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| To Hierax, a Bishop in Egypt. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Epistle
XIII.—To Hierax, a Bishop in Egypt.917
917
Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., vii. 21. The preface to
this extract in Eusebius is as follows: “After this he
(Dionysius) wrote also another Paschal epistle to Hierax, a bishop in
Egypt, in which he makes the following statement about the sedition
then prevailing at Alexandria.” |
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1. But what wonder should there be if I find
it difficult to communicate by letter with those who are settled in
remote districts, when it seems beyond my power even to reason with
myself, and to take counsel with918 my own soul? For surely epistolary
communications are very requisite for me with those who are, as it
were, my own bowels, my closest associates, and my brethren—one
in soul with myself, and members, too, of the same Church. And
yet no way opens up by which I can transmit such addresses.
Easier, indeed, would it be for one, I do not say merely to pass beyond
the limits of the province, but to cross from east to west, than to
travel from this same Alexandria to Alexandria. For the most
central pathway in this city919
919
μεσαιτάτη
τῆς πόλεως.
Codex Regius gives τῶν
πόλεων. The sedition
referred to as thus dividing Alexandria is probably that which broke
out when Æmilianus seized the sovereignty in Alexandria. See
Pollio’s Thirty Tyrants. | is
vaster920
920
ἄπειρος. But Codices
Fuk. and Savil. give ἄπορος,
“impracticable.” | and more impassable
even than that extensive and untrodden desert which Israel only
traversed in two generations; and our smooth and waveless harbours have
become an image of that sea through which the people drove, at the time
when it divided itself and stood up like walls on either side, and in
whose thoroughfare the Egyptians were drowned. For often they
have appeared like the Red Sea, in consequence of the slaughter
perpetrated in them. The river, too, which flows by the city, has
sometimes appeared drier than the waterless desert, and more parched
than that wilderness in which Israel was so overcome with thirst on
their journey, that they kept crying out against Moses, and the water
was made to stream for them from the precipitous921
921
ἀκροτόμου.
It may perhaps mean “smitten” here. | rock by the power of Him who alone doeth
wondrous things. And sometimes, again, it has risen in such
flood-tide, that it has overflowed all the country round about, and the
roads, and the fields, as if it threatened to bring upon us once more
that deluge of waters which occurred in the days of Noah.
2. But now it always flows onward, polluted
with blood and slaughters and the drowning struggles of men, just as it
did of old, when on Pharaoh’s account it was changed by Moses
into blood, and made putrid. And what other liquid could cleanse
water, which itself cleanses all things? How could that ocean, so
vast and impassable for men, though poured out on it, ever purge this
bitter sea? Or how could even that great river which streams
forth from Eden,922 though it were
to discharge the four hearts into which it is divided into the one
channel of the Gihon,923
923 Written
Γηών in Codex Alexandrinus, but Γεών in Codex Vaticanus. |
wash away these pollutions? Or when will this air, befouled as it
is by noxious exhalations which rise in every direction, become pure
again? For there are such vapours sent forth from the earth, and
such blasts from the sea, and breezes from the rivers, and reeking
mists from the harbours, that for dew we might suppose ourselves to
have the impure fluids924 of
the corpses which are rotting in all the underlying elements. And
yet, after all this, men are amazed, and are at a loss to understand
whence come these
constant pestilences, whence these terrible diseases, whence these many
kinds of fatal inflictions, whence all that large and multiform
destruction of human life, and what reason there is why this mighty
city no longer contains within it as great a number of inhabitants,
taking all parties into account, from tender children up to those far
advanced in old age, as once it maintained of those alone whom it
called hale old men.925 But those from forty years of age up
to seventy were so much more numerous then, that their number cannot be
made up now even when those from fourteen to eighty years of age have
been added to the roll and register of persons who are recipients of
the public allowances of grain. And those who are youngest in
appearance have now become, as it were, equals in age with those who of
old were the most aged. And yet, although they thus see the human
race constantly diminishing and wasting away upon the earth, they have
no trepidation in the midst of this increasing and advancing
consumption and annihilation of their own number.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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