From Our Foreign Correspondent Desk, Here's Jerome
[September 30, 420, the date of his death. Perhaps best known for his translating the Bible into Latin, the then-common tongue of the people. Here in a letter Jerome wrote to a friend a decade earlier as Rome, the then-capital of the Western world, was sacked we see concerns and laments ... not so different from ours, I think. -- David]
I shudder when I think of the calamities of our time. For twenty years the blood of Romans has been shed daily between Constantinople and the Alps. Scythia, Thrace, Macedon, Thessaly, Dacia, Achaea, Epirus -- all these regions have been sacked and pillaged by Goths and Alans, Huns and Vandals. How many noble and virtuous women have been made the sport of these beasts! Churches have been overthrown, horses stalled in the holy places, the bones of the saints dug up and scattered.
Indeed, the Roman world is falling; yet we still hold up our heads instead of bowing them. The East, indeed, seemed to be free from these perils; but now, in the year just past, the wolves of the North have been let loose from their remotest fastnesses, and have overrun great provinces. They have laid siege to Antioch, and invested cities that were once the capitals of no mean states.
[A passage from Virgil's epic Aeneid appears here. Ironic, since that's a poem regarding the founding of Rome nearly a thousand years earlier.]
Well may we be unhappy, for it is our sins that have made the barbarians strong; as in the days of Hezekiah, so today is God using the fury of the barbarian to execute His fierce anger. Rome's army, once the lord of the world, trembles today at the sight of the foe.
Who will hereafter believe that Rome has to fight now within her own borders, not for glory but for life? and, as the poet Lucan says, "If Rome be weak, where shall strength be found?"
And now a dreadful rumor has come to hand. Rome has been besieged, and its citizens have been forced to buy off their lives with gold. My voice cleaves to my throat; sobs choke my utterance. The city which had taken the whole world captive is itself taken. Famine too has done its awful work.
The world sinks into ruin; all things are perishing save our sins; these alone flourish. The great city is swallowed up in one vast conflagration; everywhere Romans are in exile.
Who could believe it? who could believe that Rome, built up through the ages by the conquest of the world, had fallen; that the mother of nations had become their tomb? who could imagine that the proud city, with its careless security and its boundless wealth, is brought so low that her children are outcasts and beggars? We cannot indeed help them; all we can do is sympathize with them, and mingle our tears with theirs.
(The World's Great Letters. Edited with an introduction by M. Lincoln Schuster. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1940, 32-33.)
I shudder when I think of the calamities of our time. For twenty years the blood of Romans has been shed daily between Constantinople and the Alps. Scythia, Thrace, Macedon, Thessaly, Dacia, Achaea, Epirus -- all these regions have been sacked and pillaged by Goths and Alans, Huns and Vandals. How many noble and virtuous women have been made the sport of these beasts! Churches have been overthrown, horses stalled in the holy places, the bones of the saints dug up and scattered.
Indeed, the Roman world is falling; yet we still hold up our heads instead of bowing them. The East, indeed, seemed to be free from these perils; but now, in the year just past, the wolves of the North have been let loose from their remotest fastnesses, and have overrun great provinces. They have laid siege to Antioch, and invested cities that were once the capitals of no mean states.
[A passage from Virgil's epic Aeneid appears here. Ironic, since that's a poem regarding the founding of Rome nearly a thousand years earlier.]
Well may we be unhappy, for it is our sins that have made the barbarians strong; as in the days of Hezekiah, so today is God using the fury of the barbarian to execute His fierce anger. Rome's army, once the lord of the world, trembles today at the sight of the foe.
Who will hereafter believe that Rome has to fight now within her own borders, not for glory but for life? and, as the poet Lucan says, "If Rome be weak, where shall strength be found?"
And now a dreadful rumor has come to hand. Rome has been besieged, and its citizens have been forced to buy off their lives with gold. My voice cleaves to my throat; sobs choke my utterance. The city which had taken the whole world captive is itself taken. Famine too has done its awful work.
The world sinks into ruin; all things are perishing save our sins; these alone flourish. The great city is swallowed up in one vast conflagration; everywhere Romans are in exile.
Who could believe it? who could believe that Rome, built up through the ages by the conquest of the world, had fallen; that the mother of nations had become their tomb? who could imagine that the proud city, with its careless security and its boundless wealth, is brought so low that her children are outcasts and beggars? We cannot indeed help them; all we can do is sympathize with them, and mingle our tears with theirs.
(The World's Great Letters. Edited with an introduction by M. Lincoln Schuster. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1940, 32-33.)
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