At last, the prophetic voices being unveiled, in our age that ancient truth, confirmed, shone forth before all, with a face plain to behold, lest the truth should waver in doubtful faith, if it lay not open with sight as a near witness. Hence we believe that the very body too does not perish, which is given over to the tomb to be devoured, because Christ raised up in Himself, with the cross, the body that died, and safely roused it bore it to the throne of the Father, and gave to all a way to rise again. That cross is ours; we ascend the gibbet; for us Christ was slain, and for us God — Christ returned, He who, dying, is man, of twofold nature: He dies and tames death, and returns to that which knows not how to perish. Let it suffice to have said a few things about the mysteries of our salvation and the progress of hope; now, now I will be silent:
we are forbidden to scatter the pearls of Christ among the unclean swine, lest the miry beasts trample the holy thing. But since it is not permitted to wrestle with you by deep reasoning, let us take counsel of what is nearest at hand: let the very judgment of the natural senses be questioned — simple, without art — and make there be present an arbiter unschooled in deceit. Give me a boy of about seven years or less, who is free of partiality and hates no one, nor falls into any vice of the mind; let us make trial of what newborn infancy says is to be followed, what new vigor knows.' He, gladly embracing this word of the holy martyr, ordered a little one from the troop of infants to be seized — one not long ago weaned from the milk — and, seized, to be present:
'Ask whatever you will,' he says; 'we will follow whatever the little lad shall approve.' Romanus, burning to test the harmless disposition of the suckling's mouth: 'Little son,' he says, 'tell me, what seems to be true and fitting — to worship the one Christ and the Father in Christ, or to pray together to gods of a thousand forms?' The infant smiled and, without delay, replied: 'Whatever that is which men call God, it must be one, and that which belongs to one is unique. Since Christ is this, Christ is the true God; many kinds of gods not even boys suppose.' The tyrant was astounded, wavering under shame; nor was it seemly to bring laws to bear upon the innocent little age, nor did his savage fury, grown wild, allow him to spare one speaking such things: 'Who,' he says, 'is the author of this voice of yours?' He answered: 'My mother, and the God of my mother:
she, taught by the parent Spirit, drank it in, so that she might feed me with it amid my very swaddling-clothes, that I, a little one, as I drew milk from the twin springs of her breasts, might also drink in the believing of Christ.' 'Then let the mother herself be present,' cries Asclepiades, 'I demand it — let the impious mistress behold the grim outcome of her teaching; let her, bereaved, ill-taught, be tortured by the death of the infant, and let her weep for him whom she has corrupted. Far be it that a vile little woman should weary our ministers: how slight, moreover, will be the pain that vexes the limbs, with the help of a brief death!
the eyes of the parent shall be punished more sharply than if bloody claws should tear his limbs.' Scarcely had he uttered this when he ordered them to lift the little lad on high and strike his buttocks with the hand, then, with his robe removed, to scourge him with rods and to cut his tender back with hard blows, whence more should flow of joys than of blood. Who, of stone, could endure to behold that spectacle? Whose rigor of bronze or of iron could bear it? As often as the dealt willow had touched the body, the wet withes grew red with the thin blood, which the stroke had made with dewy bruises. They say that the menacing cheeks of the scourgers wept of their own accord, with drops trickling down over their faces that grimaced barbarously, and that the scribes themselves, and the ring of the common folk, and the nobles stood not with dry eyes.
But the mother alone is free of such laments; with serene calm alone her brow beams with joy: in the heart of the godly there stands a piety stronger than love, defiant of pains through the love of Christ, and it steels the feeling of tender indulgence. The little one had cried out that he was thirsty — the ardor of his glowing soul amid the torments demanded this, that he should ask for a draught of water — at whom the stern mother, gazing from afar with a grim look, thus chides him with severe words: 'I think, my child, you are troubled by feeble fear, and the dread of pain subdues you, stricken. I did not pledge to God that this offshoot of my own womb should be such, nor did I bring you forth unto this hope of glory, that you should know how to yield to death.
You ask for water to drink, when that living fountain is at hand for you, which ever flows and alone waters all living things, within and without, both spirit and body at once, bestowing eternity on those who drink. You will come soon to that stream, if only ardor alone seethe in your soul and marrow to see Christ — which, once drunk to the full, so allays every burning of the breast that the blessed life now knows not how to thirst. Here, here, my child, is the cup now to be drunk by you, which a thousand little ones in Bethlehem drank: an age forgetful of milk and unmindful of the breasts, refreshed first with bitter, then soon with sweet cups, took the honey of blood. Strive toward that example, O brave boy, you noble might of a high-born mother's offspring!
