Seven Books of History Against the Pagans

They have testified to this, even those who, not knowing the past ages nor the very author of time, nonetheless learned it by conjecture from the evidence of stones, which we are often accustomed to see in remote mountains, rough with shells and oysters, and often even hollowed out by water. And although such things as these are worthy of report and can be presented by us with certain faith, yet these two principal points—concerning the prevarication of the first man and the condemnation of his generation and life, and then the destruction of the whole human race—may suffice. So that, if any accounts of the gentile historians should touch upon our affairs in any order, these may be presented more fully with the others in the very order in which they have occurred.

Chapter IV.

One thousand three hundred years before the founding of the City Rome, Ninus, king of the Assyrians, was the first (as they themselves wish) who, out of a desire for spreading his dominion, carried arms abroad and spent fifty years of a bloody life in wars throughout all of Asia. Rising from the south and the Red Sea, he devastated and conquered as far as the furthest north, the Euxine Sea. He taught the Scythian barbarism—at that time still unwarlike and innocent—to stir up its dormant cruelty, to know its own strength, to live no longer on the milk of cattle but on the blood of men, and finally, to conquer while being conquered. Most recently, he fought and killed Zoroaster, king of the Bactrians, the very discoverer (as they say) of the magical art. Afterward, he himself died, struck by an arrow while he was besieging a city that was defecting from him. To him, upon his death, succeeded his wife Semiramis, holding a man’s spirit in a woman’s body; for forty-two years she exercised the peoples, already greedy through the habit of blood, in the slaughter of nations.