Heraclias

The Heraclias Let every chorus of the stars rejoice, showing the star-slave fallen and ignorant of his own fall; for creation could not bear being honored, even when the Creator, though impiously treated, endured it. Now let the moon shine full, as Chosroes wanes, guaranteeing to the Persians that they shall no longer deify creation. And now the thrice-great pole of the sun, having bathed itself in the cleansing of bloodshed, cries out, speaks to you of the slaughter of Chosroes, having escaped the profane suspicions of God. Leap, aether; the Persian-ruler, the fire-worshipper Chosroes, has been darkened. Again a Persian furnace and a second flame is bedewed for the second Daniel, and though upward by nature, it pours down upon them and pursues and burns those who kindled the evil flame. Again the mouth of enraged lions has been opened into the Persian earth through you. Again Chosroes impiously rages and deifies fire and imagines himself a god, until the fire, boiling over together with him, was destroyed along with its deifier. Again he rages and moves creation, rivals Xerxes of old, and wishes on one side to petrify the deep with corpses, on the other to wave the earth with gore. He plays the giant and wishes to tyrannize, and imitates Balthasar before all, defiling the divine with the pollution of drunkenness, until a god-inspired finger against him, using your right hand as a written hand, pronounced judgment with black ink. So the rains of blood cease, the stream of ever-flowing slaughter flees, the earth is no longer troubled by violent tombs, the sea is no longer defiled by a flood of gore.

The captives’ tears no longer flow, the noose’s twist now lies idle, no one, having emptied soot with vinegar, forces the nose to make a mouth; trees are not burdened with dead loads, the footless and handless do not weigh down the neck; each limb’s composition is complete for everyone; no one lends a hand as a counter-worker of the feet in exchange for a reversed misfortune; but sky, earth, fire, water, air, clouds, and the whole cosmos of the upper and lower realms applaud with us the plans of God: one fallen and all saved. Now Chosroes has recognized the fiery Dawn-bringer as dark, and says the seven planets are not wanderers, but all the stars; now, having fallen into Tartarus, he sees them all dark as necessary Evenings, and having missed the hope he placed in them, whom he honored while alive, he is buried impiously. Where now is the nonsense of the ever-false magi? Where the schemes of the starry rites? What horoscope observed the fallen Chosroes? Surely he seemed to fall under Saturn’s influence; for the slayer was slain by his own child’s assaults. Homer, you who before deemed Heracles a god without reason, may you now deem him so fittingly; for what common good did the slain boar or the strangled lion bring to life? Rather, marvel how among men one world-rescuer is rightly called Heracles. This one went down as far as Hades’ gate, throttled the rage of the all-devouring dog, raised Alcestis, the inhabited world, slew the blood-guilty dragon, destroyed the many-necked hydra of harm, cleansed the previously foul life, strangled the world-destroying lion, and now Heracles has come forth in deed, having taken the golden apples, all the cities.

The fountain of lightless evening has passed; light has withstood and darkness has dispersed; and now a second life is being created, a new world and a younger creation. And now Noah of the new world has found his own heart to be an ark, and having placed all nature within, he has set it under armed orders, guarded against the flood of Chosroes; for nearly all flesh has been destroyed by the poured-out universal sin, until, taking a branch of a neglected olive tree, he saved the remnants of life. Where now is Apelles, where is speaking Demosthenes, that one might give body to your labors, the other might harmonize the sinews of your reasonings, and raise up your image as if breathing? O Scipio, be silent; a law has been written that Scipios must be called Heraclians. The decree is common; now it is permitted only to slaves to legislate against masters without danger. Ratify, O most powerful one, the law by precedent; you have a conscience, you have no suspicion, you have countless arrows bearing witness for you, you have innate fellow-workers in your wounds, you have eloquent struggles as advocates, you have noble struggles as stenographers who write the law not with spurious writing, but with red letters, as is fitting; for your blood will suffice for the writers. Plutarch, be silent, writing your Parallel Lives; why do you labor much and gather generals? Describe the master, and you write all. For already Plutarch, wishing to exalt the man of Philip and snatch him to a height, hastened to show all that contrary fortunes held him back, opposing him; for he, being a clever writer, was not unaware that if he were to write of him as fortunate, he would give the victory to fortune instead of to him.

