AGAINST EUTROPIUS
BOOK I
(XVIII.)
Let the world cease to wonder at the births of creatures half human, half bestial, at monstrous babes that affright their own mothers, at the howling of wolves heard by night in the cities, at beasts that speak to their astonied herds, at stones falling like rain, at the blood-red threatening storm clouds, at wells of water changed to gore, at moons that clash in mid heaven and at twin suns. All portents pale before our eunuch consul. O shame to heaven and earth! Our cities behold an old woman decked in a consul’s robe who gives a woman’s name to the year.[84] Open the pages of the Cumaean Sibyl, ye pontifs; let wise Etrurian seers consult the lightning’s flash, and the soothsayer search out the awful portent hidden in the entrails. What new dread warning is this the gods give? Does Nile desert his bed and leaving Roman soil seek to mix his waters with those of the Red Sea? Does cleft Niphates[85] once more let through a host of eastern barbarians to ravage our lands? Does a pestilence threaten us? Or shall no harvest repay the farmer? What victim can expiate divine anger such as this? What offering appease the cruel altars? The consul’s
[84] For the consulship of Eutropius see Introduction, p. xv.
[85] A mountain in Armenia.
consule lustrandi fasces ipsoque litandum
prodigio; quodcumque parant hoc omine fata,
Eutropius cervice luat sic omnia nobis.[86]