1.
At length our great Confessor has arrived at his appointed place of exile. He reached it faint and exhausted in body and soul; but, as was usual with him, he soon rallied, and began to colour every thing about him with his own sweet, cheerful, thankful temper. In two days he had recovered his equanimity. He was pleased with all that was in any way pleasant; he made the best of what was bad; he blotted out the trials of the past; he fed his imagination with good hopes for the future. He generously and gallantly threw himself upon his lot, and tenderly embraced the cross; and though, as we shall see, the miseries of Cucusus grew on him, in spite of himself, as time went on, still he was determined he would like the place; and he did like it as long as ever he could, and, after the manner of the exiled sovereign in the drama, “found sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
He wrote to Olympias, in letters from which I quoted in the foregoing Chapter, that the place promised well; that the climate was like Antioch; that he was too well housed to fear the winter, and too sure of the winter to fear the Isaurians; that he had had a hearty welcome on the spot; that Adelphius, the Bishop, was kind; that Sopater, the Prefect of Armenia, left nothing undone for his protection; that friends from Antioch had come over to receive him on his arrival; and, lastly, that he did not doubt that he should eventually be restored to Constantinople. If the trials of his journey still remained on his memory, it was in order to give a zest to his enjoyment of the repose which had now succeeded to them, and to indispose him to move again. Accordingly, he begged his friends not to attempt to gain from government his transference to any other place, unless, indeed, it was in the immediate neighbourhood of the imperial city. He was happy when he was let alone; but it was a tremendous penance to travel. Something of all this has already been given in his own words, and more shall now follow:
“T
o Olympias
” … All these evils have vanished. On arriving at Cucusus, I got rid of all remains of my malady, and I am in most perfect health; and I am released from my fear of the Isaurians, for there is a strong force of soldiers here who are ready and eager for an engagement; and there is an abundance of all that is necessary, which flows in upon me on every side, all parties welcoming me with the greatest good will, in spite of the extreme desolateness of the place. My lord Dioscorus happened to be there; and he had even sent a domestic to me to Cæsarea for the very purpose of inviting, nay begging, me to accept his house and no other; and many others did the same. I availed myself by preference of his offer, as I felt I ought to do, and took up my abode with him; and he has been every thing to me, so that I have been continually protesting against the lavish expense which he has been at on my account. He has even left his house to me, and gone to live at some other place, in order to show me every attention possible; and he got the house into a condition to weather the winter, busying himself with this object in every way. In a word, he has left nothing undone which could be of service to me. Many others, too, agents and stewards, have received letters from their masters,
ordering them to call upon me, as they have done continually, and in every way to study my comfort.
“And now I have told you all about me, the distressing past and the favourable present, lest any friend should be precipitate in getting me removed elsewhere. If these persons, who wish to be kind to me, put into my own hands the choice where to dwell, instead of taking on themselves to assign the place, in that case I accept the favour. But if they remove me hence, in order to send me elsewhere, and there is to be another journey and another exile, this would be far more painful to me than my present condition—first, because of the chance of my relegation to a more distant or worse country; next, because travelling is to me worse than ten thousand banishments. For the inconveniences of my late journey brought me to the very gates of death; and now here I am in Cucusus, recruiting myself by an uninterrupted rest and quiet, and by that quiet nursing my long distress and my shattered bones and wearied flesh.
“My lady the Deaconess Sabiniana arrived here the same day that I did, knocked up, indeed, and wearied out, as being of that advanced age when travel is a toil, but in her earnestness a girl, and making no account of suffering, and ready, as she said, to go as far as Scythia; for the report went that I was to be deported thither. And now her mind is made up, she says, never to go away again, but to remain wherever I am. The ecclesiastics of the place received her with much attention and kindness. Moreover, my honoured lord, the most religious priest Constantius, would have been here long ago; for he wrote to me asking my leave to come, because, he said, he would not venture on the step without my judgment, much as he desired it, and certain as it was he could not remain at home; for he is in hiding, such troubles, he says, are upon him. On this account I beg you not to exert yourself for the change of my abode, for here I am enjoying great relief—so much so that, in the course of two days, all the troubles of my journey have been wiped out of my mind.”—Ep. 43.