Romanus, valiant champion of Christ the God, move as my patron the organ of a tongueless mouth, bestow a polished song on one who is utterly speechless, grant that I may sing the wonders of your praises! For you yourself know that the dumb can speak. The savage torturer tore out for you the plectrum of your palate and your jaws, nor yet imposed silence on the mouth by which you confessed God. The voice that is witness of truth cannot be extinguished, not even if it throbs with severed passages. So our clinging speech stammers with a feeble tongue and labors with discordant measures; but if you sprinkle the liver with heavenly dew and water the breast with spiritual milk, the hoarse voice will loose its hindered sounds. The Evangelist wrote that the Messiah himself gave such precepts to the apostles:
'Do not, when my sacrament is to be proclaimed, seek words with forethought; I will suggest to the unprepared what they should speak.' I myself am dumb, but my tongue, Christ, mighty in eloquence, will discourse splendidly. He himself will unfold what tumults the demon stirred up with his last breath, while he was being subdued—a pestilence worse in fury at the very end. So a serpent, wounded by the dart's stroke, bites back at the iron and, fiercer with pain, by shaking lingers with its teeth pressed in, but the fixed spear-shaft remains the deeper, nor does it feel the empty perils of its bites. Galerius, as it chanced, was ruling, the leader stationed over the Roman world, as antiquity records, harsh, savage, rough, implacable. He had sent his edicts far and wide into all the world: that whoever preferred to live should deny Christ.
These things that serpent dictates with kingly mouth, who, coming forth from the tombs of the dead, cries out: 'Why before the time, by your swift coming, do you dissolve my realms? Spare me, Son of the Most High, or else bid me possess the hearts of swine.' The prefect Asclepiades, pressing on with these affairs, orders his soldiers to go and snatch from the sacred shrines, all the way, the assembly of the Church, and the people to be consigned to chains, unless it spurn the Nazarene discipline. Soon he himself, planning to break into the temple and eager to scatter the holy of holies, profane, with impious arms made ready to overthrow the altar's mound from its very foundation, and to dissolve into ruin the very doors.
Romanus, a keen hero of surpassing excellence, runs ahead as a herald when these things are suddenly learned, announces that the foes are coming in arms, and, forestalling the timorous spirits with exhortations, that they may stand ready and not yield to the whirlwind. The Christian flock, allied in one spirit, conspires—an undaunted army of mothers, men, little ones, virgins; and the resolve is fixed and settled in all, to defend the faith or gladly to die. The soldier, repulsed, reports to the benches of the magistrates that the Roman leader is a rebel: that all are ablaze with persistent boldness, that they obstinately offer their bared throats, so that the brave may meet a glorious death. Headlong Romanus is then bidden to be seized, and alone, as the instigator and torch of all, to plead the cause on behalf of the defiant people.
He goes, not resisting, and asks to be bound, and of his own accord twists his bent hands behind his back. Love of the crown almost forestalls the executioner's savage art, as he willingly offers his bared ribs to be cut by the two-pronged claws. He bursts in at the lofty threshold, and, while the heralds are struck dumb with amazement, he himself drags the torturer along. To him standing before his face the tyrant thus begins: 'Infamous monster, vile, abominable, you fanner of the city and fickle storm of the mob, you disquiet the unstable, wavering minds, lest the ignorant crowd should submit itself to the laws. By devastating something under the color of glory, the unlettered throng has believed that they shall consecrate themselves through the ages, if they wage wars against the gods like the giants, and, conquered by flames, are buried beneath mountains.
