The honour of having cultivated for the first time the province of hagiography as a whole and not merely in a few particulars, belongs, as far as we know, to the historian Eusebius. Before he completed his history of the Church, he planned a collection of the Acts of the Martyrs (συλλοωὴ τῶν μαρτυρίων), which he quotes in his history (v. 1, 6). Unfortunately this compilation has been lost, although it was probably used by Gregory of Tours.[463] He gives further information in his work on the martyrs of Palestine which took place in his own lifetime during the Diocletian persecution, between 303 and 310. This book seems to have been composed after the completion of his History of the Church.[464] Had we similar writings of the same period relating to other provinces of the Church, we should be better informed concerning those extraordinary events.
The method adopted was plainly that each local community worked for itself alone without troubling itself about what happened elsewhere. The worship of the martyrs was also at first limited to particular localities. Certainly there was no lack of interest in what took place in other districts, as is shown by the letter from the churches of Lyons and Vienne to the Christians of Asia Minor, but liturgical and ecclesiastical worship was paid to the martyrs of the place alone. For example, the Calendar of the Roman Church contained those martyrs alone who belonged to the Roman community; in the same way the Alexandrian Calendar contained only those belonging to Egypt, the Antiochene Calendar only those of Syria, and so on. This state of things continued until the ninth century. A striking proof of this is the fact that Ignatius of Antioch, although he suffered death in Rome, finds no place in either the Gelasianum or the Gregorianum, while at Antioch he was venerated as a saint from the beginning. A remarkable exception is the veneration which St Perpetua, St Felicitas, and St Cyprian enjoyed in Rome. In this case the relationship between the mother and the daughter church must be taken into account, for Christianity had spread to Carthage from Rome. From what has been said, it follows that information concerning the manner of a martyr’s death and the exact day on which he suffered, derived from local sources, is trustworthy in the highest degree, but it is forthcoming in a few cases only.
As it was the day of the martyr’s death which was kept and marked in the calendar, it must be observed that this day was sometimes called the martyr’s birthday, natalis, natalitium, and sometimes also dies depositionis. Owing to the burial taking place on the day of death, as was the custom among the ancients, dies obitus and dies depositionis could be used as synonymous terms.[465]
Among the Romans burial followed as soon as the death was certified. Nearly every one belonged to a burial society, which undertook the preparations for the funeral. In addition to these, there were only the preparations in the house to be thought of, and these—the washing and clothing of the corpse—could be quickly performed. Hence the burial could take place in a very short time. The Jews also buried their dead immediately after death, as the story of Ananias and Saphira shows.
The Christians of the first centuries followed out all the customs relating to burial usual in their time and country, excluding only those which were specifically heathen and idolatrous. That they buried their dead with the same expedition as the heathen is clear from an incident related by Tertullian.[466] The burial of a woman who seemed to be dead was for some reason delayed. While she lay ready for burial and the priests were reciting the prayers, she raised up both her hands, and, when the prayer for peace was concluded, laid them down again in their former position. It was only in the fourth century that it began to be the custom to delay burial to the third or fourth day after death,[467] but the earlier practice continued still to exist for a considerable period.[468]
As it was already the custom to inter those who died a natural death on the day of their decease, so there was no reason why the burial of the martyrs should be delayed, and thus with them the dies obitus and the dies depositionis were one and the same. Consequently the ancient dates in question, even when given as that of the burial, are always to be understood as referring to the day of the martyr’s death, and, when they form part of the traditions of the community to which the martyr belonged, they are to be received as absolutely reliable.
In the case of the martyrs, the rule of venerating them on the day of their death admitted of no exception, although it might be set aside in the case of those saints who were not martyrs, for certain reasons and in particular instances. Thus, for example, the day of St Chrysostom’s death, the 14th September, was already occupied in the fourth century by the festival of the Invention of the Holy Cross. St Basil died on the 1st January, and St Ambrose on the 4th April, which fell within the Pascal season. During Lent, no festivals of martyrs were to be celebrated on week-days, according to the fifty-first Canon of Laodicea, but only on Saturdays and Sundays at most. But this prohibition was by no means general.
Besides the lists of the depositiones, the service-books, the sacramentaries or missals, helped to preserve the memory of the martyrs.
In the earliest service-books of the Roman and also of a few other churches, the Masses in honour of the martyrs were not classed by themselves apart, but were incorporated with the others, and not separated from the course of the ecclesiastical year, or, to use a modern expression, the Proprium de Sanctis and the Proprium de Tempore were still fused together. Only in the Gelasianum are the Natalitia sanctorum separated from the ecclesiastical year and collected together in the second volume. Still later were the catalogues of the saints formed into independent works, the so-called martyrologies. In the East these began to appear at an early date. In this a return was made to the older arrangement, except that now it was not the martyrs of the local churches alone which were taken into consideration, but those of the Church Universal.