Text
Orosius, Historia adversus Paganos 1.4:
One thousand three hundred years before the founding of the City (= Rome), Ninus, the first king of the Assyrians, as my opponents wish him to be considered, was led on by his lust for dominion to wage wars abroad. For fifty years he maintained a reign of bloodshed throughout all Asia. Starting from the south and from the Red Sea, he laid waste and subjugated the territory in the extreme north along the Euxine Sea. He taught barbaric Scythia, hitherto an unwarlike and inoffensive country, to quicken into action her dormant spirit of ferocity, to become conscious of her strength, to drink not as heretofore the milk of domestic animals but the blood of men, and in the end to conquer even as she was being conquered. Finally he engaged in battle with Zoroaster, the king of the Bactrians, and after defeating him slew him. This was the same man who they say invented the art of magic.
Later Ninus himself, while storming a rebellious city, was struck by an arrow and died. His wife Semiramis succeeded him on the throne. She had the will of a man and went about dressed like her son. For forty-two years she kept her own people, lusting for blood from their previous taste of it, engaged in the slaughter of foreign tribes. Not satisfied with the boundaries that she had inherited from her husband, who was the only king of that age to be warlike and who had acquired these lands in the course of fifty years, the woman added to her empire Ethiopia, which had been sorely oppressed by war and drenched with blood. She also declared war upon the people of India, a land which nobody ever had penetrated excepting herself and Alexander the Great. To persecute and slaughter peoples living in peace was at that time an even more cruel and serious matter than it is today; for in those days neither the incentive for conquest abroad nor the temptation for the exercise of cupidity at home was so strong. Burning with lust and thirsty for blood, Semiramis in the course of continous adulteries and homicides caused the death of all those whom she had delighted to hold in her adulterous embrace and who she had summoned to her by royal command for that purpose. She finally most shamelessly conceived a son, godlessly abandoned the child, later had incestuous relations with him, and then covered her private disgrace by a public crime. For she prescribed that between parents and children no reverence for nature in the conjugal act was to be observed, but that each should be free to do as he pleased.
Source (list of abbreviations)
Orosius, Historia adversus Paganos 1.4
Bibliography
| Raymond 1936, 48-50 | Raymond, Irving W. Seven Books of History against the Pagans. The Apology of Paulus Orosius. New York: Columbia University Press 1936. |
Amar Annus
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