This spectacle of bloody slaughter you have prepared, you lost wretch, for the destruction of the citizens, whom, as profane and guilty of an impious age, it is necessary, with you as their master, to put to death. You are the cause of their death, you the standard-bearer of evils. Unless I am mistaken, it is just that, since as a wicked instigator you compelled many to suffer, as their executioner, it should rebound upon you, and that for so great slaughters as are soon to come, you first should pay the destruction and bear it yourself, what you had urged must be borne.' To these things that man replies with free voice: 'I embrace it, O prefect, nor do I withdraw myself, that for the faithful people I alone may be sacrificed, worthy to undergo all things—if you ask me—whatever your cruelty shall command. It is not permitted to the slaves of idols and demons to enter the holy house of our salvation, lest the pure place of prayer be polluted;
I am confident in the Holy Spirit that it shall never be granted you to set your foot upon that blessed threshold, unless perchance, being made one of us, you should earn to be taken into our flock — which may God the Father bring to pass.' Inflamed by these words, Asclepiades had ordered the body to be disembowelled, to hang stretched far out upon the rack, and to be stretched ever wider with hooks and bonds. But the officers suggest to the raging man that he is noble by ancient lineage and, by his many merits, foremost among the citizens. He orders the deadly stake removed, lest a plebeian punishment condemn so illustrious a man. 'Let his back be beaten,' he says, 'with thick blows, and let his neck, lashed with lead, swell up. Each person is fittingly punished, and it matters greatly whether he be base or noble;
the manner of torment is meted out to the accused according to his rank.' So the martyr, smitten by that hail of blows, after he had sung a hymn amid the leaden strokes, stood upright and began: 'Far be it that the blood of my forebears or the rank of the senate-house should make me noble; it is the high-born sect of Christ that ennobles men. If you would recount, in the text of a genealogy, what is the first origin of our beginnings, we took our descent from the very mouth of God our Father. Whomever each man serves, he is truly noble; the rebel against his Father is found to be degenerate. Then a new honour accrues to one's lineage, and a vast splendour, as when a magistracy is conferred, if the branded wounds of iron and fire seal one a worthy witness in confessing the Name, and a glorious death follow the violence of these pains. Beware that you be not perversely kind, nor spare me with gentle leniency;
press hard upon my limbs, torturer, that I may be noble! If, enlarged by these, I may enjoy such successes, I shall reckon my father's and my mother's stock not worth a straw. These very heights of your dignities — what do you think they are? Do not the rods, the axes, the curule chair, the bordered togas, the lictor, the tribunal, and three hundred insignia (in which you swell up and then straightway deflate) pass swiftly away? When you enter the consulate, as house-born slaves are wont — I am ashamed to confess it — you feed chickens with spelt; the bearer of the ivory eagle takes on arrogance and swells, puffed up by the bone of a beast that has the form of a bird. Now if you lie beneath the altars at the feet of little images, thirsting below the carved oak, what should I judge you to be but more abject? I know that togaed nobles bare their soles before the carriage in the rites of the Idaean Mother.
A little black stone, to be carried in a chariot, enclosed in silver, with the face of a woman, sits enthroned; and while you lead it forth, going before it on foot, your shoes removed and your feet chafing, you come all the way to the brook of Almo. What of that disgraceful procession? Surely it shows us to be base, when you Luperci run about. Whom among the little slaves would I not count the vilest — if, naked and dashing through every street, he should strike at the girls, smitten with a playful lash? I pity your rites and your princes and your morals, O Rome, the supreme head of the age. Come, let us unfold, if you please, your mysteries, prefect: now you must hear, whether you will or no, what filth you worship. Nor does that frenzy frighten me, in which you swell — that with grimacing face, with haughty bearing, with rigid mien you menace the torments of a cruel death;
if you strive to move me by any of these things, contend with me by reason, not by fury! You bid me, leaving the sacred rites of my Father and of Christ, to worship along with you a thousand females and males, gods and goddesses and offspring of both sexes, grandsons, great-grandsons, brought forth — and a whole foul progeny of so many debaucheries. The girls marry, are often beguiled by tricks, are crushed by the frauds of their lovers; incest seethes, the adulteries of paramours grow hot, the husband cheats, the wife hates her rival, chains bind the adulterous gods. Show me, I pray, at which altars you bid the sod smoke with a slaughtered ram? Shall I go to Delphi? But there forbids the corrupted fame of that wrestler-boy whom your god unmanned by the license of the wrestling-school. Soon the foul one wept for the youth he had slain with a heavy discus and consecrated his flowery minion;
the same one, hired, fed another's herd, and then, suffering the theft of his lost flock, that sluggish cowherd even lost his very weapons. Or shall I go to Cybele's pine-grove? But the cock-priest stands in the way, for his lust's sake, safe — through a grievous wound and a shameful gelding — from the embrace of the unchaste goddess: a eunuch to be bewailed amid the Mother's many rites. But perhaps, I suppose, I shall embrace the threshold of great Jove, who, if he were arraigned as a defendant under your laws, entangled in the snares of the menacing Julian law, would, convicted, pay the stern penalty — and, with you as judge, deserving by the Scantinian law to go to prison. What — do you think the founder of the golden age must be worshipped? whom you do not deny was a fugitive and lay hidden by stealth while he dreaded harm; whom, if Jupiter hears that he lives in bliss, he must needs strike down — the accomplices of his concealment.