The Father has ordained that all ages are capable of virtues; He has excepted no day, granting triumphs even to the very wailings of infants. You know — I have often told you, when you played beside me as I taught and gave signs of prattling words — that Isaac was the only little son to his father, who, when he saw the altar and the sword for the sacrifice, of his own accord offered his neck to the consecrating old man. I have also told you that noble and memorable contest which seven boys, born of one mother, waged — yet, by their deeds, men — at the urging of that same mother, in the doubtful issue, that they should not spare their blood for the sake of penalty and crown. She herself, present, watched the very preparations of their funerals, nor was the parent moved, rejoicing as often as either the hissing pan, frying with oil, had roasted a youth, or the dread imprint of the plates had burnt him.
The torturer had torn the hair and the skin from the crown of his head, from the brow, so that the bare skull, stripped of its covering, might disgrace the head all the way down to the neck. But she cried out: 'Endure it! A royal crown shall clothe this brow with gems from a kingly diadem.' The tyrant had ordered the tongue of one of the young men to be cut out; the mother said: 'Glory enough has already been won for us. Behold, the choicest part of our body is offered up to God! Worthy to be a victim is the faithful tongue. The interpreter of the soul, the announcer of our thoughts, the servant of the heart, the herald of the hidden breast, let it be offered first in the sacrament of death, and let it be the first redeemer of all the members; the rest shall soon follow the leader thus consecrated.' Spurring on her Maccabees with such goads, the mother subdued the enemy, beaten down seven times over, she who was rich in as many triumphs as the children she had borne;
'That one child of mine may render me fruitful of glory—my very life—lies in your hand. By the faithful chambers of this womb, by the hearth that twice five months gave you shelter, if the nectar of my breast was sweet to you, if my lap was soft, if my fond rattles were dear, persevere, and claim him who is the author of these gifts! By what skill you began to live within me, and that nothingness too, whence your body came, I do not know; he alone knows it, the quickener and maker of you. To spend yourself upon Him by whose gift you came to birth—well shall you pour back upon the Giver what He gave.' While the mother sang such things, the boy, now glad, laughed at the whistling rods and the pain of the lashes. Then the magistrate pronounced: 'Let the infant be shut in prison, and let the Roman, author of so great an evil, be tortured more harshly.'
Him they furrowed anew along the fresh paths of his scars, and where a little before they had drawn the sharp iron, soon, as the wounds broke open again, they followed up the marks laid bare—those whom now the proud victor calls cowards. 'O strength not manly, O soft hands, that for so long you cannot break apart the single frame of this tottering little body! Scarcely does it hold together, yet it does not wholly fall, overcoming the muscles of your feeble right hands. More swiftly do dogs tear a corpse with their teeth, and far more effective is the bite of vultures for devouring the gobbets of dead flesh; you grow faint with unwarlike hunger and weary, your gullet is wild yet your gluttony is sluggish.' At these words the judge's troubled anger blazed up, and he roused himself to his final sentence: 'If the delay irks you, you may meet a speedy end—you shall be allowed it:
condemned, you shall be devoured by fire, and soon become thin ash.' But as he was led away, while the savage attendants snatched the man from the forum, he, looking back behind him, said: 'I appeal from this cruelty of yours, perfidious one, to my Christ—not trembling in fear of death, but that it may be proved to be nothing, the verdict you pass.' 'Why do I delay,' said the other, 'to destroy them both, the boy and the master, accomplices of an impious sect? Let the sword strike off the worthless head of the child, scarcely a man's, and let the avenging flame burn that other one up; let their ends be unalike, though under one common close.' They came to the very place where the slaughter was to be done. The mother carried her son in her embrace and bosom, so that you would have believed a firstling was being borne to be offered to God, on the dish of holy Abel, chosen from the sheepfold, purer than the rest.
