Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/238

220 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. monstrous crimes in the past centuries; and that I should arrange and set forth the matter briefly in a book."^ Orosius finds that there were four great kingdoms corresponding in the ineffahili ordinatione (sc. Dei) to the four quarters of the earth; first the Babylonian in the East ; then the Macedonian in the North ; the African in the South ; and, finally, the Roman in the West.^ Of these, the two intervening kingdoms of Africa and Macedonia act as the tutors and curators of the heritage of empire, which is Eome's from Babylon. Rome was not ready to assume this empire when the Babylonian power fell. For Sardanapalus was the last successor of Ninus, the founder of the Babylonian empire; and the Medes overthrew Sardanapalus the same year that Procas, the grandfather of Rhea Silvia, began to reign over the Latins. All these matters were so disposed in the mysteries and fathomless judgment of God, and did not take place through accident or human power.^ Following upon these statements, Orosius sets forth certain further ineffable chronological coincidences and parallels. 1 Orosius, Hist., prologue. Beyond the Old and New Testaments and the Jewish Apocrypha, Orosius uses Latin sources exclusively, and chiefly those near to his own time. He knows nothing of the Greek histories of Herodotus or Thucydides. He draws from the following writers : Livy, Eusebius (Jerome's trans.) , Justin (who drew exclusively from Trogus Pompeius) , Eutropius ; far less fre- quently, Caesar, Suetonius, Virgil, Hirtius, Cicero, Sallust, Florus, Rufinus, Augustine. 2 The oldest part of Sihyllina Oracula, III, 159-162, has eight kingdoms : 1, Egypt ; 2, Persians ; 3, Medes ; 4, Ethiopians ; 5, As- syria-Babylonia ; 6, Macedonia ; 7, Egyptian ; 8, Rome. » Hist., II, 2.