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Life of Constantine
Eusebius of Caesarea, NPNF II.1
Book 2, 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.1 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.2
Notes
- 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 Graeco-Roman conception of Hades.