The executioner demanded the boy; the mother gave him, nor did she linger in tears, but pressed only a single kiss: 'Farewell,' she said, 'sweetest one, and when, blessed, you have entered the kingdoms of Christ, remember your mother—now her patron, sprung from her son!' She spoke. Then, while the striker smote the little neck with his sword, the woman, schooled in song, sang a hymn of David's strain: 'Precious in the sight of God is the death of His holy one; that one is Your servant, the offspring of Your handmaid.' Reciting such words she unfolded her cloak and stretched out her hands beneath the blow and the blood, that she might catch the gushing flow of the streaming veins and the welling jet from the throbbing mouth; she caught it, and pressed the flesh to her breast.
But on the other side of the field a smoke-grimed burner was weaving a huge pyre of dry pine, heaping faggots together beneath and a stack of hay, sprinkling it with melted dew of seething pitch, so that the flame might grow more fiercely on such fuel. And now, with his arms wrenched back, the Roman, thrust from afar, was being heaved onto the pyre by a fork: 'I know,' he said, 'that it shall not come to pass that I am burned up, nor is this manner of suffering granted me, and there yet remains a mighty miracle to be done.' These words of his are followed by an immense crash of a falling cloud, a storm-blast hurled headlong wave upon wave in a black river of waters, that overwhelmed the fires. They feed the half-burnt torches with oil, but already the downpour conquers the soaking tinder.
The foul executioner began to tremble, dismayed at these strange things, and to press on by whatever art he could—to turn the brands over with their damp embers, to revive the coals with handfuls of tow, and to seek a seed of fire amid the waters. When this was reported to the swelling judge, it stirred up the wrath of his implacable gall: 'How long, pray,' said he, 'will this arch-magician make sport of us, skilled by Thessalian incantation to turn his punishment into mockery? Perhaps his neck, if I order it to be cut, will not lie open to the wound but bend beneath the sword; or the blow severing the throat will divide the neck, only for it to come together again and be glued back, and the head will jut out, set anew upon the shoulders. Let us try, then, first to lop off with the steel some part of his surviving body, lest, criminal that he is, he fall by a single death, the manifold wretch, or the perfidious one meet death by one slaughter only:
as many members as he bears, by so many ways I wish him to perish. I would like to test, as the tale goes of Lerna, whether he sprouts forth with reborn limbs and renews himself, made new by the losses of his diminished body: he himself shall then be at hand—a Hercules, wont to scorch the Hydra's wounds. Now let a craftsman skilled in cutting be present, one who knows all the borders of the entrails and how to separate the bonds knit to the sinews: bring me one who can mend the wrenched-out bones, or, stitching the bits broken at the joints, fit them together. Let him first draw out the tongue by the very root, which alone of the whole body lives more wickedly; that tongue, basest of all, with insolent motion railing against our gods, has profaned ancient right, daring, and has not even spared the emperor himself.' A certain physician named Aristo, summoned, came; he ordered the tongue to be put forth.
At once the martyr put forth his tongue, uncovered, and the man laid open its depths, handled both the inside of the throat and the palate, and with his finger, tracing the channel of the voice, explored the place for the wound. Then, drawing the tongue far out from the mouth, he plies the scalpel, thrusting it right up to the gullet. While he cut the strands one by one, little by little, never did the martyr bite, nor clench his teeth with set jaws, nor swallow the gore. Unmoved and with mouth wide open he stood firm, while the blood flowed forth without, gushing; beautiful, he bears his chin bathed in a ruddy garland, and gazes on the glory of his bloody breast, and takes joy, as though already in the purple of a royal robe.
The prefect, therefore, supposing that the tongueless man could be compelled to sacrifice, since, lacking words, he would babble no insult against the gods, ordered him brought back—now silent and crippled—being formerly terrified by the great whirlwind of his speech. Once more he sets up the altars before the tribunal, and incense and living fire upon the coals, and the entrails of bulls or the fat of swine; he, having entered and seeing these preparations, blows upon them, as though he beheld the very demons. At this Asclepiades laughs the more merrily, then adds: 'Are you not, somewhat more harshly, as you used to be, ready to speak? Say whatever you wish, and harangue and discourse; I give you leave to exercise your voice freely.' Romanus, sighing long from deep in his heart, drew out his complaint with a groan, and thus began:
'To one who speaks of Christ the tongue is never lacking, nor need you ask by what instrument the words are governed, when the very Giver of words is being proclaimed. He who made it so that the force of the voice, pressed out from the innermost lung, and twisted beneath the vaulted arch of the mouth, now gives back echoing sounds from the palate, now is tempered by the comb of the teeth, and that for these workings the tongue is the moving plectrum—if He commands likewise that the pipes of the throat thus breathe with concordant blast, singing together, so that they unfold words in these very passages or at the mouth's exit, and that the lips, now pressed sparingly, now gaping, utter forth as upon cymbals—do you doubt that the state of nature can be changed, for which that form was made, such as it was at the first? For surely the Maker can turn it as He pleases, and weave and unweave the laws He has set, so that the tongue need not demand speech as its servant.
