How Persecution Brought Ruin on the Persecutors

“From the causes I have described, terrible wars arose, and destructive devastation. From them followed a shortage of the common necessities of life and a crowd of miseries in their train. From them, too, the authors of these wicked deeds have either met a disastrous death in extreme suffering, or have dragged out a shameful existence that they confessed to be worse than death itself. So they received, as it were, a measure of punishment in proportion to the enormity of their crimes. For each of them met with calamity in the degree of the blind fury with which he had been led to fight against the divine will and, as he thought, to defeat it. So they not only felt the weight of the evils of this present life, but were also tormented by a most vivid dread of punishment in the world to come. [a]