But your general, O Plutarch, had allies more effective than fortune. Who else could have persuaded an army full of Persian fear—among whom flight was a safe battle, and cowardice had become second nature from habit—to take up arms and be armed with words, and, transforming their timidity into boldness, reveal courage where there was cowardice, if not your wisdom and your power, which roused them like immovable stones burdening the earth with fruitless loads? Where now are the painters of Athens who formerly depicted the general Timotheus sleeping in battles, and then Fortune on one side handing over cities? They ought now to paint the opposite: Fortune sleeping everywhere for you—or rather, contending against your labors—while you are a general of a double-dangerous battle, toiling both against fortunes and against barbarians. Whence did the gold-imitated hair of your head change to the opposite dye? The snow of your cares dyed it. And whither did the whiteness of your limbs depart? Did the sun's heat take it away? Nothing is unlikely, but I conjecture that as the sweat of your labors flowed, the whiteness passed into your heart. Were not the battles against tyrants enough for you—tyrants whom the all-powerful judgment overthrew faster than thought and almost before fortune, if indeed there is any fortune of tyranny? Were not the many-sided cares, both civil and foreign, and barbarian conflicts and confusions, one after another, enough for you? Were not the affairs of the army enough for you? But you came to such a desire of pious insatiability that you even entered within the entrails of lawless Persia.

What generals, or Stagirite, did you have when you advanced into the land of the prosperous barbarians? Did your reason not shrink, considering the boundless distances of the road, especially seeing that the sinews of war, wealth, had flowed away to the barbarians? Did a mother's pity, breathing an inborn torch, hold you back? Did your children then, those soul-guiding pearls of life, bound by spiritual affection, restrain you? Did you not fear the harassing diseases, nor the fortunes opposing us—if I must call the sins fortunes—but as if bodiless and alone, seeming to have either a bronze body or an iron heart, you departed, you campaigned, you armed yourself again, one in place of all. O philanthropic fervor, superior to every effective necessity. What extension of hand, O general, did you bear, and what base reaching to the clouds did you find, that you stretched yourself out so as to overtake and drag down the fortune of the fire-worshipping Chosroes, raised to the utmost height? Or is it clear that your hand was easily stretched from the moisture of piety, and a rock higher than the heavens, Christ, stood near you as a base, through whom you cast down the enemy, raised in evils from the clouds, into Tartarus? What path of the whole earth, impiously inflamed, did you not pass, though pressed? For Chosroes, vainly worshipping fire, had it not for saving, but for burning. How then

You passed through the deserts as if they were cities, unless by coming through the very Gate of thought you were shown to be an unerring traveler. O you who now show the purple to be true—for it is dyed into an eternal hue by your pious sweat, bloodied; yet it remains white, though it is purple, and in its new beauty it shines, and the more it is worn, the more it is brightened. Hail, general of the cosmic nativity; for your achievement every land and city knows as the practical nativity of your life. You completed the fivefold course to the end, sweating, driving, raising up, running together until you cast down the transgressor Chosroes. The charioteers before you were astounded at such an extension of the course, seeing your wheels firmly planted, and the whole populace of the earth from the four sides hymned you in the theater of life. All adorn the City when you appear, and gathering living flowers they crown you with prayers as with roses; for the one who is both judge and master of contests opens the cosmic doors for you, through which, advancing as a universal victor, you bear the undefiled image from on high. Thus insatiably poured out toward words, I cherish through you the noble insatiability. What first to say, what middle to write, what last preludes of yours shall I grasp? For an interweaving and a battle of your contests now mixed together is being formed; and a mixture and a stasis come to me, as when the rivers of rain flow, the Pontic stream stands still, mixed. For thus the rivers of your sweat, gushing from one source, mixed, push and throb as if by force, each hastening to outrun the other and to be placed in the abysses of words.

