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To be brief, the city of Rome was rounded, like another Babylon,
and as it were the daughter of the former Babylon, by which God was
pleased to conquer the whole world, and subdue it far and wide by
bringing it into one fellowship of government and laws. For there were
already powerful and brave peoples and nations trained to arms, who did
not easily yield, and whose subjugation necessarily involved great
danger and destruction as well as great and horrible labor. For when
the Assyrian kingdom subdued almost all Asia, although this was done
by fighting, yet the wars could not be very fierce or difficult,
because the nations were as yet untrained to resist, and neither so
many nor so great as afterward; forasmuch as, after that greatest and
indeed universal flood, when only eight men escaped in Noah's ark,
not much more than a thousand years had passed when Ninus subdued all
Asia with the exception of India. But Rome did not with the same
quickness and facility wholly subdue all those nations of the east and
west which we see brought under the Roman empire, because, in its
gradual increase, in whatever direction it was extended, it found them
strong and warlike. At the time when Rome was rounded, then, the
people of Israel had been in the land of promise seven hundred and
eighteen years. Of these years twenty-seven belong to Joshua the son
of Nun, and after that three hundred and twenty-nine to the period of
the judges. But from the time when the kings began to reign there,
three hundred and sixty-two years had passed. And at that time there
was a king in Judah called Ahaz, or, as others compute, Hezekiah
his successor, the best and most pious king, who it is admitted
reigned in the times of Romulus. And in that part of the Hebrew
nation called Israel, Hoshea had begun to reign.
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