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which Hazael had beaten down, if God had not been against him. But his fearful heart being likely to quake upon any apprehension of danger, was able to put the Syrian king in hope, that by terrifying him with some shew of war at his doors, it were easy to make him crave any tolerable conditions of peace. The unexpected good success hereof, already related, and the (perhaps as unexpected) ill success, which the Aramites found in their following wars against the king of Israel, sheweth plainly the weakness of all earthly might resisting the power of the Almighty. For by his ordinance, both the kingdom of Judah, after more than forty years time of gathering strength, was unable to drive out a small company of enemies; and the kingdom of Israel, having so been trodden down by Hazael, that only fifty horsemen, ten chariots, and ten thousand footmen were left, prevailed against his son, and recovered all from the victorious Aramites. But examples hereof are everywhere found, and therefore I will not insist upon this; though indeed we should not, if we be God's children, think it more tedious to hear long and frequent reports of our heavenly Father's honour, than of the noble acts performed by our forefathers upon earth.

When the Aramites had what they listed, and saw that they were not able, being so few, to take any possession of the country, they departed out of Judah loaded with spoil, which they sent to Damascus, themselves belike falling upon the ten tribes, where it is to be thought that they sped not half so well. The king of Judah being in ill case, was killed on his bed when he came home, by the sons of an Ammonitess, and of a Moabitess, whom some, (because only their mother's names, being strangers, are expressed,) think to have been bondmen. Whether it were contempt of his fortune, or fear, lest, (as tyrants use,) he should revenge his disaster upon them, imputing it to their fault, or whatsoever else it were

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that animated them to murder their king, the scripture tells us plainly, that for the blood of the chil'dren of Jehoiada this befel him". And the same appears to have been used as the pretence of their conspiracy, in excuse of the fact when it was done. For Amaziah, the son and successor of Joash, durst not punish them, till his kingdom was established but contrariwise, his body was judged unworthy of burial in the sepulchres of the kings; whereby it appears, that the death of Zachariah caused the treason wrought against the king, to find more approbation than was requisite among the people, though afterwards it was recompensed by his son, upon the traitors, with well deserved death.

SECT. VI.

Of the Princes living in the time of Joash: Of the time when Carthage was built; and of Dido.

THERE lived with Joash, Mezades and Diognetus in Athens; Eudemus and Aristomedes in Corinth; about which time Agrippa Sylvius, and after him Sylvius Alladius, were kings of the Albans in Italy. Ocrazapes commonly called Anacyndaraxes, the thirty-seventh king succeeding unto Ophratanus, began his reign over the Assyrians, about the eighteenth year of Joash, which lasted forty-two years. In the sixteenth of Joash, Cephrenes, the fourth from Sesac, succeeded unto Cheops in the kingdom of Egypt, and held it fifty years.

In this time of Joash was likewise the reign of Pygmalion in. Tyre, and the foundation of Carthage by Dido; the building of which city is, by divers authors, placed in divers ages; some reporting it to be seventy years younger than Rome, others above four hundred years elder; few or none of them giving any reason of their assertions, but leaving us uncertain whom to follow: Josephus', who had read 1 Joseph. cont. App. lib. i.

2 2 Chron. xxiv. 25.

the annals of Tyre, counting one hundred forty and
three years and eight months from the building of
Solomon's temple, in the twelfth year of Hiram king
of Tyre, to the founding of Carthage by Dido, in
the seventh of Pygmalion. The particulars of this
account, (which is not rare in Josephus,) are very
perplexed, and serve not very well to make clear the
total sum.
But whether it were so that Josephus
did omit, or else that he did miswrite some number
of the years, which he reckoneth in fractions, as
they were divided among the kings of Tyre, from
Hiram to Pygmalion; we may well enough believe,
that the Tyrian writers, out of whose books he gives
us the whole sum, had good means to know the
truth, and could rightly reckon the difference of
time, between two works, no longer following one
the other, than the memory of three or four genera-
tions might easily reach. This hundred forty and
four years current, after the building of Solomon's
temple, being the eleventh year of Joash, was a hun-
dred forty and three years before the birth of Rome,
and after the destruction of Troy two hundred eighty
and nine: a time so long after the death of Æneas,
that we might truly conclude all to be fabulous which
Virgil hath written of Dido, as Ausonius noteth,
who doth honour her statue with this epigram':

Illa ego sum Dido vultu, quam conspicis, hospes,
Assimilata modis pulchraque mirificis.