And if one of them, with a heavier speed, should lean forward toward the other, the mind, having shifted, is sweetly divided, as if of necessity henceforth constrained to block for itself the course of the exit, until your mind and the fountain-like mouth loosen the many blockages of words. Nevertheless, having spread out with reckless daring, I swim upon the very things themselves. Rome, judge the balanced verdict. Having been well supplied with many generals, say with whom you think the master should be compared. Let him be placed alone, it says, having no equal. Already, then, the fire of tyranny was extinguished: Phocas, the storm, the drunkenness, the prime mover of our misfortunes, the punishment of the phantoms in dreams, the one who thought to hold the bloody outpourings against us in a thrice-wretched power, the sea-monster of the earth, the face of a Gorgon. You did not seize him, as the deception of Perseus, but by arraying against the corrupter of maidens the terrifying form of the undefiled Virgin; for you had her helping image when you approached the beast's prey. You cast him down, not having saved one hanged maiden, but whole cities. Such was not, even if someone says it happened, the previously slain monster by Heracles, as the monster tyrant that Heracles the master cast down, destroying not one city but reaping the entire commonwealth. Yet a reward is prepared for you, not a reward of horses superior to corruption; for that is a myth and a colored noise, unless someone, like you, having cognitive tones, will allegorize the sowing of males to be incorruptible by the transmission of the race, with one after another enlivening nature.

Not this for you, nor should you receive such a reward through us, but may you obtain a vehicle of life running on roads of incorruption. Since, moreover, the people’s boldnesses, nurtured together with the tyrant’s drunkenness, had as an inhabitant the disorder of the limbs, and the City was giving birth to nearly all the citizens confused, like a Centaur—for they were divided and badly mixed, and were occupied with their own confusions—a physician came, truly Galenius, and, feeling the disordered arteries, you yourself did not overlook the throbbing disease, and you used neither a cutting division nor astringent tones, but with a softening and speaking drug you persuaded them, by orderliness alone, not to suffer this beastly passion, but rather to keep the rational nature above, and to cast down and well kick away the beast-shaped monster of disorder, lest the disorder of the mind, turning aside from the beaten path, take the mind wandering with it. Thus you best reconcile the divided ways of the demagogues’ factions, and, composing a composite animal from opposite reasonings, you harmonized them into unity, and joined together the ways leaping apart from each other, and you alone accomplished what nature could not easily achieve. Wishing to attach a memory to this greatest deed, the City writes to you the image below, for if you had another painter above.

Since you, like a master of the house, drained all the places within us and emptied the veins of our passions with your pious cleansing, and shut out the harm of the inner savagery, and then the clouds of Thrace also stirred up storms of battle against us from outside, and here the Scyth-nourishing Charybdis, seeming silent, waylaid us like a robber, and there the Sclavene wolves, running together, joined the sea’s surge to the land, and the stream, befouled with their own blood, became red from violence, and from there, as if contending further, the face of the Gorgon, harsh and unyielding, was brought forward opposite that of Perseus; and the whole world was confounded together. It was necessary for you to command the battle; perhaps another in such confusion would not easily have endured to steer, but it seemed good to you to bear the whole burden, if you could, in place of all, and you renounced your own cares and made the cares of all your own. And often, wishing to draw the bow and strike Charybdis against the Gorgon, the petrifying image of the beholders, you turned and held back the hastened shot; and indeed, against her, when they shot back a missile, the rapacious wolves drew you back; and over a short time, marshaling, you endured a single triple-perilous battle against them. Since these swords of necessity, sharpened by common assaults against us, were divided by your cares in a short time, and winter now prevailed not only over affairs but also over the passage of time; in which especially the extensions of the night give birth to entrances for cares, you became of a mind to cut off the circumstances from the ends of the sun, as far as was possible.

