Arnobius, Against the Pagans (Adversus Nationes)

Arnobius against the Nations

these plagues, from where did antiquity know these names of miseries, from where did it give significance to wars? By what reason could it have marked a pestilence or hail, or taken them up among its own voices by which speech was explained? For if these evils are novel and draw their causes from recent offenses, how could it have come to pass that it formed words for those things which it neither knew itself to have experienced, nor had discovered to have been done in any times of the ancestors? Scarcity, he says, of crops and famine-related straits hold us tightly. Were the ancient and most distant ages ever exempt from this necessity? Do not the very names, by which these evils are judged, testify and cry out that no mortal has ever departed from them immune? But if it were a difficult matter to believe, we could act with the testimonies of authors, how many times and which nations have sensed horrible famine and have perished in aggregated devastation. Very frequent cases of hail occur and destroy everything. For do we not see it captured and composed in ancient letters that stone-like showers have often crushed whole regions? Difficult rains make crops perish and inflict sterility upon the lands. For was antiquity immune from these evils, since we have known that even huge rivers have become bristling with dried-up mud? The contagions of pestilence burn the human race. Run through the writings of the annals f. 3 with their diversities of languages: you will learn that all nations have many times been desolate and widowed of their own inhabitants. By locusts, by mice, every kind of crop is killed and gnawed away. Go through your own histories and you will be instructed by these plagues how often the prior age has been affected and has come to the miseries of poverty. Cities, shaken by the most powerful tremors of the earth, totter even to the point of danger. What, did past times not see cities intercepted by huge chasms together with their peoples?