Poems ascribed to Cyprian (Sodom, Jonah, To a Senator, On Easter, To Flavius Felix) 2.1–5.53

Already God almighty had blotted out the crimes of the primeval age with the avenging flood, with all the waters that the sky scatters, the earth vomits up, the sea spits out; and, having covenanted from then on not to decree punishments by a liquid destruction, whenever the air should gather a storm, he had appointed the varied bow for restraining the rains, marking the clouds with a hem of purple and green, under the name of Iris, which is the clasp proper to the clouds. But the impiety of men, springing up again together with the second race, and a new age of evil sprouts once more, allotted now for punishment not rains but fires: so the land of Sodom deserved to be burned by blazing dews and to foreshow the signs of the end to come. There savage luxury, the enemy of modesty, was as good as law; a forewarned guest would flee it, preferring at the Scythian altars or at the altars of Busiris to seek death through sacrifice, and with the boxing glove to yield his blood to the Bebrycian, or to glut the Libyan wrestling grounds, preferring even, through Circe's cups, to take on new shapes, rather than lose his violated sex in Sodom. Unions (monstrosities!) beat upon heaven with ill will; with like incest, nature rebelled against its own kind, against itself, and the name of man was violated along with his body.

But at a fixed time God, who had foreseen all things, judges the unjust in patience, when the age of crime had frustrated the space given for ceasing and had compelled his anger. And now the avenging day was at hand: two sent from the host, youths in angelic form, both of them spirits, on divine service, as the Lord's commands enjoined, come up to Sodom. There, of the stock of the pious, Lot, a newcomer, wise in equity and a dweller in justice, was the one man to remember God: so a fruitful tree is wont to lie hidden in wild woods, its fruit a guest there. He then, sitting before the gate (the heaven-dwellers were scarcely reaching the walls), though unaware that they were divine, of his own accord calls to them, addresses them, honors them with a father's reverence, and invites them to lodge, though they meant to put up far off; prevailing by long entreaties, he discharges with friendly zeal the holy pledges of the table and the honest duty of a host. Night had given rest, the next light had dissolved the night, and Sodom clamors at the doors with its shameful law. Lot, facing them, a suppliant: “Let not ill-fed lust inflame you young men to defile this youth: to what end a lust in which begetting is void? to what end seed in vain? To such no living creatures are wed: not those that haunt the lairs, not those that come back to the stalls, not those that gape beneath the waves, nor those that hang near the clouds with the measured beat of wings, nor those that flow over the earth with their bodies stretched out.

Every kind has brought forth by its striving; the female is the mate of all, and never is anyone's mother other than a female. Now if youthful passion is eager to lay waste to modesty, I have two daughters inside, of marriageable age, their virginity swelling in flower, already due for the harvest, a desire worthy of men; take them wherever your will may lead: I, their father, give them up, and for my guests I will bear the grief.” At this the crazed crowd: “Who are you, how great, and from where, to lord it over our minds and lay down laws? A newcomer, not a ruler, you weigh out the acres of Sodom. Now therefore you yourself shall pay for what our desire is, in place of daughters and guests: one is enough for all.” Said and done at once: no delay in the raging mob. As a torrent rolls on in a wintry onrush and carries countless streams of brooks in one course: if any tree there is struck by the rushing waters, not to stand for long, so far as its root will allow its hairy fibers to hold out in delay, when, the ground eaten away beneath, it loses its soil and hangs with its trunk now dug around, this way and that, unsteady, it puts off its certain fall: just so Lot in the midst of the mob's whirl was tottering, almost overcome now; but divine power came to help: the angelic youths snatch him from the threshold and bring him back inside; and the crazed crowd, right there, as a first omen of punishment, they strike with loss of sight.

