Incerti Auctoris Carmen Sodoma

Of Uncertain Authorship, On Sodom. Now the omnipotent God had blotted out the times of the early age with a punishing flood, with all the waters that the sky scattered, the earth, and the sea spewed forth: not yet had he agreed to decree punishments clearly by destruction, as often as the air brought on a storm, he had commanded the rainbow, marking the clouds with a purple and green border, to restrain the varying rains. It is called Iris, which is the natural bond of the clouds. But a second race of men arose, and with it impiety again, and a new age of evils sprouts forth. Destruction now is allotted not by rains, but by fires. Thus the land of Sodom deserved to be burned by fiery dews and to portend signs of the future end. Savage luxury there, hostile to modesty, was like a law; a prudent guest would flee it, preferring to die by a sacred death before the Scythian altars or at the altars of Busiris, or to pour out blood in the Bebrycian caestus and to satisfy the Libyan wrestling-schools of Antaeus, or to take on new forms through Circe's potions, rather than to lose one's sex, violated in Sodom. Envy was beating against heaven: marriages mixed with equal incest, a nature rebellious against itself, and the name of man, injured along with the body. But at a fixed time, God oversees all things: he judges the unjust, where the age of crime has given space for ceasing. No force had compelled his anger. And now the avenging day was at hand: two were sent from the flock.

Of Uncertain Authorship, On Sodom. Now the omnipotent God had blotted out the times of the early age with a punishing flood, with all the waters that the sky scattered, the earth, and the sea spewed forth: not yet had he two youths of angelic form, both spirits, bearing the divine ministries of the Lord’s commands: they proceed to Sodom. There, from the stock of the pious, the sojourner Lot was present, a wise man and a cultivator of justice; he alone remembered God. As a useful tree is wont to hide in forests, bearing fruit like a guest, so then, sitting before the gate—the heaven-dwellers scarcely approached the walls—although unknowing of the divine, he of his own accord summons them, addresses them, venerates them with ancestral honor, and calls them to hospitality, though they were preparing to lodge far off. He prevailed with long entreaties: with a table of pious pledges and with honest services, he diligently distinguishes his friends by devotion. Night had given rest. The next day’s light had loosed the night, and Sodom clamors at the doors with its shameful law. Lot, suppliant, speaks against it: “Do not now let the pact of lust inflame you, young men, to defile your very youth with luxury, by which they summon the generative power, by which they summon the seeds, in vain: by which no souls marry, not those who frequent the shrines, not those who return to the stables, not those who gape beneath the waters.

nor those which, with the modulations of their feathers, hang near the clouds, nor those which, with body stretched out, glide over the earth. Every kind is a kind by lust; but a wife is female to all, and never is anyone’s mother except a female. Now, if youthful license has the right to ravage modesty, I have twin daughters born at home, of marriageable age; their virginity swells in bloom: already given over to the harvest, worthy of desire for husbands: your pleasure will have taken it. As a father, I give them up, and in return for the guests I will compensate for the grief. The maddened crowd to this: “Who are you, how great, and from where, that you lord it over us,” it says, “and lay down laws? A foreigner, not a ruler, you plow the acres of Sodom. Now therefore you yourself will pay the penalty for what our desire is: for your daughters and for the guests: one man is enough for all.” Word and deed were simultaneous: there was no delay for the raging crowd. As a turbid winter torrent, when it rolls with its rush, carries away countless streams with one foot: if any tree there is struck by the swift waters, it will not last long; as long as the root allows, it will hold out with its hair-like branches; when the earth is eaten away beneath, and the trunk, already undermined, hangs

Here and there it delays a certain ruin with uncertain ruin: Not otherwise did Lot, in the midst of the crowd’s whirl, waver, nearly already conquered; but divine power came to his aid. Angelic youths, snatching him from the threshold, restore him to the roofs. The mad crowd, in the same place, by the omens of punishments, sometimes blind with light. Then they disclose the decrees of God: that a fitting punishment from heaven awaits Sodom; that he himself has merited safety by the title of righteousness. “Why then do you not gird yourself to hasten flight from there and likewise to lead out, if you have any of your kin? We are now bringing destruction upon the city.” Lot swiftly addresses his sons-in-law. But the hard mind of men scorned to believe the warning and laughed at the fear. Soon at the time when light tries to kindle the darkness and the face of the sky is two-colored from night and day, the youths pressed to lead the Chaldaean kin out of Sodom and to grant the just household to safety. “Come now, Lot, arise and take your spouse and your twin daughters, and go from here into exile, forestalling the punishments of Sodom.” With friendly hands, too, they lead out the trembling ones and entrust these further things to you:

