2.
Since, however, you have been inquiring 1 about what has befallen us, and wish to be informed as to how we have fared, you have got a full report of our fortunes; how when we--that is to say, Gains, and myself, and Faustus, and Peter, and Paul--were led off as prisoners by the centurion and the magistrates, 2 and the soldiers and other attendants accompanying them, there came upon us certain parties from Mareotis, who dragged us with them against our will, and though we were disinclined to follow them, and carried us away by force; 3 and how Gaius and Peter and myself have been separated from our other brethren, and shut up alone in a desert and sterile place in Libya, at a distance of three days' journey from Paraetonium.
-
Reading epeide punthanesthe, for which some codices give epei punthanesthai. ↩
-
strategon. Christophorsonus would read strategou in the sense of commander. But the word is used here of the duumviri, or magistrates of Alexandria. And that the word strategos was used in this civil acceptation as well as in the common military application, we see by many examples in Athanasius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and others. Thus, as Valesius remarks, the soldiers (stratioton) here will be the band with the centurion, and the attendants (hupereton) will be the civil followers of the magistrates. ↩
-
This happened in the first persecution under Decius, when Dionysius was carried off by the decision of the prefect Sabinus to Taposiris, as he informs us in his epistle to Germanus. Certainly any one who compares that epistle of Dionysius to Germanus with this one to Domitius, will have no doubt that he speaks of one and the same event in both. Hence Eusebius is in error in thinking that in this epistle of Dionysius to Domitius we have a narrative of the events relating to the persecution of Valerian,--a position which may easily be refuted from Dionysius himself. For in the persecution under Valerian, Dionysius was not carried off into exile under military custody, nor were there any men from Mareotis, who came and drove off the soldiers, and bore him away unwillingly, and set him at liberty again; nor had Dionysius on that occasion the presbyters Gaius and Faustus, and Peter and Paul, with him. All these things happened to Dionysius in that persecution which began a little before Decius obtained the empire, as he testifies himself in his epistle to Germanus. But in the persecution under Valerian, Dionysius was accompanied in exile by the presbyter Maximus, and the deacons Faustus, and Eusebius, and Chaeremon, and a certain Roman cleric, as he tells us in the epistle to Germanus.--Valesius. ↩
