ed out to suffer a miserable
death.

II.

Sec. 1. During all this time, Palladius, the original cause of these
miseries, whom we have already spoken of as having been arrested by
Fortunatianus, being, from the lowness of his original condition, a man
ready to fall into every kind of wickedness, by heaping one murder on
another diffused mourning and lamentation over the whole empire.

2. For being allowed to name any persons he chose, without distinction
of rank, as men contaminated by the practice of forbidden arts, like a
huntsman who has learnt to mark the secret tracks of wild beasts, he
enclosed many victims within his wretched toils, some as being polluted
with a knowledge of poisonings, others as accomplices of those who were
guilty of treason.

3. And that wives too might not have leisure to weep over the miseries
of their husbands, officers were sent at once to seal up the house of
any one who was condemned, and who, while examining all the furniture,
slipped in among it old women's incantations, or ridiculous love-tokens,
contrived to bring destruction on the innocent; and then, when these
things were mentioned before the bench, where neither law, nor religion,
nor equity were present to separate truth from falsehood, those whom
they thus accused, though utterly void of offence, without any
distinction, youths, and decrepit old men, without being heard in their
defence, found their property confiscated, and were hurried off to
execution in litters.

4. One of the consequences in the eastern provinces was, that from fear
of similar treatment, people burnt all their libraries; so great was the
terror which seized upon all ranks. For, to cut my story short, at that
time all of us crawled about as if in Cimmerian darkness, in the same
kind of dread as the guest of Dionysius of Sicily; who, while feasting
at a banquet more irksome than famine itself, saw a sword suspended over
his head by a single horsehair.

5. There was a man named Bassianus, of most noble family, a secretary,
and eminently distinguished for his military services, who, on a charge
of having entertained ambitious projects, and of having sought oracles
concerning their issue, though he declared he had only consulted the
oracles to know the sex of his next child, was saved indeed from death
by the great interest made for him by his relations who protected him;
but he was stripped of all his splendid inheritance.

6. Amid all this destructi