Then they unlock God's decrees: a fitting punishment would come from heaven upon Sodom; he himself had deserved salvation by right of justice: “Why then do you not gird yourself to hasten your flight from here, and bring out with you any of your family you have? We are now bringing destruction on the city.” Lot quickly speaks to his sons-in-law, but the hard mind of men scorned to believe the warning and laughed at his fear. Soon, at the time when light already tries to cleave the darkness and the face of the sky is two-colored, of night and of day, the youths pressed to lead the Chaldean family out of Sodom and to grant the just household salvation: “Come now, Lot, rise up, take your wife and your two daughters, and go from here an exile, getting ahead of Sodom's punishment.” And with friendly hands they lead out the trembling ones and there give them the rest of their orders: “Save your life, Lot, and do not choose to turn your gaze backward, or halt the step you have begun: to the mountain; hurry.” Lot feared to clamber up the heights with his slow step, lest heaven's anger overtake them first: he sets about asking for another haven, a small city that he had seen over against them. “Let our flight be here,” he says, “it surely scarcely stands out by its walls, not far, and not great for me.” They favored the frightened man and granted salvation to the city itself as well: hence the barbarian tongue knew the place by the name Segor.

Then Lot enters Segor, and at once the sun rises, the last indeed for Sodom, already glowing with fires; in anger it had armed its rays with all its flame. A rival gloom creeps in beneath, attempting to shut in the light and to weave masses into the confused sky. Smoking clouds gather, a new rain rushes down, sulphur with flames; chaos blazes, the upper air seethes, the scorched air crackles with liquid burnings. From this the fable has its false report drawn from the truth, that the Sun's offspring desired his father's chariot and that the gentle boy could not rein the proud horses of the Sun, that the world burned; that then the charioteer was snatched away by lightning, and his sisters changed their forbidden lament. Let the Eridanus see to it, if any poplar grows white there, if any more tuneful bird grows its plumes there in old age. Here the marvels of another changed form mourn. For his companion and wife, alas, ill then too with the law, a woman, hearing the divine rumblings of heaven, in vain turned her bold eyes behind, never to speak of what she had seen; and at once there, changed into fragile salt, she stood, herself her own tomb and herself her own image, keeping her shape without a body: for she endures still, in her bare station under the open sky, neither dissolved by rains through decay nor torn down by winds;

indeed, if any stranger mutilates her form, at once, welling up from herself, she fills up the wounds. It is even said that, living now in another body, her sex still discharges its customary months with bountiful blood. And now nowhere are the cities of Sodom, nowhere the impious people; the whole region is a pyre: here with the black horror of ash, there with the hoary rust of cinders they mark the burning. No one ploughs, in vain, the clods pitchy with soot. That former beauty has perished which Lot, looking out, when he parted from his uncle, had chosen as rich fields. Even if some half-destroyed acres there attempt the glad wealth of autumn, they readily promise the eyes that pears, peaches and all apples are of the best, until one longs to pluck them: for at once, at the betraying touch, the deceit of the empty fruit dissolves into ash. Thus then, heaven and earth buried alike, not even the sea lives there; death is the sea's very peace: by it the sea stirs no waves in panting rolls, by it the sea never sighs from its native south wind, by it the sea lacks the power to bring forth any race from its depths, scaly-skinned or smooth-skinned or enclosed in a shell, or the crinkled conch, or that shut within a double fastening. Only bitumen is harvested there as its own crop, the soot of the burnt sea, which a lively heat, cooking it beneath the pools from the heat of sulphur and salt, tempers, and gives the lands to have a pitch from the sea:

at its own season the rich venom of the burnt water is carried in, and a skin of black foam over the waters is woven. Those whose trade is that catch call it in, and tilt their light boats with a balancing of their sides, so as to teach the vein, once laid on, to climb aboard: for, raising itself now of its own accord, it will give itself to the idle boat and will sink it to the bottom with its large bounty, unless that cloth touches it with which a woman clothes her months. Lo, another wonder of the sea is noted from the disaster: everything there floats against its will; the nature fixed for sinking bodies has withdrawn. If, finally, you set a light-bearing lamp to float, where the breath of the fire is the tip of the flame will sail; if the flame is put out, the shipwrecked wreck of light will go beneath the waters. These punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah, marked out for the ages, will teach the unjust nations, from whose hard hearts the fear of God has departed, to revere heaven's laws and to hope in the one Lord of all things.