What — do you think one ought to act amid the altars of warring divinities? Mars's offended valour will be indignant if the Lemnian (Vulcan) is worshipped; whoever should consecrate Hercules with image or shrine will feel Juno's wrath. You say that the poets freely color these tales — but they too are themselves devoted, along with you, to such mysteries, and they worship what they describe. Why do you so gladly read over the sacrilege? Why, in the theaters, with you looking on, is it applauded? The Swan-seducer sins upon the stage; the player dances the bull-horned Thunderer; the chief pontiff, spectator of these things, sits and laughs, and even by his not denying clears nothing away, while the repute of so great a divinity is defiled. Why do you, consecrated priest, dissolve into peals of laughter, when the god feigns himself the husband of Alcmene?
The stage-harlot openly bewails the wounded Adonis with lustful passion; and does the brothel of the holy Cyprian (Venus) not move you? What of the truth that lies plain beneath the very images, shaped in bronze with the traces of crimes? What does that emblem mean, ever fixed to Jove — the bird, his minister? Surely a swift armor-bearing pander, who carried off the catamite to the tyrant. Ceres holds out a torch, her robe ungirt: why, if no one among the gods ravished the maiden, whom the sleepless mother wanders through the night to seek? We behold the Tirynthian (Hercules) twirling spindles: why, if he was not a plaything to Neaera? What — shall I detest the gods that are monsters of rustics, the Fauns, the Priapi, the patrons of the pan-pipes, the swimming nymphs and the watery dwellers, set in the deep after the manner of frogs in a pool — divine right resting in worthless seaweeds?
To worship these things you summon me, good censor? Can you, if you are sound of mind, deem anything of the sort holy? Does not derision shake your lungs as you gaze on these follies, which drunken old women fashion in their dreams? Or if there is anything anywhere of mystic vanity that we ought to worship, do you yourself begin first. Adore them all indiscriminately, whatever sacred thing is on earth — the Latin gods and the Egyptian gods, to whom Rome pours libations, to whom Canopus makes supplication. You pray to Venus — pray also to the ape; the sacred asp of Aesculapius pleases — why then do the crocodile, the ibis, and the dog displease? Set up devout little altars to leeks, worship the bitter onion, the biting garlic. Are the sooty household-gods appeased with incense, while the consecrated little vegetables are spat out?
Or whence is the majesty of the hearths believed to be greater than that born in the hoed gardens, if there is a deity in pots and a deity in leeks as well? But the carved form in bronze is a beautiful thing: what shall I imprecate against the workshops of Greece, which made gods for foolish peoples? The forceps of Myron, the hammer of Polyclitus — these are the nature and origin of your heavenly ones. Art, skillful at sowing errors, while it twines the stiff beard about Jove, while gently shaping his flowing hair files into curls and clusters the locks of Liber, and while it roughens Minerva's breast with serpents, has cast a black terror upon the affrighted, that they shudder at the bronze as at the Thunderer's bolt, that they tremble at the venom of the hissing Gorgon, that they think the youth (Bacchus), after his Indian triumphs, can strike with his thyrsus though he be drunk.
Then, because they see Diana lightly girt, they dread the bow of the hunting virgin; if perchance the molten mass has fashioned the visage of a more grim-faced Hercules with curling locks, his club is believed to threaten unless he be worshipped. Now what terror lurks in the hearts of the fearful, if it should have polishedly expressed Juno's wrath — as though, gazing with eyes twisted askance, she turned her face away from the sacrificing victim, the stone with stern brow counterfeits her menaces. I marvel that you have not also consecrated Mentor himself, and that Phidias himself has no temple and altars — these makers of gods, or rather parents of the divinities; who, had they plied the furnaces more sluggishly, there would be no cast-bronze Jupiter at all.
Are you not ashamed, you fool, given over to the village-cult, always to have wasted such great victuals — which, witless, you offered to such gods as a ladle, a basin, a flagon, frying-pans, broken and melted-down little vessels contributed? Yet I forgive these things in the common simpletons, whom the dyed wool upon a post frightens, whom the lying mountebank often deceives, to whom everything is holy that the dreadful sing-song of the toothless hags has commended as awful. But you — learned and erudite men I marvel at, men whom a weighed rule of life governs, that you do not know by what law things divine or mortal subsist, what great Majesty rules whatever has been created, which made all things.
