roes commanded the army to capture and enslave the survivors of the
population of Antioch, and to plunder all the property, while he himself
with the ambassadors descended from the height to the sanctuary which
they call a church. There Chosroes found stores of gold and silver so
great in amount that, though he took no other part of the booty except
these stores, he departed possessed of enormous wealth. And he took down
from there many wonderful marbles and ordered them to be deposited
outside the fortifications, in order that they might convey these too to
the land of Persia. When he had finished these things, he gave orders to
the Persians to burn the whole city. And the ambassadors begged him to
withhold his hand only from the church, for which he had carried away
ransom in abundance. This he granted to the ambassadors, but gave orders
to burn everything else; then, leaving there a few men who were to fire
the city, he himself with all the rest retired to the camp where they
had previously set up their tents.

X

A short time before this calamity God displayed a sign to the
inhabitants of that city, by which He indicated the things which were to
be. For the standards of the soldiers who had been stationed there for a
long time had been standing previously toward the west, but of their own
accord they turned and stood toward the east, and then returned again to
their former position untouched by anyone. This the soldiers shewed to
many who were near at hand and among them the manager of finances in the
camp, while the standards were still trembling. This man, Tatianus by
name, was an especially discreet person, a native of Mopsuestia. But
even so those who saw this sign did not recognize that the mastery of
the place would pass from the western to the eastern king, in order,
evidently, that escape might be utterly impossible for those who were
bound to suffer those things which came to pass.

But I become dizzy as I write of such a great calamity and transmit it
to future times, and I am unable to understand why indeed it should be
the will of God to exalt on high the fortunes of a man or of a place,
and then to cast them down and destroy them for no cause which appears
to us. For it is wrong to say that with Him all things are not always
done with reason, though he then endured to see Antioch brought down to
the ground at the hands of a most unholy man, a city whose beauty and
grandeur in every respect could not