15 Non numina bona, sed omina mala.
17 Though levis was the word usually employed to signify the inconstancy of the Greeks, it is evidently here used, in opposition to immanis of the following clause, to indicate that the Greeks were more civilized than the barbarians, and not relentless, but, as we say, easily moved.
23 So Cyprian (Contra Demetrianum) says: Parnam de adversis mundi ille sentif, cui ei loetitia et gioria omnis in mundo est.
25 Compare with this chapter the first homily of Chrysostom to the people of Antioch.
32 Paulinus was a native of Bordeaux, and both by inheritance and marriage acquired great wealth, which, after his conversion in his thirty-sixth year, he distributed to the poor. He became bishop of Nola in A.D. 409, being then in his fifty-sixth year. Nola was taken by Alaric shortly after the sack of Rome.
33 Much of a kindred nature might be gathered from the Stoics. Antoninus says (ii. 14): "Though thou shouldest be going to live 3000 years, and as many times 10,000 years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and the shortest are thus brought to the same."
34 Augustine expresses himself more fully on this subject in his tract, De cura pro moutuis gerenda.
39 Diogenes especially, and his followers. See also Seneca, De Tranq. c. 14, and Epist. 92; and in Cicero's Tusc. Disp. i. 43, the answer of Theodorus, the Cyrenian philosopher, to Lysimachus, who threatened him with the cross: "Threaten that to your courtiers; it is of no consequence to Theodorus whether he rot in the earth or in the air."
40 Lucan, Pharsalia, vii. 819, of those whom Caesar forbade to be buried after the battle of Pharsalia.
41 Gen. xxv. 10, xxxv. 29, etc.
48 "Second to none," as he is called by Herodotus, who first of all tells his well-known story (Clio. 23, 24).
49 Augustine here uses the words of Cicero ("vigilando peremerunt"), who refers to Regulus, in Pisonem. c 19. Aulus Gellius, quoting Tubero and Tuditanus (vi. 4), adds some further particulars regarding these tortures.