The really great and note-worthy struggler for truth, the first one who opened that universal gymnastic stadium, the man who overthrew the adversary in every round, the man who received the blows and bruises even down to the bone and remained unconquered. The one full of worms and crowned; the man whom not even death was strong enough to lay low and cover with dust, but who continued to stand like some statue immutable or (as one might say) untiring [and] unmalleable, throughout his life throwing down and dashing the adversary to pieces. This man was the first to trample down the Devil; this man took trophies of victory from the evil one, not by competing in the Nemean [Games] and the Olympian [Games] and the Isthmian [Games] and the Pythian [Games] and whatever [games] the Greek stories brag about, but competing so as to defend his children and property and cattle and servants and all the things having to do with life, the strong-souled man who looked upon the same houses which had become tombs of the corpses and common graves of his own children, whom the all-abominable one in one day and hour spread out in heaps as they were being fed well and dining together at the table, when [the all-abominable one] had shaken their house down on them,[1] not two or three or four but ten,[2] laying low all of them, both men and women. And even with these things the rage and malice of the adversary was not satisfied, until, having called forth the naked athlete himself to the dung-heap, he made him spotted all over with wounds[3] and full of worms, making him a sight horrible and strange to everything under the sun, biting with his teeth and licking with his tongue the whole body of the blessed man for seven years: until the all-abominable one drew defeat upon himself and inherited a shameful end. You know the rest of the story and the prizes of this lover of wisdom. And you also have this man’s book, singing much more sweetly than the books of Homer and Plato the nightingale; not just narrating tales and sketches of others' sufferings -- either Achilles the Bold or the ever-crafty Odysseus, whose wounds became trophies and whose seductions of women became successes -- but narrating Satan smitten by some naked man, unarmed and alone, and the sympathizing of his friends with rhetoric and tears[4] and natural histories of the whole of creation and the natures of living things, and birds, and other glorious narration. And narrating Satan himself in the likeness of a dragon[5] -- crooked and twisted, with eyes bright as if dripping fire, and also the shared descent into Hades and the subterranean places of the dead, and again the redeeming of his righteous crown and children and entire property, taking many times more, and doubling his life-span.[6] And with the names of his daughters being extraordinary -- not Leda or Europa or Antiope, whom Zeus highest of the gods deflowered, but taking the names of Day, Kasia,[7] and Amalthea[8], and being deemed more distinguished than all the women under the heavens.[9] And, the greatest thing [that the daughters got was] the good lineage of Job, the prize-winner and crown-wearer, just as if [the daughters had] obtained by chance a token or a randomly selected lot. For this man alone, well-born of the people from the East, the illustrious and thrice-longed-for, this man earned, out of his own prizes, the best and most extreme: being resurrected together with Christ and beholding again this world with his body -- not like the fable of Herakles and Alkestis (wife of Admetus) whom, when she had died for her husband, the valiant fighter[10] and man begotten over three nights raised up but then [he, Herakles] perished accidentally in the end by fire and by a woman -- but, by the ineffable power of our Savior, who disarmed Hades and carried off the dead from the subterranean parts, who took his seat at the right side of the Father with [the body] which he had assumed previously. And he rules over all the invisible and visible creation.