History of Ancient Civilization

by Charles Seignobos

The Persecutions.—The Christian religion was persecuted from its birth. Its first enemies were the Jews, who forced the Roman governor of Judæa to crucify Christ; who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr, and so set themselves against St. Paul that they almost compassed his death.

Then came the persecution by the Pagans. The Romans tolerated all the religions of the East because the devotees of Osiris, of Mithra, and of the Good Goddess recognized at the same time the Roman gods. But the Christians, worshippers of the living God, scorned the petty divinities of antiquity. More serious still in the eyes of the Romans, they refused to adore the emperor as a god and to burn incense on the altar of the goddess Roma. Several emperors promulgated edicts against the Christians, bidding the governors arrest them and put them to death. A letter of Pliny the Younger, then governor in Asia, to the emperor Trajan, shows the procedure against them. "Up to this time, regarding the people who have been denounced as Christians, I have always operated as follows: I asked them if they were Christians; if they confessed it, I put the question to them a second time, and then a third time, threatening them with the penalty of death. When they persisted, I had them put to death, convinced that, whatever their fault that they avowed, their disobedience and their resolute obstinacy merited punishment. Many who have been denounced in anonymous writings have denied that they were Christians, have repeated a prayer that I pronounced before them, have offered wine and incense to your statue, which I had set forth for this purpose together with the statues of the gods, and have even reviled the name of Christ. All these are things which it is not possible to compel any true Christians to do. Others have confessed that they were Christians, but they affirm that their crime and their error consisted only in assembling on certain days before sunrise to adore Christ as God, to sing together in his honor, and to bind themselves by oath to commit no crime, to perpetrate no theft, murder, adultery, nor to violate their word. I have believed it necessary in order to secure the truth to put to the torture two female slaves whom they called deaconesses; but I have discovered only an absurd and exaggerated superstition."

The Roman government was a persecutor,[165] but the populace were severer yet. They could not endure these people who worshipped another god than theirs and contemned their deities. Whenever famine or epidemic occurred, the well-known cry was heard, "To the lions with the Christians!" The people forced the magistrates to hunt and persecute the Christians.

The Martyrs.—For the two centuries and a half that the Christians were persecuted, throughout the empire there were thousands of victims, of every age, sex, and condition. Roman citizens, like St. Paul, were beheaded; the others were crucified, burned, most often sent to the beasts in the amphitheatre. If they were allowed to escape with their lives, they were set at forced labor in the mines. Sometimes torture was aggravated by every sort of invention. In the great execution at Lyons, in 177, the Christians, after being tortured and confined in narrow prison quarters, were brought to the arena. The beasts mutilated without killing them. They were then seated in iron chairs heated red by fire. Blandina, a young slave, who survived all these torments was bound with cords and exposed to the fury of a bull. The Christians joyfully suffered these persecutions which gave them entrance to heaven. The occasion presented an opportunity for rendering public testimony to Christ. And so they did not call themselves victims, but martyrs (witnesses); their torture was a testimony. They compared it to the combat of the Olympian games; like the victor in the athletic contests, they spoke of the palm or the crown. Even now the festal day of a martyr is the day of his death.

Frequently a Christian who was present at the persecution would draft a written account of the martyrdom—he related the arrest, the examination, the tortures, and the death. These brief accounts, filled with edifying details, were called The Acts of the Martyrs. They were circulated in the remotest communities; from one end of the empire to the other they published the glory of the martyrs and excited a desire to imitate them. Thousands of the faithful, seized by a thirst for martyrdom, pressed forward to incriminate themselves and to demand condemnation. One day a governor of Asia had decreed persecutions against some Christians: all the Christians of the city presented themselves in his tribunal and demanded to be persecuted. The governor, exasperated, had some of them executed and sent away the others. "Begone, you wretches! If you are so bent on death, you have precipices and ropes." Some of the faithful, to be surer of torture, entered the temples and threw down the idols of the gods. It was several times necessary for even the church to prohibit the solicitation of martyrdom.

The Catacombs.—The ancient custom of burning the dead was repugnant to the Christians. Like the Jews, they interred their dead wrapped with a shroud in a sarcophagus. Cemeteries[166] were therefore required. At Rome where land was very high in price the Christians went below ground, and in the brittle tufa on which Rome was built may be seen long galleries and subterranean chambers. There, in niches excavated along the passages, they laid the bodies of their dead. As each generation excavated new galleries, there was formed at length a subterranean city, called the Catacombs ("to the tombs"). There were similar catacombs in several cities—Naples, Milan, Alexandria, but the most celebrated were those in Rome. These have been investigated in our day and thousands of Christian tombs and inscriptions recovered. The discovery of this subterranean world gave birth to a new department of historical science—Christian Epigraphy and Archæology.

The sepulchral halls of the catacombs do not resemble those of the Egyptians or those of the Etruscans; they are bare and severe. The Christians knew that a corpse had no bodily wants and so they did not adorn the tombs. The most important halls are decorated with very simple ornaments and paintings which almost always represent the same scenes. The most common subjects are the faithful in prayer, and the Good Shepherd, symbolical of Christ. Some of these halls were like chapels. In them were interred the bodies of the holy martyrs and the faithful who wished to lie near them; every year Christians came here to celebrate the mysteries. During the persecutions of the third century the Christians of Rome often took refuge in these subterranean chapels to hold their services of worship, or to escape from pursuit. The Christians could feel safe in this bewildering labyrinth of galleries whose entrance was usually marked by a pagan tomb.

THE MONKS OF THE THIRD CENTURY

The Solitaries.—It was an idea current among Christians, especially in the East, that one could not become a perfect Christian by remaining in the midst of other men. Christ himself had said, "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple." The faithful man or woman who thus withdrew from the world to work out his salvation the more surely, was termed an Anchorite (the man who is set apart), or a Monk (solitary). This custom began in the East in the middle of the third century. The first anchorites established themselves in the deserts and the ruins of the district of Thebes in Upper Egypt, which remained the holy land of the solitaries.