God eternal, a Reality beyond all reckoning, is not enclosed by thinking nor by seeing; He exceeds every measure of the human mind, nor can He be comprehended by our sight; outside and within He fills and overflows. Timeless, before the first day, He alone holds it to be and ever to have been; He Himself is the true Light, the Author of the true light: when He was Light, He poured forth His own Light, and from that Light the Brightness here begotten is the Son. One is the power of the Father, and one the power of the Son, and one Splendor sown from one Light shone forth in the full deity of brightness; the simple nature of the one God prevails, and whatever exists anywhere, one Power founded:
the heaven and the earth, the force of the sea's flood, the spheres that preside over days and nights, the winds, storms, lightnings, rains, clouds, the seven plough-oxen (the Great Bear), the evening stars, the tides, snows, springs, frosts, and metals and rivers; the cliffs, the plains, the mountain valleys, the wild beasts, the birds, the creeping and the swimming things, the beasts of burden, the cattle, the yoke-bearers, the brute beasts, the flowers, the shrubs, the buds, the herbs, the trees, both those that are for fragrance and those that grow green for food. These God wrought not by labor and craft, but by a command which His power brought forth He bade to be; the things that were not were made; by His Word He created the all-formed engine of the world; the Father's power was always in the Word.
You have come to know Him; now learn the rite and manner of worshipping, of what kind the temple should be, what offerings He has ordained to be dedicated, what vows He requires, what priests He wills, what nectar He commands to be immolated there. He has Himself founded for Himself, within the mind of man, a temple living, serene, sensible, breathing, incapable of being dissolved nor destructible, fair, comely, towering at its summit, overlaid with diverse colors. There the priest stands upon the consecrated threshold, and the maiden Faith guards the foremost doors; her tresses bound with royal fillets, she requires that victims be offered to Christ and to the Father, such as she knows to please Him — white-robed and unblemished:
modesty of brow, innocence of heart, the calm of peace, chastity of body, the fear of God, the rule of knowledge, the sober frugality of fasts, hope that does not lie prostrate, and a hand ever generous. From these victims a pleasant vapor rises, surpassing the fragrance of balsam, of frankincense, of saffron, the moist breezes of Persian spices; lifted from there it is borne up to the very heavens and, prospered, delights the sweet God. Whoever, in enmity, forbids this discipline forbids the approved life and the following of holiness, forbids the vigor of the mind to reach high, and calls the keenness of our fire down to the earth, nor allows the power of prudence to be roused.
O blindness of the heathen, sunk in mire! O fleshly breasts of the nations! O dense error, O benighted race, friendly to the earth, given over to the corpse, ever gazing on things below, never above! Is it not the height of madness and the utmost folly to deem those gods who are begotten by marriages, to seek a spiritual thing in an earthly way, to consecrate the elements of the world upon altars, to believe that to be the Creator which has been created, to make supplication to a hewn log, to sprinkle inscribed stones with the blood of a boar, to entreat altars with morsels of beef — when you know that those whom you consecrate were once men — to lick the carrion urns of the accused dead? Cease, O judge of this world, to bid so great a wickedness upon brave and free men! Nothing is loftier than the love of truth;
to those who assert the name of the eternal God there is nothing for fear; death itself lies subject to them. For a long while Asclepiades, as the martyr discoursed, had been seething within with cunning wrath, fuming with deep gall, while he kept long silent and conceived bile in his hidden breast; at last he vomited out the force of his lurking fury: 'By Jupiter! What is this that I hear from this man? He stands amid the altars and the images of the gods and — what I am forced to confess — in the midst of the forum, with my own self silent, the lost wretch holds forth, defiling with his impious mouth whatever is sacred. O law of our forefathers! O state of the ancient custom! The inventions of the Pompilian kings for the public welfare our age now carps at. What new error has imported these sophists, who argue that the gods are not to be worshipped?
Now this Christian doctrine is born to us, after a thousand consuls have at last rolled by since the City of Rome — not to recount the Nestors. Whatever rises up as new, once was not. Do you wish to know the supreme power of things? Consult Pyrrha! Where then was this supreme god of yours, when, by the gods' favor, the boy of Mars, Romulus, founded the seven-hilled citadel? In that Rome is mighty, founded under good auspices, she owes it to Jupiter the Stayer and to the other gods. This is hallowed from of old, this handed down from our ancestors: that shrines must be appeased by us for the triumphs of the prince, so that the auspicious onset may second his glory, and that, with the foes subdued, the leader may rein the quiet world with laws.
