Heraclius forbade the lapsed to grieve for their sins. Eusebius taught those unhappy ones to weep for their crimes. The people were rent in parties, and with increasing fury began sedition, slaughter, fighting, discord, and strife. Straightway both were banished by the cruelty of the tyrant, although the ruler was preserving the bonds of peace inviolate. He bore his exile with joy, looking to the Lord as his Judge, and on the Trinacrian shore gave up the world and his life.
The Heraclius mentioned in the inscription is probably the heretical leader referred to in the epitaph of Marcellus, previously given. No reference to this event occurs in any of the ecclesiastical writers, and this
inscription, says Dr. Northcote, is the recovery of a lost chapter in the history of the church.[138] The remains of Eusebius were brought from Sicily, the place of his exile, by his successor, Melchiades, and interred in the Catacomb of Callixtus, but not with the other bishops, the approaches to whose tomb were blocked up with earth, probably to prevent its violation by the enemies of the faith. Melchiades, with whom the long succession of Rome’s martyr bishops comes to a close, was the last of his order who was buried in the Catacombs, and De Rossi conjectures that he has discovered in the Cemetery of Callixtus his tomb, and the very sarcophagus in which he lay.[139]
One of the most illustrious of the lay martyrs of the Diocletian persecution was the gallant young soldier Sebastian, who has given his name to one of the most ancient basilicas of Rome and to the adjacent Catacomb, and Adauctus, a treasurer of the imperial palace. In the Damasine epitaph of the latter occur the fine lines:
INTEMERATA FIDE CONTEMPTO PRINCIPE MVNDI
CONFESSVS XRM CAELESTIA REGNA PETISTI.[140]
With unfaltering faith, despising the lord of the world, having confessed Christ, thou didst seek the celestial realms.
Several of the Christian cemeteries receive their designation from the martyrs of this period, among others those of Saints Agnes, Peter, and Marcellinus, of Pancratius, Generosa, Zeno, Soteris, and Quattro Incoronati, notice of whom will be more appropriate in the accounts of their respective sepulchres. History has also preserved the names of many other valiant confessors, who proved faithful even unto death amid the fiery trials and cruel mockings and scourgings to which they were exposed. Among these may be mentioned Cosmo and Damian, two holy brothers of Cilicia, who practised in Rome with great skill the healing art, from pure love to God and to their fellow-men, refusing to receive aught for their services;[141] Simplicius and Faustinus, who were drowned in the Tiber by the tyrant’s orders, and their martyred sister Beatrice, whose tombs and epitaphs De Rossi believes he has recovered.[142] Most of the legends, however, of what may be called the Romish mythology are disfigured by absurd and superstitious additions; and the martyrs themselves have become the objects of idolatrous veneration far alien from the spirit of that primitive Christianity for which they died.[143]
The following inscriptions from the Catacombs are the only records of the victims of persecution whose names they bear.
