So sang Dryden. Chaucer has given the Legend of S. Cæcilia as the Second Nun’s Tale in the Canterbury Pilgrimage.
There is a marvellous collection of ancient statues in Rome, in the Torlonia Gallery. It was made by the late Prince Torlonia. Unhappily, he kept three sculptors in constant employ over these ancient statues, touching them up, adding, mending, altering. It is a vast collection, and now the Torlonia family desire to sell it; but no one will buy, for no one can trust any single statue therein; no one knows what is ancient and what is new. The finest old works are of no value, because of the patching and correcting to which they have been subjected.
It is the same with the Acts of the Martyrs: they have been tinkered at and “improved” in the fifth and sixth centuries, and even later, no doubt with the best intention, but with the result that they have—or many of them have—lost credit altogether.
What a buyer of statuary from the Torlonia Gallery would insist on doing, would be to drag the statues out into the sunshine and go over them with a microscope and see where a piece of marble had been added, or where a new face had been put on old work. Then he would be able to form a judgment as to the value of the statue or bust. And this is precisely the treatment to which the legends of the martyrs have to be subjected. But this treatment tells sometimes in their favour. Narratives that at first sight seem conspicuously false or manufactured, will under the critical microscope reveal the sutures, and show what is old and genuine, and what is adventitious and worthless.
S. AGNES.
III
S. AGNES
About a mile from the Porta Pia, beside the Nomentine road that leads from Rome to the bridge over the Arno and to Montana, are the basilica and catacomb of S. Agnese. We are there on high ground, and here the parents of the saint had a villa and vineyard.
They were Christians, and their garden had an entrance to a catacomb in which the faithful were interred. We know this, because some of the burials in the passages underground are of more ancient date than the martyrdom of S. Agnes, which took place in 304.
A little lane, very dirty, leads down hence into the Salarian road, and there is a mean dribble of a stream in a hollow below.