Do you wish to know the power of our Deity? He pressed with His foot the waves of the flowing sea, and the fluid, thin element joined into solid: how unlike to those laws by which it was founded! It is wont to bear swimming, yet it bears footsteps. Divinity holds this as a familiar office—that Deity which is truly worshipped by us in Christ and the Father—to render speech to the dumb, swift gait to the lame, the enjoyment of hearing to the deaf, and to bestow upon the blind the daylight of light unaccustomed. If any madman thinks these things fables, or if you yourself but lately deemed them little to be trusted, you may now know them true: you have one speaking whose tongue you had cut out. Yield now to miracles that have been proved.' Horror creeps over the stupefied persecutor, and fear and wrath turn his heart into darkness:
he knows not whether he is awake or dreaming, he marvels, transfixed at what kind of portent this might be: dread breaks him, indignation arms him. He can neither master the force of his unbridled mind, nor find where to turn the weapons of his frenzy. At last, in savagery, he orders the innocent physician to be summoned to the dock; he accuses him of having been bought, of having struck a bargain for a fixed fee to play along with the trick—either of having turned the iron about in the mouth to no purpose and in vain, or, with blunted touches or by some craft, of having inflicted a slight wound, which, by injuring a wounded part of the tongue, would harm the sinews yet not cut them all clean away. He claims that the harmony of the voice cannot rightly remain whole, that words cannot be formed by an empty hollow, which the regulating little tongue makes to ring out. Granted that breath resounds in an empty cavern—yet what comes from there is an echo, not speech.
With truths the physician refutes this slander: 'Search, even you yourself now, the recesses of the throat, and carry your curious thumb in among the teeth; either feel the gulps, or inspect the open spaces, whether anything lies hidden that might govern the breathing-passages. And yet, had I perchance touched the tongue with a light prick or a slight wound, the speaker would have spoken feebly, with faltering plectrum; for when the mistress of the voice falls into defect, it is necessary that the very faculty of speaking be cut off too. Let the test be made, if you please, what manner of complaint a four-footed beast utters when its tongue is torn out, and what grunt a tongueless sow squeals—whose voice is broken, whose cry is unshaped; I shall prove that a mute creature emits nothing shrill. I swear by the welfare of the emperor that, plying a simple cutting art, most excellent judge, I have served the public orders without fraud;
let this man know what God it is that lends him words; but I, whence the mute man is made eloquent, I do not know.' With these words Aristo clears himself; but on the other side these things in no way move the impious robber against the Christians—more and more he is borne into madness. He asks whether another's blood had besprinkled the man, or whether it had flowed from his own wound. To these Romanus replied: 'Behold, here I am at hand: this blood of mine is true, not a bull's. Do you recognize that of which I speak, most wretched pagan, the sacred blood of your bull, with whose offered slaughter you are drenched? For your high priest, indeed, is lowered into a pit dug deep into the earth, there to be consecrated, strangely garbed, binding his festal temples with fillets, then with hair combed back beneath a golden crown, propped in his silken toga with a Gabine cincture.
Above, planks laid across weave a platform, full of chinks from the loose-jointed framework of the boarding; they split and bore the surface here and there, and pierce the wood through with frequent point, so that it lies open with many small gaps. Hither a huge bull, with grim and bristling brow, bound with garlands of flowers either across his shoulders or about his entangled horns, is led down; and the victim's brow flashes with gold too, and the gleam of gold-leaf tints his bristles. Here, when the beast is set to be immolated, they cleave its breast with a consecrated hunting-spear; the wide wound belches forth a wave of seething blood, and onto the woven planks of the bridge below it pours a steaming river and surges far and wide.
