"Well, you look capable of it," said the Prefect, with an undisguised sneer, "and I will gladly use any instruments to crush this vile sect."
"But, your Excellency," said the cringing Greek, swallowing his chagrin and annoyance, "I shall require gold to gain the confidence of these Christians—not to bribe them, for that is impossible, but to spend in what they call charity—to give to their sick and poor."
"Not forgetting yourself, I'll be bound," sneered the Prefect. "But what you say is no doubt true;" and turning to the table he wrote an order upon the Imperial Exchequer, and handed it to the Greek, with the words, "If you make good use of that, there is more where it comes from. The Emperor pays his faithful servants well." Then dismissing the treacherous tool whom he himself despised, he passed into the Basilica, or court, where the bold Christian youth who had torn down the Emperor's edict was to receive his sentence.
Livid with the torture he had undergone to make him disclose the names of his accomplices —tortures which he had borne with heroic fortitude he boldly avowed his act, and defied the power of the Prefect to extort the name of a single Christian from his lips. We will not harrow the hearts of our readers by recounting the atrocious tortures by which the body of the brave youth had been wrung. He was at length borne away fainting to his cruel fate. Although the Prefect, who had sworn to have his secret if he tore the heart out of his body, gnashed his teeth in impotent rage at the defiance of the mangled martyr, yet he could not in his inmost soul help feeling the vast gulf between his sublime fidelity and the heinous guilt of the base traitor from whom he had just parted.
The pages of the contemporary historians, Eusebius and Lactantius, give too minute and circumstantial accounts of the persecutions, of which they were eye-witnesses, to allow us to adopt the complacent theory of Gibbon, that the sufferings of the Christians were comparatively few and insignificant. "We ourselves have seen," says the Bishop of Cæsarea, "crowds of persons, some beheaded, others burned alive in a single day, so that the murderous weapons were blunted and broken to pieces, and the executioners, weary with slaughter, were obliged to give over the work of blood.... They vied with each other," he continues, "in inventing new tortures, as if there were prizes offered to him who should contrive the greatest cruelties."[16] Men whose only crime was their religion, were scourged with chains laden with bronze balls, till the flesh hung in shreds, and even the bones were broken. They were bound in fetters of red hot iron, and roasted over fires so slow that they lingered for hours, or even days, in their mortal agony; their flesh was scraped from the very bone with ragged shells, or lacerated with burning pincers, iron hooks, and instruments with horrid teeth and claws, hence called ungulæ, examples of which have been found in the Catacombs; molten metal was applied to their bodies till they became one undistinguishable wound, and mingled salt and vinegar,[17] or unslacked lime, were rubbed upon the quivering flesh, torn and bleeding from the rack or scourge—tortures more inhuman than savage Indian ever wreaked upon his mortal foe. Chaste matrons and tender virgins were given over to a fate a thousand-fold worse than death, and were subjected to indignities too horrible for words to utter. And all these sufferings were endured, often with joy and exultation, for the love of a Divine Master, when a single word, a grain of incense cast upon the heathen altar, would have released the victims from their agonies. No lapse of time, and no recoil from the idolatrous homage paid in after ages to the martyr's relics, should impair in our hearts the profound and rational reverence with which we bend before his tomb.
While the examination of the Christian martyr was in progress, much interest was manifested in his fate by the throng of idlers who were wont to linger around the public courts, to gratify their curiosity or their morbid love of cruelty.
"The State is in danger," said Piso, the barber, gesticulating violently, "if such miscreants are suffered to live."
"Ay, is it," chimed in a garrulous pedagogue, "this is rank treason."
"Right, neighbour Probus," added a pettifogging lawyer. "This is the very crimen majestatis. These men are the enemies of Cæsar and of the Roman people."
"Who would think he was so wicked?" said a poor freed-woman who sold sugar barley in the Forum. "Sure he looks innocent enough."