2.
And to John a revelation is made in like manner: 1 "And there was given unto him," he says, "a mouth speaking great things, and blasphemy; and power was given unto him, and forty and two months." 2 And one finds both things to wonder at in Valerian's case; and most especially has one to consider how different it was with him before these events, 3 --how mild and well-disposed he was towards the men of God. For among the emperors who preceded him, there was not one who exhibited so kindly and favourable a disposition toward them as he did; yea, even those who were said to have become Christians openly 4 did not receive them with that extreme friendliness and graciousness with which he received them at the beginning of his reign; and his whole house was filled then with the pious, and it was itself a very church of God. But the master and president 5 of the Magi of Egypt 6 prevailed on him to abandon that course, urging him to slay and persecute those pure and holy men as adversaries and obstacles to their accursed and abominable incantations. For there are, indeed, and there were men who, by their simple presence, and by merely showing themselves, and by simply breathing and uttering some words, have been able to dissipate the artifices of wicked demons. But he put it into his mind to practise the impure rites of initiation, and detestable juggleries, and execrable sacrifices, and to slay miserable children, and to make oblations of the offspring of unhappy fathers, and to divide the bowels of the newly-born, and to mutilate and cut up the creatures made by God, as if by such means they 7 would attain to blessedness.
Eusebius prefaces this extract thus: "Gallus had not held the government two full years when he was removed, and Valerian, together with his son Gallienus, succeeded him. And what Dionysius has said of him may be learned from his Epistle to Hermammon, in which he makes the following statement." ↩
exousia kai menes tessarakontaduo. Rev. xiii. 5. Baronius expounds the numbers as referring to the period during which the persecution under Valerian continued: see him, under the year 257 a.d., ch. 7. [See Introductory Note, p. 78, supra. Here is a quotation from the Apocalypse to be noted in view of our author's questionings, part i., i. 5, p. 83, supra.] ↩
The text is, kai touton malista ta pro autou hos houtos esche sunnoein; heos epios, etc. Gallandi emends the sentence thus: kai autou ta malista pro touton, hos ouch houtos esche, sunnoein, eos epios, etc. Codex Regius gives hos men epios. But Codices Maz. and Med. give heos epios, while Fuk. and Savil. give eos gar epios. ↩
He means the Emperor Philip who, as many of the ancients have recorded, was the first of the Roman emperors to profess the Christian religion. But as Dionysius speaks in the plural number, to Philip may be added Alexander Severus, who had an image of Christ in the chapel of his Lares, as Lampridius testifies, and who favoured and sustained the Christians during the whole period of his empire. It is to be noted further, that Dionysius says of these emperors only that they were said and thought to be Christians, not that they were so in reality.--Gallandi ↩
archisunagogos. ↩
Baronius thinks that this was that Magus who, a little while before the empire of Decius, had incited the Alexandrians to persecute the Christians, and of whom Dionysius speaks in his Epistle to Fabius. What follows here, however, shows that Macrianus is probably the person alluded to. ↩
eudaimonesontas. So Codices Maz., Med., Fuk. and Savil. read: others give eudaimonesantas. It would seem to require eudaimonesonta, "as if he would attain;" for the reference is evidently to Valerian himself. ↩