Talis eram sed non, Maro quam mihi finxit, erat mens:
Vita nec incestis læta cupidinibus.

Namque nec Æneas vidit me Troïus unquam,

Nec Libyam advenit classibus Iliacis.
Sed furias fugiens atque arma procacis larbæ,
Servavi, fateor, morte pudicitiam :
Pectore transfixo castus quod perculit ensis,
Non furor, aut læso crudus amore dolor.
Sic cecidisse juvat. Vixi sine vulnere famæ.
Ulta virum, positis manibus, oppetii.
Invida cur in me stimulasti Musa Maronem,
'Fingeret ut nostræ damna pudicitiæ ?

2 Ausoni Ep. 111.

"Vos magis historicis, lectores, credite de me,
Quam qui furta deum concubitusque canunt
Falsidici vates: temerant qui carmine verum:
'Humanisque deos assimilant vitiis.'

Which in effect is this:

'I am that Dido which thou here dost see,
'Cunningly framed in beauteous imagery.
'Like this I was, but had not such a soul
As Maro feigned, incestuous and foul.
'Æneas never with his Trojan host
'Beheld my face, or landed on this coast;
But flying proud Iarba's villany,

Not moved by furious love or jealousy,
I did with weapon chaste, to save my fame,
Make way for death untimely, ere it came.
This was my end: But first I built a town,
Revenged my husband's death, lived with renown.
"Why didst thou stir up Virgil, envious Muse,
Falsely my name and honour to abuse?

Readers, believe historians; not those

Which to the world Jove's thefts and vice expose.

Poets are liars, and, for verses sake,

Will make the gods of human crimes partake.'

From the time of Dido unto the first Punic war, that Carthage grew and flourished in wealth and conquests, we find in many histories; but in particular we find little of the Carthaginian affairs before that war, excepting those few things that are recorded of their attempts upon the isle of Sicily. We will therefore defer the relation of matters concerning that mighty city, until such time as they shall encounter with the estate of Rome, by which it was finally destroyed; and prosecute, in the meanwhile, the history that is now in hand.

SECT. VII.

The beginning of Amaziah's reign. Of Joash king of Israel, and Elisha the prophet.

AMAZIAH, the son of Joash, being twenty-five years old when his father died, took possession of the kingdom of Judah, wherein he laboured so to demean himself, as his new beginning reign might be least offensive. The law of Moses he professed to observe; which, however, it had been secretly despised since the time of Jehoram, by many great persons of the land, yet had it, by provision of good princes, yea and of bad ones, (in their best times,) imitating the good, but especially by the care of holy priests, taken such deep root in the people's hearts, that no king might hope to be very plausible who did not conform himself unto it. And at that present time, the slaughter, which the Aramites had made, of all the princes who had withdrawn the late king from the service of God, being seconded by the death of the king himself, even whilst that execrable murder, committed by the king upon Zachariah, was yet fresh in memory, did serve as a notable example of God's justice against idolators, both to animate the better sort of the people in holding the religion of their fathers, and to discourage Amaziah from following the way which led to such an evil end. He therefore, having learned of his father the art of dissimulation, did not only forbear to punish the traitors that had slain king Joash, but gave. way to the time, and suffered the dead body to be interred, as that of Jehoram formerly had been, in the city of David, yet not among the sepulchres of the kings of Judah. Nevertheless, after this, when, belike, the noise of the people having wearied itself into silence, it was found that the conspirators, (howsoever their deed done was applauded as the handy-work of GOD,) had neither any mighty par

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