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Chapter XXVII.—How the Persecution became the Occasion of Calamities to the Aggressors.

“From the causes I have described, grievous wars arose, and destructive devastations. Hence followed a scarcity of the common necessaries of life, and a crowd of consequent miseries: hence, too, the authors of these impieties have either met a disastrous death of extreme suffering, or have dragged out an ignominious existence, and confessed it to be worse than death itself, thus receiving as it were a measure of punishment proportioned to the heinousness of their crimes. 3183 For each experienced a degree of calamity according to the blind fury with which he had been led to combat, and as he thought, defeat the Divine will: so that they not only felt the pressure of the ills of this present life, but were tormented also by a most lively apprehension of punishment in the future world. 3184

Footnotes

Compare Lactantius, On the deaths of the persecutors (De M. P.), and the Church History of Eusebius.

Literally “beneath the earth,” referring of course to the Græco-Roman conception of Hades.