While he was staying in Antioch, a dreadful earthquake occurred. Many cities were damaged, but Antioch was most of all unfortunate. Since Trajan was wintering there and many soldiers and many private persons had flocked thither from all directions for lawsuits, embassies, business, or sightseeing, there was no nation nor people that went unscathed. Thus in Antioch the whole world under Roman sway suffered disaster.
There were many thunderstorms to start with and portentous winds, but no one could have expected that so many evils would result from them. First came, on a sudden, a great bellowing roar, and there followed it a tremendous shock. The whole earth was up-heaved and buildings leaped into the air. Those that were lifted up collapsed and were smashed to pieces,
A.D. 115 (a.u. 868)
while others were beaten this way and that as if by the surges and were turned about. The wrecks were strewn a long distance over the countryside. The crash of grinding and breaking timbers, tiles, and stones together became most frightful, and an inconceivable mass of dust arose, so that no one could see any person nor say or hear anything. Many persons were hurt even outside the houses, being picked up and tossed violently about, and then with a momentum as in a fall from a cliff dashed to the earth. Some were maimed, others killed. Not a few trees leaped into the air, roots and all.
The number of those found in the houses who perished was beyond discovery. Multitudes were destroyed by the very force of the collapse and crowds were suffocated in the debris. Those who lay with a part of their bodies buried under the stones or timbers suffered fearful agony, being able neither to live nor to find an immediate death.
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Nevertheless many even of these were saved, as was natural in such overwhelming numbers of people. And those outside did not all get off safe and sound. Numbers lost their legs or their shoulders and some [Lacuna] their [Lacuna] heads. Others vomited blood. One of these was Pedo the consul, and he died at once. In brief, there was no form of violent experience that those people did not undergo at that time. And as Heaven continued the earthquake for several days and nights, the people were dismayed and helpless, some crushed and perishing under the weight of the buildings pressing upon them, and others dying of hunger in case it chanced that by the inclination of the timbers they were left alive in a clear space, it might be in a kind of arch-shaped colonnade. When at last the trouble had subsided, some one who ventured to mount the ruins caught sight of a live woman. She was not alone but had also an infant, and had endured by feeding both herself and her child with her milk. They dug her out and resuscitated her together with her offspring, and after that they searched the other heaps but were no longer able to find in them any living creature save a child sucking at the breasts of its mother, who was dead. As they drew out the corpses they no longer felt any pleasure at their own escape.
So great were the disasters that had overwhelmed Antioch at this time. Trajan made his way out through a window of the room where he was. Some being of more than human stature had approached him and led him forth, so that he survived with only a few small bruises. As the shocks extended over a number of days, he lived out of doors in the hippodrome. Casium itself, too, was so shaken that its peaks seemed to bend and break and to be falling upon the city. Other hills settled, and quantities of water not previously in existence came to light, while quantities more escaped by flowing away.
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