Nilus of Ancyra→Taurianus|c. 415 AD|nilus ancyra|From Ancyra|AI-assisted
To Taurianus, a former Prefect.
Woe to your soul, you inhuman and senseless man! For you do not know that it is hard for you to kick against the goads [cf. Acts 9:5], and that it is a fearful thing to dare to raise your hand against God. For the outrage committed against the saints is in every case carried up to God himself. For you, having dared to seize with intolerable violence the contemplatives [monks] who had fled for refuge to the shrine of the all-victorious martyr Plato, and to cast them into the public prison, roaring intolerable things, puffing out your cheeks, raising your eyebrows, and enslaving free men by your all-tyrannical resolve, how do you not reckon on what is to come, you reasonless man? How do you not consider what will befall you afterward, you man without feeling? How are you unwilling to foresee the reversals of affairs, you deranged man, and especially since, for your own purpose, you have close at hand a most base and most utterly defiled counselor, Laurentius, the advocate sprung from a sausage-seller [a man of low birth], a most impious man, wholly corrupted and rotted through? Know therefore that the all-holy martyr is not one to be despised, and prepare yourself to receive the terrors that will come upon you: first the wrath of the mortal emperor, on account of which, in your fear, you will flee for refuge to the most august shrines, the very ones that were outraged and dishonored by you; then a grave and grievous sickness, of yourself and of all those most dear to you; and after all this, the confiscation of the great fortune that formerly belonged to you. And then at last Cronos, the father of Zeus, will shrilly lament you and gladly beat his breast over you [in mock mourning], precisely because you above all the other gods reverenced him in your prosperity, and many a time at his festival you consoled his lamentations, inasmuch as his private parts had been pitifully cut off, and he had been wretchedly bound by his own son, and covered over with the leather hood, and dwells forever in the darkness.
Woe to your soul, you inhuman and senseless man! For you do not know that it is hard for you to kick against the goads [cf. Acts 9:5], and that it is a fearful thing to dare to raise your hand against God. For the outrage committed against the saints is in every case carried up to God himself. For you, having dared to seize with intolerable violence the contemplatives [monks] who had fled for refuge to the shrine of the all-victorious martyr Plato, and to cast them into the public prison, roaring intolerable things, puffing out your cheeks, raising your eyebrows, and enslaving free men by your all-tyrannical resolve, how do you not reckon on what is to come, you reasonless man? How do you not consider what will befall you afterward, you man without feeling? How are you unwilling to foresee the reversals of affairs, you deranged man, and especially since, for your own purpose, you have close at hand a most base and most utterly defiled counselor, Laurentius, the advocate sprung from a sausage-seller [a man of low birth], a most impious man, wholly corrupted and rotted through? Know therefore that the all-holy martyr is not one to be despised, and prepare yourself to receive the terrors that will come upon you: first the wrath of the mortal emperor, on account of which, in your fear, you will flee for refuge to the most august shrines, the very ones that were outraged and dishonored by you; then a grave and grievous sickness, of yourself and of all those most dear to you; and after all this, the confiscation of the great fortune that formerly belonged to you. And then at last Cronos, the father of Zeus, will shrilly lament you and gladly beat his breast over you [in mock mourning], precisely because you above all the other gods reverenced him in your prosperity, and many a time at his festival you consoled his lamentations, inasmuch as his private parts had been pitifully cut off, and he had been wretchedly bound by his own son, and covered over with the leather hood, and dwells forever in the darkness.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.