Save Lot's soul, lest you chance to turn your gaze backward or to halt your begun step: hurry to the mountain!" Lot feared to crawl out with slow step from the steep heights, lest the celestial wrath crush him first; therefore he sets about to seek other havens. He had caught sight of a small city opposite. "Hither," he says, "let the flight be: surely it barely stands with its walls, neither far nor great is it for me." The city and its own safety alike yielded favor to the petitioner. Thence the place took the name Segor, a barbarian word knows it. Then Lot enters Segor: at the same time the sun rises. That sun was indeed the last, and it brings the burning fires of Sodom: for it had armed all its rays with fire; a rival darkness is interposed, attempting to enclose the light and to weave confused globes into the sky. Smoking clouds gather; a new rain rushes in. The chaos blazes with flames of sulphur; the ether seethes; the scorched air crackles with liquid fires. Hence the fable gains fame from falsehood about truth: that the Sun's offspring desired his father's chariot and was unable, a light boy, to rein in the proud fire-horses; that the world burned; then he was snatched away by a thunderbolt.

the forbidden charioteer. The sisters changed their lament. Let the Eridanus see to it. If there is any poplar there that whitens... or if any bird more melodious in its old age is feathered. Here, otherwise, they mourn the miracles of a changed form: for the wife, a companion—alas me, even then a transgressor of the law, a woman not enduring the divine—at the murmurs of the sky she alone, in vain, turned back her audacious eyes, not destined to speak what she saw. And at once there, changed into brittle salt, she stood, herself a tomb, herself and her own image, preserving a form without a body. For she still endures, in a bare station under the sky, neither dissolved by rains into decay nor shattered by winds. Indeed, if any stranger mutilates the form, at once from itself it fills the wounds with a supply. She is said to live, even now, in another body, and to pay out the generous monthly blood of her sex. Nowhere are the Sodomites. Nowhere there do the impious walls gleam. Nowhere is every inhospitable house with its masters. The whole region is a pyre: here with black horror of ash, and there with hoary decay, the cinders mark the fires.

No one plows the sooty clods in vain. That earlier savagery has perished. Lot, looking ahead, had chosen rich fields, distinct from his uncle. Even if any acres there, half-destroyed, attempt the joyful wealth of autumn, the best fruits readily promise themselves to the eyes—pears, peaches, and all apples—until they are plucked: for, once touched by the finger, the deceit of the empty fruit dissolves into ash. Thus, with heaven and earth alike buried, the sea does not live there either: that stillness is the death of the sea. It stirs no waves through panting billows; it never sighs even from its native south wind; it cannot produce from its depths any scaly race, enclosed by smooth skin or bark, or by a curled shell and double hinge. Only bitumen there feigns its own fruit—the soot of the burnt-out sea, which a living heat, cooking beneath the pools, tempers from the heat of sulfur and salt and turns into pitch to cling to the land.

When the proper season comes, the rich juice of the burnt land is carried in, and a skin is woven over the black waters with its foam. They approach. What is this capture of merchandise? They lean the light skiffs against the side with their balance, so that they may teach the once-placed vein to climb aboard; for, lifting itself spontaneously, it will swim to the mouth of the idle ship and give a pressed yield in return for a generous gift, unless a wound has befallen it, where the female of the month clothes. Behold another monster of the sea noted from the disaster: all things there swim unwillingly; nature has withdrawn from bodies given to sinking. If, finally, you stand on a shining shard of shell, where the spirit is of fire, the tip of the flame will sail; if the flame is extinguished, the shipwrecked structure of light will go under the waters. These are the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah, marked for the ages for unjust peoples. Who will harden hearts to fear, to revere the laws of God from heaven, and to care for the one ruler of all things?