[165] Called ungulæ, from their resemblance to the claws of a beast of prey.
[166] See examples of the above named tortures in Eusebius’s Hist. Eccles., v, 2; vi, 41; viii, 14; The Martyrs of Palestine, viii; and Lactantius, passim.
On the 22d of April, 1823, says Cardinal Wiseman, a grave in the Catacombs was opened, and, beside the white and polished bones of a youth of eighteen, whose epitaph it bore, was found the skeleton of a boy of twelve or thirteen, charred and blackened chiefly about the upper part. This was probably the remains of a youthful martyr hastily interred in another’s grave, to come to light after the lapse of fifteen centuries.
Prudentius describes the martyr Hippolytus as torn limb from limb:
Cernere erat ruptis compagibus ordine nullo,
Membra per incertos sparsa jacere situs.
[167] Lib. Pontif., c. iv. These notaries were called by the Greeks ὀξυγράφοι or ταχυγράφοι, that is, short-hand writers. Eusebius says they reported the extemporaneous discourses of Origen. Hist. Eccles., vi, 36.
[168] Hic fecit sex vel septem subdiaconos, qui septem notariis imminerent ut gesta martyrum fideliter colligerent.—Lib. Pontif.
[169] The Peristephanon—“Concerning the [martyrs’] crowns.”
[170] In the thirteenth century many of the stories were collected in the Legenda Aurea by Jacques de Voragine, an archbishop of Genoa. After the discovery of printing the press teemed with this legendary literature, Flowers of the Saints, Acts of the Martyrs, etc., embellished with numerous engravings, representing with horrible minuteness the Dantean tortures on which the monkish mind loved to expatiate.
[171] Assatum est: versa et manduca.