Читать книгу The History of Persecution - Samuel Chandler - Страница 11

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Juvenal23 gives us a very tragical account of some disputes and quarrels about religion amongst the Egyptians, who entertained an eternal hatred and enmity against each other, and eat and devoured one another, because they did not all worship the same god.

“24Ombos and Tentyr, neighbouring towns, of late, Broke into outrage of deep fester’d hate. Religious spite and pious spleen bred first This quarrel, which so long the bigots nurst. Each calls the other’s god a senseless stock, His own, divine, tho’ from the self-same block. At first both parties in reproaches jar, And make their tongues the trumpets of the war. Words serve but to inflame the warlike lists, Who wanting weapons clutch their horny fists. Yet thus make shift t’ exchange such furious blows, Scarce one escapes with more than half a nose. Some stand their ground with half their visage gone, But with the remnant of a face fight on. Such transform’d spectacles of horror grow, That not a mother her own son would know, One eye remaining for the other spies, Which now on earth a trampled gelly lies.”

All this religious zeal hitherto is but mere sport and childish play, and therefore they piously proceed to farther violences; to hurling of stones, and throwing of arrows, till one party routs the other, and the conquerors feast themselves on the mangled bodies of their divided captives.

“Yet hitherto both parties think the fray

But mockery of war, mere children’s play.

This whets their rage, to search for stones——

An Ombite wretch (by headlong strait betray’d,

And falling down i’th’ rout) is prisoner made.

Whose flesh torn off by lumps the ravenous foe

In morsels cut, to make it farther go.

His bones clean pick’d, his very bones they gnaw;

No stomach’s balk’d, because the corps is raw.

T’ had been lost time to dress him: keen desire

Supplies the want of kettle, spit, and fire.”

Plutarch25 also relates, that in his time some of the Egyptians who worshipped a dog, eat one of the fishes, which others of the Egyptians adored as their deity; and that upon this, the fish eaters laid hold on the other’s dogs, and sacrificed and eat them; and that this gave occasion to a bloody battle, in which a great number were destroyed on both sides.