to recount the Nestors. Whatever rises up as new, once was not. Do you wish to know the supreme power of things? Consult Pyrrha! Where then was this supreme god of yours, when, by the gods' favor, the boy of Mars, Romulus, founded the seven-hilled citadel? In that Rome is mighty, founded under good auspices, she owes it to Jupiter the Stayer and to the other gods. This is hallowed from of old, this handed down from our ancestors: that shrines must be appeased by us for the triumphs of the prince, so that the auspicious onset may second his glory, and that, with the foes subdued, the leader may rein the quiet world with laws.
Gird yourself then, whoever you are, you utter villain, duly to pray the gods with us for the welfare of the prince by your life; or, since you must suffer as a public enemy, pay the penalty with your blood: to have scorned the temples is to have spurned the prince.' Then he replied: 'Never, for the welfare and the mightiest and bravest cohorts of the prince, shall I pray otherwise than that they may serve faithfully and, by Christ's baptismal waters, be reborn to the Father, and may receive the very Paraclete from heaven, that they may spurn the murk of idols, that they may discern that Light of eternal hope which flows in not by gross sights nor flashes through bodily windows, but which shines within upon pure minds.
The dull pupil of the flesh perceives the dull, and sees a perishable thing — that which must be dissolved; but the liquid moisture of the soul is fit for seeing liquid things; the fervent nature alone of the most fervent Godhead grasps His coruscating power. This Light, I pray, may your emperor and mine come to know — mine, if he will become mine; for if he resists the Christian name, that emperor of yours shall not be mine; never, believe me, will I serve one who commands wickedness.' 'Do you stand idle, ministers?' the judge cries out, saying, 'Do you stand and hold back your avenging hands?
Do you not rip his entrails with cut furrows, nor probe the soul hidden within, from whence bursts forth this voice profaning the prince?' The most hideous soldiers cleave both sides of the hanging man's flank with a gaping blade; they furrow long wounds, drawn out across his limbs, cutting slanting across the straight, the straight across the transverse; and now, the bones laid bare, his breast gleams white. They pant with their straining, they flow with sweat, though calm is the hero against whom they rage. Amid these things Romanus adds, speaking of his own accord: 'If you seek, O prefect, to know the truth — all this, however we are mangled, gives no pain. The pain is that error has settled in your breast, that you drag these lost peoples along with you to ruin.
They run thronging from every side to the spectacle, the heathen crowd — alas, bodies to be lamented — and they tremble at the raw example of our lot. Hear, all of you! I cry afar and proclaim, I send forth my voice from the scaffold, the higher: Christ, the Splendor of the Father's glory, God, Creator of all things, our partaker likewise, promises everlasting salvation to those who believe — the salvation of the soul, which alone does not perish, but, enduring perpetually, undergoes diverse fates: either it shines with light or is plunged in darkness; following Christ it enters the glory of the Father, sundered from Christ it is made over to Tartarus. The quality of the reward must be cared for — what manner of everlasting substance may one day fall to me; for I count my limbs of little worth, in whatever way they fall, certain to fall by the law of their own nature. Ruin is at hand; let what must be dissolved fall to ruin.
Nor does it matter whether fire and torture-strings rage, or whether a harsh wasting wracks the sickly body, since often a greater savagery arms diseases. The hooks do not gouge the side with such force as the cruel pleurisy strikes with its point; nor does the skin, branded with plates, burn so, as a fever consumes the veins with black gall, or fire creeping over the surface of the skin scorches it and the seething heat raises up blisters: you would think it were being burnt with hissing cauteries. You think me wretched, that I hang stretched with arms twisted back, that my feet are wrenched apart, that the joint sounds with cracking sinews: so, wailing, do their bones cry out as being torn asunder, whom knotty gout and arthritis torment. You all shudder at these hands of the executioners: are the hands of the healers more gentle, when the Hippocratic butchery rages?
The living flesh is cut, and fresh blood stains the scalpels, while the rottenness is scraped away. Suppose the surgeons bring the grim iron to my ribs — yet it cuts to heal; that is not bitter by which health is restored. Those men seem to pluck at the wasting limbs, but they give a remedy to the things alive within. And who does not know how great a corruption belongs to flesh, contaminated and dissoluble? It grows foul, swells, melts, stinks, aches, is inflamed with anger, dissolved by lust, and oftentimes, dyed with gall, draws on livid bruises. Is not hoarded gold acquired for the flesh? The flowing robe, the gem, the silk, the purple are sought in a thousand wiles for the flesh's use; the luxury of gluttony fosters the flesh's fat; the pleasure of the flesh rushes headlong through every wickedness.