After Sodom and Gomorrah, funerals living through the ages, and burnings of punishment marked by the hoariness of ashes, and fruits that spring up in vain for the eyes alone, and likewise the death of the sea, and the salt that was made there, if a human being is something that keeps its punishment in a changed body: the fire of a rain from above had almost struck down another, Nineveh, a city that had transgressed the way of equity and justice. For what fear has a perverted mind? To the crowd all lessons of punishment are empty where error holds possession. But the good Lord almighty, patient with us and slow to strike, will hurl no anger unless he first warns and beats upon hardened hearts, stirring up prophets, foreknowing, by his august mind. And now the Lord had commanded Jonah to foretell destruction to the Ninevites for their deserts; but he, knowing that the Lord spares the submissive and remits punishment owed to suppliants and is easily moved to goodness, delayed to go, lest he sing in vain, the threats giving way to peace. Soon flight was his plan, if that is indeed in any way possible, to avoid God and escape the Lord's right hand, beneath which the whole trembling world is held in check. Or is there reason in what the prophet does from his holy heart? On the lip of the shore, most famous for its trusty harbor, facing the coasts of the Cilicians, lies the city Joppa.

From there, then, Jonah in haste seeks Tarsus by ship, over the waters of the same God; and indeed no wonder if, fleeing the Lord on land, he found him in the waves. For suddenly a tiny cloud had stained the air, roused from a sulphurous seed by the fleece of the wind, and little by little, bringing forth a mass, it closed with the sun and shut in the deceived day with a column of darkness. The sea becomes a mirror of the sky; a black circuit stains the waves; the upper air rushes into darkness and the sea rises: nor is there anything between, as the wave touches the clouds, the halls of the winds, all of which it mingles in a whirlwind. Varied fury gnashed against the fugitive Jonah. The one ship was the contest of sky and sea; it is beaten this way and that; all its timber trembles under the wave-breaking blow; below, the spine of the shaken keel throbs; the screeching toil of the yard shudders from on high; the mast itself, uncertain whether to break, is bent. Meanwhile the sailors' groaning fear tries everything for the ship and for life: to pay out the coils of the cable, to unlace the girding band, to tighten the strain of the tillers, to haul at the struggling ropes, to push the capstan round with their chests: some, in turn, vigorously bail out the well of the inner sea, heavy with stench, then they hurl overboard the wares and all the cargo and strive to overcome the perils by their losses. Then wretched voices at each crash of the sea,

and they spread out their hands to the powers of gods that are nothing, whom the force of sea and sky does not fear, drowning them no less in angry whirlwind, hidden away as they are in the sterns. Unaware of this, the guilty one himself, under the hollow vault of the stern, was sounding out a snoring sleep with puffed-out nose, already then in sleep forming a figure of the Lord. Him, slumbering in calm peace, proud in his rest, the one who directs the duties of the wave-cutting prow pressed upon, nudging him: “What,” he says, “in this peril do you sing dreams through your nose? And in such a whirlwind do you alone have a harbor? Look, it is overwhelming us; the one hope is in the gods. You too, whoever your god is, speak vows and prayers, and, calling on him, bend your ancestral deity as a suppliant.” Then they decide to learn by lot who is nearer the guilt, who is the cause of the storm; and the lot does not lie about Jonah. Then they ask: “Who are you, and from where among men, what in short is your business, of what people, from what home are you called?” He confesses himself the servant who deeply fears God, who raised the heavens on high, who set the earth in place, who poured out the whole mass of things, and he reveals that he is His fugitive, and why. They stiffened with fear: “What fault of yours, then, is ours? What will happen now? By what pact shall we calm the waters?” For the cruel straits were swelling more and much more. Then the Lord's prophet, at the prompting of the spirit, begins:

“Look, I am the storm, I am the whole madness of the world; because of me,” he says, “the upper air falls upon you and the sea rises, because of me land is far off, death very near, no hope from God. Rather, throw the cause headlong, and, lightening the ship, cast this one great burden into the willing sea.” But they strive in vain to turn their course back toward return, for the tiller would not let itself be turned, nor would the hard balance of the yards be changed. At last, to the Lord: “Do not give us into the gaping jaws of death for the sake of one soul, nor will that we be spattered with righteous blood, if your right hand leads thus.” And now there, rising from the deepest abyss, a sea-monster, rolling out the scaly column of its body with its shells, was pressing nearer on the waves, the marble surface shaken, seizing at God's will the prey which, rolled down from the height of the stern, it swallowed with its slimy jaws, and it hurried the living feast down into its long belly, and with the man it devoured the rage of sky and sea. The wave of the sea is laid flat, the shadow of the sky dispersed. On this side the waves, on that the winds are made friendly again, and as the keel marks out a safe path in the calm, white tracks bloom in the blue furrow. Then the sailor, glad, sacrifices to the Lord his reverent fear and his thanks, then enters friendly harbors. And the prophet Jonah sails too, taken up by another vessel, and cuts the waves beneath the lowest waves, sailing in entrails, a beast's breath breathing for him, shut in and not wetted by the waters, inmost in the sea and outside it, among half-eaten fleets and bodies dissolved by putrid digestion, now learning his own funeral. But as a sign of the Lord who was one day to come, he was not for destruction, but a witness of death driven off.

When I saw you once more in the service of diverse and empty rites, and held fast by the ancient error, I was struck with dismay. Because you have always loved poetry, answering in a poem I have hastened to write verses to rebuke you: for who would bear darkness being preferred to light, your believing that the Great Mother can be called a goddess, and your thinking her again to be worshipped, whose worshippers foul infamy brands? For her priests in women's tunics confess by their outward dress the same inner vice, and think that lawful which is not lawful: hence through the city they walk softly, speaking in a softened voice, and hold their weary loins with outstretched thumb, and change their own sex by a crime made public. And when they celebrate their rites, on those days they say they are chaste: but if they are chaste only then, as they claim, what are they the rest of the time? But because they are forced to be modest at least once, they rage in mind, lacerate their body and pour out blood. What kind of sacred rite is it that truly goes by the name of blood? Now too I have learned that it was not age that made you bald but your religion, and that, your boot set aside, a Gallic sandal is on your feet, bound with soft papyrus. A thing marvelous enough, and cast down from the highest summit:

if a consul came out of a temple of Isis into the city, he would be the laughing stock of every mouth: but who would not laugh at you, who were a consul, to be now a minister of Isis? And what shames a man the first time, you are not ashamed to be a second time, and to condemn your talent by foul hymns, the crowd answering you and the senate tearing you to pieces, and you, once painted in your own house with the fasces, now also carrying a dog's face with the sistrum. Is this humility? It is an image of humility. These monuments will always remain in your house. And public rumor has reached even our ears that you said: “Goddess, I erred, forgive me, I have come back.” Tell me, if you can: when you often asked such things and sought pardon, what words did she speak with you? Truly you lack a mind, you who follow those who lack a mind. These things you repeat again and do not feel that you are sinning. See what you deserve: perhaps you would be less to be censured if you knew only this and remained in this error: but when you had entered the doors of the truth-worshipping law and it was granted you in a few years to know God, why do you hold what should be left, or leave what should be held? And you worship nothing, while you worship everything; nor do you consider in your heart how true differs from false, light from shadows. You play the philosopher, while your opinion keeps changing you:

for if popular anger stirs your stomach, you will be a Jew too, and be held wholly unstable. Indulge my words: lofty wisdom does not please. Everything that is too much falls the opposite way: heat and cold work one thing: this one, that one, both burn. So darkness takes away sight, so does the sun, its opposite, and cold and hot baths alike do harm: the body is nourished by food, the body is corrupted by food, and it lessens its own force if anything is stretched beyond measure. Then, if you sit, it is a great rest from labor: if you sit much, it is labor. For Maro the poet set it down as a punishment: “he sits and for ever will sit, unhappy Theseus.” What is useful always harms when long: long lunches harm, long fasts weary. So too much wisdom makes a fool. “The sect is shameless; the goddess so taught me, she said moderation is lovable…” But you care neither for a sect nor for moderation. But a stable mind is overturned by no surge, and simplicity itself never thinks any evil. Hence sincere faith will enjoy an eternal seat, and guile, on the contrary, will be tormented by long fire. Choose what you will, so as to avoid the penalties due. Yet, I say, let a believer deserve this pardon: that it will be a light crime if you do not wish to know the truth; it will not be a light crime if you abandon truths once known.

But perhaps ripe old age, having corrected you, calls you back to the better, sated with these errors: for time changes evils, time sets all things in order. Then, therefore, when well-counseled age has led you back, learn to keep faith with God, lest you happen twice to incur the one fall, because this is truly said: he who does not know how to avoid a second time the stone his foot struck and, unwary, bruises his limbs again, let him blame himself and not blame any chance. Correct your offense by faithfulness, correct your mind. It was enough to have sinned once; stop fearing: he will not be at fault who repents of what he was before.

There is a place which we believe to be the middle of the whole world; the Jews call it Golgotha in their ancestral speech: here I remember that a tree, cut from a barren trunk, was planted and bore saving fruits; yet it did not offer them to those settlers who planted it; outsiders had the blessed fruits. This is the tree's appearance: it rises from one stem and soon stretches out its arms into twin branches, as yards stretch heavy, full sails, or like yokes when the oxen are unyoked from the plough. What it bore first, fallen with ripe seed, the earth conceived: soon from it (wonderful to tell) the third light had again brought up, dreadful to earth and those above, a branch blessed with life-giving fruit. But after twice twenty days, firmly established in it, it grew to an immense height and touched the sky with its topmost crown, and at last hid its holy head on high, while yet it put forth twice six branches of great weight and, spreading them, extended them through the whole world, that they might offer to all nations food and life everlasting and teach that death itself can die. And soon, when fifty days had been completed, from the very summit the heavenly breath of the Spirit brought down a draught of divine nectar into the branches: the leaves dripped everywhere, heavy with sweet dew.

Look: under the shade of the huge covering of branches there was a spring: here, clear, with nothing by chance troubling it, with translucent, unmuddied waters; and the grasses around poured out glad colors from varied flowers. Around it countless nations and peoples gathered, how varied in kind, sex, age, rank: unmarried and married women, widows and young brides, infants and boys, men, youths and old men: here, when they saw the branches bent and leaning with fruits of many kinds, they rejoiced to touch with eager right hands the fruits moist with heavenly nectar. Yet they could not pluck them with desirous palms until they had wiped off the muddy, foul tracks of their former road and washed their body in the holy spring. So, walking around a long while on the soft grass, they look up at the fruits hanging from the high tree: then, if any husks fell from those branches and sweet fruits dripping with much nectar, they feed on them, longing to take the true fruits: so, when their mouths had taken the heavenly taste, they change their dispositions and begin to lose their greedy minds and with a sweet sense to recognize what a human being is. We have seen the unaccustomed taste stir the stomach of many, and the venom of gall, disturbed by the honey, reject good tastes with a troubled mind, or, having taken it eagerly, not love it for long, and, having drunk it badly, at last vomit up the taste.

Often indeed many, with renewed minds, have restored their sick souls, and endured what they said they could not, and reaped the fruit of their labor. Many too who dared to touch the holy springs went away again suddenly and, falling backward, wallow in the same filth and mire. Many, carrying the truth in a good heart, receive it with their whole souls and store it deep within. So all who are able to come to the sacred springs, the seventh light sets them at the waters they longed for; they dip their fasting limbs in the liquid springs: so at last they put off the filth of mind and the stain of their former life, and bring back from death pure, shining souls that will go to the light of heaven. Hence the way to the branches and the sweet fruits of salvation, thence the way to heaven through the branches of the high tree. This is the tree of life for all who believe. Amen.