Then through the thousand passages of the crowded chinks the seeping shower rains down a putrid dew, which the priest, sunk within, catches, holding up his shameful head to all the drops, and is befouled both in his garment and in his whole body. Nay, he turns up his face, offers his cheeks to meet it, sets his ears beneath, exposes his lips and nostrils, washes his very eyes with the fluids, and now spares not his palate but wets his tongue, until he drinks in wholly the black gore. Afterwards, when the carcass, stiffening with the blood drained out, has been drawn back by the priests from that frame, the pontiff comes forth thence, dreadful to look upon, displaying his dripping crown, his heavy beard, his soaked fillets, and his drunken robes.
This man, defiled by such contagions, foul with the gore of a fresh atonement, all salute and adore from afar, because vile blood and a dead ox have washed him as he lurked beneath the loathsome cavern. Shall we add, if you will, that hecatomb of yours, when a hundred animals fall by the knife and the gore, abounding with varied slaughter, floods anew, so that the augurs can scarcely make their way through the deep with bloody swimming? But why do I reproach the fat shambles of your couch-shrines, or the manglers of the greatest herds, with their raw flesh of disemboweled victims? They are holy rites—seeing that you yourselves cut yourselves, and votive grief lops off the limbs. The fanatic draws the knife upon his own arms, and with severed limbs appeases the Mother goddess; to rave and to whirl about is reckoned mystic law;
the sparing right hand is deemed impious for cutting; the cruelty of wounds earns heaven. But this one consecrates his genitals to be reaped, soothing the deity by the severance from his groin; the half-man offers his shameful parts as a gift to the goddess, and feeds her—increased with the flowing blood of the masculine seed wrenched away. Each sex displeases their sanctity; he keeps a middle state between alternating kinds; that one ceases to be a man, yet does not become a woman. The blessed Mother of the gods makes for herself beardless ministers with gentle razors. What, when one about to be consecrated receives the brand-marks? They thrust tiny needles into the furnaces, and proceed to sear the limbs with these, that they may be made fiery; whatever part of the body the burning brand has marked, this they proclaim thus consecrated.
Then, when the spirit has left the dead man and the funeral procession bears him to the tomb, gold-leaf is impressed upon those very parts; a notable plate of gold overlays the skin, and what was scorched by fires is covered with metal. These penalties the heathen world is compelled to bear; by this law the gods restrain their worshippers: thus the demon himself makes sport of these whom he has captured, he teaches them to bear accursed insults, he commands torments to be branded upon the wretched. But this blood of ours flows from your cruelty; you, with impious tyranny, gall the bodies of the innocent. If you let us be, we live unbloodied; but if we are punished bloodily, we conquer.
But now I shall fall silent; the appointed end draws near, the end of evils, the glory of suffering; no longer will it be permitted you, wicked one, as just now it was permitted, to torture or to cut my vitals. You must needs yield, vanquished, and now cease.' 'The torturer and cutter shall indeed cease henceforth,' the judge threatens, 'but the hand of the slayer shall succeed them, the strangler of throats; otherwise the restless voice of the chattering mouth knows no other way to be silenced than if I break that trumpet.' He spoke, and ordered the man to be dragged from the forum, thrust into the darkness of a felon's prison; there the wicked lictor crushed the martyr's neck with a noose. So was the passion accomplished; the soul, loosed from its bonds, seeks heaven.
The prefect is said to have reported the whole affair to the emperor, adding the order of the scrolls and arranging the sequence of so great a tragedy; rejoicing, the tyrant enters every charge as his own upon the magistrates' rolls, on lasting little leaves. But those long ages consume, soot blackens, dust covers with mould, old age wears away, or ruins overwhelm; the page inscribed to Christ is immortal, nor does any letter grow obsolete in the heavens. An angel, standing in the presence of God, took down both what the martyr spoke and what he endured; nor did he record only the words of the one discoursing, but, depicting the very wounds, he expressed them with his stylus—the wounds of the sides, the cheeks, the breast, and the throat.
Every measurement of the blood was noted, how deep, how wide, how near, how long, how short each gash that the furrow had ploughed, what force of pain and what extent of cutting—not one drop of gore did he let go to waste. This book is among the heavenly registers, preserving the memorials of imperishable praise, to be read again one day before the eternal Judge, who with even balance shall weigh the burdens of evils against the abundant stores of rewards. I would wish that, though I am to be among the herds of goats at the left hand, I might be discerned from afar, and that at this man's prayer the best of Kings might say: 'Romanus prays; transfer this goat to me, let him be at the right hand, let the lamb be clothed in fleece.'