Heal, I beg you, executioner, so great evils; cut away, pluck out the tinder of sins; bring it to pass that, the rotting state of the weak flesh being cut away, the mind may survive, free from all pain, nor bear any longer what a tyrant may amputate. Nor be frightened by the crowd of bystanders: this alone I lose, which will perish for all — king, client, poor man and rich. So the flesh of house-slaves, so of senators, wastes away; nay, with the tomb it is laid in. A cheap loss bites, and the damage is light, if we fear to lose that which must be done without. Why does not the will anticipate what is necessary? Why does not nature turn it into a matter of glory? Let us reckon a lawful loss among the rewards. But what may be the form of rewards for the brave, let us see — that, surely, which never seeks itself.
Poured back into heaven, the spirit will fly up, and enjoy to the full the Light of God the Father, while Christ reigns, standing in the royal citadel. Whenever heaven shall be folded up like a book, the orb of the wheeling sun shall fall to earth, ruin shall destroy the monthly sphere (the moon); God alone shall survive, and the just at the same time, together with the everlasting angels, shall remain. Despise the present advantage, O prudent man — that which must come to an end, which must be left behind by you; let go the body, the thing of the tomb and of the funeral; stretch toward the glory to come, press on to God, recognize who you are, conquer the world and the age!' Scarcely had the martyr finished uttering this oration, when the raging Asclepiades broke in: 'Let the executioner turn his stroke against the speaker's mouth, and let him transfer his hand and the sharp furrows and the torture-strings to his jaws.
Let the very source of his wordiness be burst, that loquacity may lose the gushing breaths of speech through punctured bellows, on which no law sets a measure for sounding; and the very words of the speaker I would have tortured.' The impious lictor fulfills the orders of him that commands; he scratches both cheeks with writing claws and cuts the face with bloody marks; the skin shaggy with beard is loosened piecemeal, and the whole visage is rent right down to the chin. The martyr speaks amid the flowing blood: 'Great thanks, O prefect, I owe you, that, opening many mouths, I now speak Christ: a single passage was straitening the heralding of the ample Name, unequal to the praises of God.
The uttered voice has found gaping clefts, and, poured through many openings, gives back sounds from here and there, more numerous, and from every side proclaims the eternal glory of Christ and the Father: behold, as many mouths praise as there are wounds!' The judge, checked by such constancy, orders the punishment to cease; then thus he speaks: 'By the fires of the Sun I swear, who administers our days by alternating circuits, by whose return both light and the year are led on — fires must now be prepared for you, of a grim pyre, which with a fitting end may devour that body, which, persevering, so wickedly resists the ancient rites, nor, vanquished by the darts of pains, grows faint, but becomes stronger under punishments. What stupor has cast this rigidity into his breast? The mind is obstinate, the whole body has grown callous; so great is the frenzy of the new doctrine that reigns:
for this Christ of yours surely was not long ago, whom you yourself confess fastened to a cross.' 'This very cross is the salvation of us all,' Romanus says; 'this is the redemption of man. I know you incapable of the sacrament, impious one; you cannot drink in our mystery with your blind senses: night grasps nothing of the daylight. Yet in the darkness I will bring forth a bright torch; the healthy will see, the bleary-eyed will cover his eyes. Remove the light, the incurable man will say; to one seeing nothing the brightness is an injury. Hear, profane one, what, weighed down, you hate! The eternal King brought forth the eternal King, abiding in Himself and not lesser in time, because time does not hold Him; for He is the wellspring, going back behind the beginnings, both of days and of times — Christ from the Father: the Father is this same thing which the Son is.
Here He offered Himself to be seen by mortals; immortality took on a mortal body, that, while the Eternal bears the perishable, our nature might be able to pass to the things of heaven: man was slain, and God rose again. Death joined battle with God bearing limbs; while it assails our part, it yielded to the immortals. You think this foolish, sophists of the age, but the supreme Father chose the foolish things of the world, that the foolish of the world might be the prudent of God. You recount the antiquity of Romulus and the Martial she-wolf first, and the omen of the vultures. If you spurn new things, nothing is so recent: scarcely does the course of days fill out this little age with a thousand fasti, reckoned from the augur-founder.
I could bring forth six hundred kingdoms founded long ago throughout the whole world, were there leisure — illustrious long before Jupiter, the father of Mars, is said to have sucked the Cretan she-goat. But those are no more, and these too one day shall not be. This cross of Christ, which you call new — when, at the world's birth, man was first made, it was figured in signs and set forth in letters; His coming was foretold through a thousand miracles by the harmonious mouth of the prophets. Kings, prophets, judges, and princes by valor, by wars, by sacred rites, by the pen did not cease to portray the form of the cross; the cross was prefigured, the cross was foreshadowed before; the ancient ages drank in the cross.