Resultados25 letters/passages
jerome · c. 396 · score 0.02
When they came, they spared neither religion, nor rank, nor age; they had no pity even for wailing infants. Children were forced to die before they could be said to have begun living, and little ones, oblivious to their fate, could be seen smiling in the hands of their killers. It was generally believed the invaders we …
salvian_marseille · c. 450 · score 0.02
To the most holy Lord Salonius, bishop of Geneva, from Salvian, greetings. The question you raise about the relationship between divine providence and human freedom in the context of the barbarian catastrophe is one I have been wrestling with in the work I am currently writing, and I want to share my current thinking. …
synesius_cyrene · c. 412 · score 0.02
To Theophilus. You care for Pentapolis — you truly do. You will therefore read the official correspondence. But beyond what those letters contain, the messenger will tell you that the disasters that have already occurred are greater and more numerous than those the letters threaten. He was sent to request military rein …
chrysostom · c. 380 · score 0.02
For that which has never taken place has now come to pass, the barbarians leaving their own country have overrun an infinite space of our territory, and that many times over, and having set fire to the land, and captured the towns they are not minded to return home again, but after the manner of men who are keeping hol …
ambrose_milan · c. 388 · score 0.02
I replied that I had never deceived anyone: the fact that I had not cooperated with his plans was exactly the point. I had been sent by a legitimate emperor, and I had acted in that emperor's interest. Then he tried a different tactic. He claimed that Bauto, the Frankish general, had invited barbarians into the empire. …
gregory_great · c. 600 · score 0.02
Gregory to Maximus, Bishop of Salona. When our mutual friend the priest Veteranus arrived in Rome, he found me so weakened by gout that I could not personally answer your Fraternity's letters. Regarding the Slavic nation [the Slavs, who were pressing into the Balkans and threatening the Dalmatian coast], from which you …
chrysostom · c. 405 · score 0.01
Moreover she besought me to take refuge in her house, which had a fortress and was impregnable, that I might escape the hands of the bishop and monks. This however I could not be induced to do, but remained in the villa, knowing nothing of the plans which were devised after these things. For even then they were not con …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
But if verses devoid of ease and happiness cannot win approval, you too will find nothing pleasing on the page I append below. [The poem that follows describes the barbarian peoples gathered at the court of Euric in Bordeaux:] Why do you try to rouse the Muses now, Lampridius, glory of our poetry, and force me to compo …
chrysostom · c. 405 · score 0.01
And when day dawned all the city was migrating outside the walls under trees and groves, celebrating the festival, like scattered sheep. 4. All which happened afterwards I leave you to imagine; for as I said before it is not possible to describe each separate incident. The worst of it is that these evils, great and ser …
jerome · c. 413 · score 0.01
Like him too he had with him a Cerberus, not three headed but many headed, ready to seize and rend everything within his reach. He tore betrothed daughters from their mothers' arms and sold high-born maidens in marriage to those greediest of men, the merchants of Syria. No plea of poverty induced him to spare either wa …
athanasius_alexandria · c. 339 · score 0.01
Upon this license of iniquity and disorder, their deeds were worse than in time of war, and more cruel than those of robbers. Some of them were plundering whatever fell in their way; others dividing among themselves the sums which some had laid up there ; the wine, of which there was a large quantity, they either drank …
jerome · c. 396 · score 0.01
How was it that the soothsayer Balaam, in prophesying the mysteries of Christ [Numbers 24:15-19], spoke more plainly of Him than almost any other prophet? I answered as best I could. Then, unrolling the scroll further, she reached the list of all the halting-places by which the people traveled from Egypt to the waters …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
To the Lord Bishop Graecus [Bishop of Marseille]. Here once again our Amantius — that gossipmonger of ours — returns to his Marseille, doubtless planning to bring home some profit from the city's markets, if only a favorable cargo-ship should arrive. Through him I would chatter at length in a lighter vein, if my heart …
epistulae_wisigothicae · c. 633 · score 0.01
An epistola from the Fourth Council of Toledo [633] addressed to the Visigothic clergy, communicating the council's... [This letter from the Epistulae Wisigothicae (Letter 24) represents official correspondence of the Visigothic clergy in Spain. The full Latin text requires further translation.]
basil_caesarea · c. 371 · score 0.01
No respect is shown to gray hair, to a lifetime of practical godliness, to a life lived according to the Gospel from youth to old age. No criminal is condemned without evidence, but bishops are being convicted on slander alone. Some have been banished without even the pretense of a trial. Others have been carried off t …
athanasius_alexandria · c. 339 · score 0.01
The church and the holy Baptistery were set on fire, and straightway groans, shrieks, and lamentations, were heard through the city; while the citizens in their indignation at these enormities, cried shame upon the governor, and protested against the violence used to them. For holy and undefiled virgins were being stri …
jerome · c. 390 · score 0.01
Count the disasters of our generation: Adrianople, where an emperor and his army were swallowed by the earth [the Battle of Adrianople in 378 AD, where Emperor Valens was killed by the Visigoths]. The walls of Rome themselves are no longer a guarantee of safety. What the world outside those walls looks like, I do not n …
theodoret_cyrrhus · c. 440 · score 0.01
To Eustathius, Bishop of Aegae, The story of the noble Mary belongs in a tragedy. As she herself says, and as several others confirm, she is a daughter of the distinguished Eudaemon. In the catastrophe that has overtaken Libya [likely the Vandal conquest of North Africa], she has fallen from her father's free estate in …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
Sidonius to his dear Namatius, greetings. 1. The dictator Julius Caesar, who they say administered military affairs with greater generalship than any other, was claimed in turn by the rival pursuits of writing and reading. And though in the person of this one man the military and oratorical sciences competed for primac …
chrysostom · c. 405 · score 0.01
And women from the oratories who had stripped themselves for baptism just at that time, fled unclothed, from terror at this grievous assault, not being permitted to put on the modest apparel which befits women; indeed many received wounds before they were expelled, and the baptismal pools were filled with blood, and th …
sidonius_apollinaris · c. 467 · score 0.01
This is the character that favorable report has brought us. Send word quickly if the reports match reality, so that those on perpetual guard duty — whom neither snowy days nor moonless, stormy nights persuade to sound the retreat from the walls — may catch their breath. For even when the barbarian withdraws to winter q …
libanius · c. 374 · score 0.01
To Anatolius. (361 AD) What outrages have been committed — not on the Danube near the Scythians, nor at the ends of Libya, but in Phoenicia, the most civilized region of all, where laws exist, governors are in charge, and an emperor lives under arms to keep all violence at bay. A certain Lucianus, a man holding some mi …
cassiodorus · c. 522 · score 0.01
It is an act of mercy to bind a foreign people to the state through public benefits — and to extend to newcomers, not just to blood relations, the advantages of settled life. For these people, inheritance exists without blood kin, succession without family ties; the sole proof of kinship is to speak one's ancestral lan …
columbanus · c. 613 · score 0.01
You are awaited by the whole, you have the power of ordering all things, of declaring war, arousing the generals, bidding arms to be taken up, forming the battle-array, sounding the trumpets on every side, and finally of entering the conflict with your own person in the van; since for long, alas, as is obvious in this …
chrysostom · c. 405 · score 0.01
The tribune, having heard this, took the soldiers which he had and went out. For they were afraid lest the enemy should make an assault also upon the city, and all were in terror, and in an agony of alarm the very soil of their country being in jeopardy, so that even the old men undertook the defense of the walls. Whil …