For you knew the Persian land to be the source of evils. And indeed, shaping the matter, you pretended to provide the places before the city not with something pleasant—especially since the time was winter and they were accustomed to being well supplied—but so that the affairs of the citizens might in no way become entangled with your plans, nor that the decrees of your deliberations might become evident to harmful spies; for a spy, slipping in like a cloud among a crowd, is concealed and remains hard to find. There, then, O most mighty one, gathering your whole mind and nourishing it with wise leisure, you read through all the ordinances of the laws defined by arms and affairs. But the hidden decrees of your purpose were starting points for words among those accustomed to speaking, among whom the tongue, slipping from the inner door, flees and cries out in error; yet you understood that these things deserve forgiveness. For it seemed somehow from a reasonable necessity that the commonalty was distressed by the love for you, not because they were provoked by envy—for envious thoughts are not envied by the spiteful—but because they could not endure seeing your absence, even if they often happened to be benefited. There, imitating the earlier Elijah and traversing the deserts, you were nourished not on food, as you showed, but on cares; for there was no work of military formations that you did not pursue in the leisure of your deliberations, forming, ordering, preparing, prescribing, and shaping the images of battle for others, for yourself, for the army, for the nations, so that one might say you embraced in brief the contests before the contests, gathering and fully performing the battle before the battle.

Others, then, will write, if it pleases them, of mountains, ravines, narrow passes, and rocky crags, and the difficult routes through which you passed like a swift-running breeze, so that neither can rocks struck by missiles be used for shooting, nor can those digging the earth with trenches draw it down below, but the mountains are walls for the enemy, holding the keys of the blocked road. I wished, though I am a slow writer, to record your gathering of armies, scattered to every part of the earth, but assembled in brief by your counsels; for your compelling words led them, as if someone were drawing golden fragments together from a single drop of quicksilver. But I pass over these things and the crossing of the Euphrates, through which you passed running more than the Euphrates, and the effective and laborious action, as if in passing, the disaster of the Doubios, if indeed it is fitting to compare with disaster a city ravaged for a pious master or saved for an impious Chosroes. I now come to the city of Darartasa; they say this is the northern boundary of the Persian territories, and that its position toward the South is opposite to us, and I will shape in brief running speech the turning point against it. For they say that Artasir, being a slave by fortune, with a tyrannical and bold sword, having separated the Parthians from the then ruling power, enthroned himself on the throne he seized as a captive, placing Persia in evils. And they count times, as they say, sixteen years running through sixty, in which the bitter race of this seed gave birth from blood to a generation of blood.

For in such an extension of time, that murderous chain had no change in its inextricable bond, but from children to children this bond, steeped in slaughter, was interwoven, and every enemy among them, a slayer of mortals, sowed a child for a generation that was patricidal, and that one in turn, like the substance of a viper, sent back the inheritance to his descendants; and a stream flowed, pouring forth murders, until, widened into an immeasurable flood, it stood, having plunged Chosroes into the abyss. For it was necessary, I think, that they, emulating the life of Jocasta with parallel envy, should run back to similar misfortunes. That man, then, built this city as a topmost tower, an impregnable place, a wall, as he showed, of sin; for there Chosroes had both the Magi and his own protectors, the coals, being rightly held by a terrible suspicion that you might seize the venerable captives. But you yourself came with the speed of lightning, and having fabricated for them a feigned slaughter—for you yourself wish no slaughter, not even of barbarians, unless they should draw their swords against themselves—and having set up many engines of war, rams, tortoises, stone-throwing slings, and having blocked the phalanx and enclosed their entire wall with a new wall, you took all of them within by fear alone.

First, then, O most mighty one, you reduced to ash all the gods of Persia, offering acceptable first-fruits to your God from the treasures of Chosroes' ancestors; for in extinguishing them you burned Chosroes, not as an enemy of fire in its substance—for you are entirely fire united with God—but because you wished to present creation to God as free and saved. For fire, too, was delivered from defilement, having been more outraged by worship, and it receives honor in its noble dishonor, purified by your pious demolition; and it endured to suffer misfortune advantageously, being well reduced to ash rather than wickedly kindled. Thus, having quenched all that fire, you left nothing, except, as was necessary to speak, a small spark to inflame Chosroes.