Babylon

But the Assyrians, both those from Babylon and those from the rest of Assyria, will bring, I think, not fewer than 20,000 horse and not fewer, I am sure, than 200 war-chariots, and a vast number of infantry, I suppose;

Why, pray, said the other, is that so difficult?

As this, therefore, is my conviction, lead us straight on to Babylon.

" And indeed he calls the men of Babylon "wise.

" For he travelled over Babylon and Persia and Egypt, learning from the Magi and the priests.

and the line of the Hebrew kings comes to an end.

For what is left for me, having mastered Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana and the affairs in India?

said, "But you will have no advantage over anyone, nor will you truly be king, with this mind you have—not even if you leap over the wall at Babylon and so take the city, instead of digging through it from outside and undermining it;

But while we say that Dromon and Sarambus justly hear this name—because at Athens they keep taverns and are so called by the Athenians—does Darius the elder not justly hear it, because in Babylon and Susa he kept a tavern, and the Persians even now call him huckster?

the city is divided into two parts;

These walls are the city's outer armor;

In the last tower there is a great shrine;

And Cyrus summoned the generals of the Greeks and told them that the march was to be to Babylon, against the Great King;

And the soldiers—not only his own men, but the rest also—when they heard that he said he would not go on to the King’s capital, commended him;

and the people who dwelt here made a living by quarrying mill-stones along the river banks, then fashioning them and taking them to Babylon, where they sold them and bought grain in exchange.

After many cycles of years, however, they too came to reverence statues of human form, as Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldaic Affairs, this having been introduced by Artaxerxes son of Darius son of Ochus, who first set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaïtis in Babylon and Susa and Ecbatana, and showed the Persians and Bactrians and Damascus and Sardis to reverence it.

For these have dared to deify men, recording Alexander the Macedonian as a thirteenth god, whom Babylon convicted as a corpse.

So too Babylon, even in our John, is a figure of the city of Rome — likewise great, and proud in empire, and a warrior against the saints of God.

"Behold, days come, and all that is in thy house shall be taken away, and what thy fathers laid up shall be transferred to Babylon.

First I advise that the birds gather together in one city and that they build a wall of great bricks, like that at Babylon, round the plains of the air and the whole region of space that divides earth from heaven.

And like to him, in later times, they say that the wise Daniel learned the wisdom of the Chaldeans at Babylon, and only then laid hold of the divine teachings.

Thus we find the Hebrew Kings were reproved by the prophets, and punished by God for not observing the oaths, which they had taken to the kings of Babylon.

"Listen, you abyss of error, you murkier than the darkness that can be felt, you seed of Babylon, you offspring of the tower-building of Chalane, by which the world was thrown into confusion, you vain-minded and wretched old man,

For when, about to besiege Babylon, he was hurrying to a war whose greatest crises lie in opportunities, he tried to cross the river Gyndes, which spreads wide, at a ford—a thing scarcely safe even when it has felt the summer and been brought to its lowest.

You shall not set beside them the walls of Babylon, which Alexander entered, nor the ramparts of Carthage or Numantia, taken by a single hand, nor the Capitol or the citadel:

So too Babylon in our John is a figure of the city of Rome, inasmuch as it too is great and proud in its kingdom and a vanquisher of the saints.

no one has yet wept the downfall of Babylon.

as when the downfalls of nations and cities resound — of Tyre and Egypt and Babylon and Idumaea and the ships of the Carthaginians — as when they speak through to the end of Israel's own plagues or pardons, captivities, restorations, and the issue of the final dispersion.

" From the very dwelling in that Babylon, in the Apocalypse of John, we are removed—much more from its platform.

About the dream of the king of Babylon all the wise men are troubled, and freely confess that it cannot be known by human excellence.

Thus that king of Babylon, having offended the Lord, when for seven years he had been an exile from human form in squalor and filth, by the immolated patience of his body both recovered his kingdom and — what is more desirable for a man — gave satisfaction to God.