Gird yourself then, whoever you are, you utter villain, duly to pray the gods with us for the welfare of the prince by your life; or, since you must suffer as a public enemy, pay the penalty with your blood: to have scorned the temples is to have spurned the prince.' Then he replied: 'Never, for the welfare and the mightiest and bravest cohorts of the prince, shall I pray otherwise than that they may serve faithfully and, by Christ's baptismal waters, be reborn to the Father, and may receive the very Paraclete from heaven, that they may spurn the murk of idols, that they may discern that Light of eternal hope which flows in not by gross sights nor flashes through bodily windows, but which shines within upon pure minds.
The dull pupil of the flesh perceives the dull, and sees a perishable thing — that which must be dissolved; but the liquid moisture of the soul is fit for seeing liquid things; the fervent nature alone of the most fervent Godhead grasps His coruscating power. This Light, I pray, may your emperor and mine come to know — mine, if he will become mine; for if he resists the Christian name, that emperor of yours shall not be mine; never, believe me, will I serve one who commands wickedness.' 'Do you stand idle, ministers?' the judge cries out, saying, 'Do you stand and hold back your avenging hands?
Do you not rip his entrails with cut furrows, nor probe the soul hidden within, from whence bursts forth this voice profaning the prince?' The most hideous soldiers cleave both sides of the hanging man's flank with a gaping blade; they furrow long wounds, drawn out across his limbs, cutting slanting across the straight, the straight across the transverse; and now, the bones laid bare, his breast gleams white. They pant with their straining, they flow with sweat, though calm is the hero against whom they rage. Amid these things Romanus adds, speaking of his own accord: 'If you seek, O prefect, to know the truth — all this, however we are mangled, gives no pain. The pain is that error has settled in your breast, that you drag these lost peoples along with you to ruin.
They run thronging from every side to the spectacle, the heathen crowd — alas, bodies to be lamented — and they tremble at the raw example of our lot. Hear, all of you! I cry afar and proclaim, I send forth my voice from the scaffold, the higher: Christ, the Splendor of the Father's glory, God, Creator of all things, our partaker likewise, promises everlasting salvation to those who believe — the salvation of the soul, which alone does not perish, but, enduring perpetually, undergoes diverse fates: either it shines with light or is plunged in darkness; following Christ it enters the glory of the Father, sundered from Christ it is made over to Tartarus. The quality of the reward must be cared for — what manner of everlasting substance may one day fall to me; for I count my limbs of little worth, in whatever way they fall, certain to fall by the law of their own nature. Ruin is at hand; let what must be dissolved fall to ruin.
Nor does it matter whether fire and torture-strings rage, or whether a harsh wasting wracks the sickly body, since often a greater savagery arms diseases. The hooks do not gouge the side with such force as the cruel pleurisy strikes with its point; nor does the skin, branded with plates, burn so, as a fever consumes the veins with black gall, or fire creeping over the surface of the skin scorches it and the seething heat raises up blisters: you would think it were being burnt with hissing cauteries. You think me wretched, that I hang stretched with arms twisted back, that my feet are wrenched apart, that the joint sounds with cracking sinews: so, wailing, do their bones cry out as being torn asunder, whom knotty gout and arthritis torment. You all shudder at these hands of the executioners: are the hands of the healers more gentle, when the Hippocratic butchery rages?
The living flesh is cut, and fresh blood stains the scalpels, while the rottenness is scraped away. Suppose the surgeons bring the grim iron to my ribs — yet it cuts to heal; that is not bitter by which health is restored. Those men seem to pluck at the wasting limbs, but they give a remedy to the things alive within. And who does not know how great a corruption belongs to flesh, contaminated and dissoluble? It grows foul, swells, melts, stinks, aches, is inflamed with anger, dissolved by lust, and oftentimes, dyed with gall, draws on livid bruises. Is not hoarded gold acquired for the flesh? The flowing robe, the gem, the silk, the purple are sought in a thousand wiles for the flesh's use; the luxury of gluttony fosters the flesh's fat; the pleasure of the flesh rushes headlong through every wickedness.
Heal, I beg you, executioner, so great evils; cut away, pluck out the tinder of sins; bring it to pass that, the rotting state of the weak flesh being cut away, the mind may survive, free from all pain, nor bear any longer what a tyrant may amputate. Nor be frightened by the crowd of bystanders: this alone I lose, which will perish for all — king, client, poor man and rich. So the flesh of house-slaves, so of senators, wastes away; nay, with the tomb it is laid in. A cheap loss bites, and the damage is light, if we fear to lose that which must be done without. Why does not the will anticipate what is necessary? Why does not nature turn it into a matter of glory? Let us reckon a lawful loss among the rewards. But what may be the form of rewards for the brave, let us see — that, surely, which never seeks itself.
Poured back into heaven, the spirit will fly up, and enjoy to the full the Light of God the Father, while Christ reigns, standing in the royal citadel. Whenever heaven shall be folded up like a book, the orb of the wheeling sun shall fall to earth, ruin shall destroy the monthly sphere (the moon); God alone shall survive, and the just at the same time, together with the everlasting angels, shall remain. Despise the present advantage, O prudent man — that which must come to an end, which must be left behind by you; let go the body, the thing of the tomb and of the funeral; stretch toward the glory to come, press on to God, recognize who you are, conquer the world and the age!' Scarcely had the martyr finished uttering this oration, when the raging Asclepiades broke in: 'Let the executioner turn his stroke against the speaker's mouth, and let him transfer his hand and the sharp furrows and the torture-strings to his jaws.
Let the very source of his wordiness be burst, that loquacity may lose the gushing breaths of speech through punctured bellows, on which no law sets a measure for sounding; and the very words of the speaker I would have tortured.' The impious lictor fulfills the orders of him that commands; he scratches both cheeks with writing claws and cuts the face with bloody marks; the skin shaggy with beard is loosened piecemeal, and the whole visage is rent right down to the chin. The martyr speaks amid the flowing blood: 'Great thanks, O prefect, I owe you, that, opening many mouths, I now speak Christ: a single passage was straitening the heralding of the ample Name, unequal to the praises of God.
The uttered voice has found gaping clefts, and, poured through many openings, gives back sounds from here and there, more numerous, and from every side proclaims the eternal glory of Christ and the Father: behold, as many mouths praise as there are wounds!' The judge, checked by such constancy, orders the punishment to cease; then thus he speaks: 'By the fires of the Sun I swear, who administers our days by alternating circuits, by whose return both light and the year are led on — fires must now be prepared for you, of a grim pyre, which with a fitting end may devour that body, which, persevering, so wickedly resists the ancient rites, nor, vanquished by the darts of pains, grows faint, but becomes stronger under punishments. What stupor has cast this rigidity into his breast? The mind is obstinate, the whole body has grown callous; so great is the frenzy of the new doctrine that reigns:
for this Christ of yours surely was not long ago, whom you yourself confess fastened to a cross.' 'This very cross is the salvation of us all,' Romanus says; 'this is the redemption of man. I know you incapable of the sacrament, impious one; you cannot drink in our mystery with your blind senses: night grasps nothing of the daylight. Yet in the darkness I will bring forth a bright torch; the healthy will see, the bleary-eyed will cover his eyes. Remove the light, the incurable man will say; to one seeing nothing the brightness is an injury. Hear, profane one, what, weighed down, you hate! The eternal King brought forth the eternal King, abiding in Himself and not lesser in time, because time does not hold Him; for He is the wellspring, going back behind the beginnings, both of days and of times — Christ from the Father: the Father is this same thing which the Son is.
Here He offered Himself to be seen by mortals; immortality took on a mortal body, that, while the Eternal bears the perishable, our nature might be able to pass to the things of heaven: man was slain, and God rose again. Death joined battle with God bearing limbs; while it assails our part, it yielded to the immortals. You think this foolish, sophists of the age, but the supreme Father chose the foolish things of the world, that the foolish of the world might be the prudent of God. You recount the antiquity of Romulus and the Martial she-wolf first, and the omen of the vultures. If you spurn new things, nothing is so recent: scarcely does the course of days fill out this little age with a thousand fasti, reckoned from the augur-founder.
I could bring forth six hundred kingdoms founded long ago throughout the whole world, were there leisure — illustrious long before Jupiter, the father of Mars, is said to have sucked the Cretan she-goat. But those are no more, and these too one day shall not be. This cross of Christ, which you call new — when, at the world's birth, man was first made, it was figured in signs and set forth in letters; His coming was foretold through a thousand miracles by the harmonious mouth of the prophets. Kings, prophets, judges, and princes by valor, by wars, by sacred rites, by the pen did not cease to portray the form of the cross; the cross was prefigured, the cross was foreshadowed before; the ancient ages drank in the cross.
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.'