'Ask him too for the instructions and the bribes given to the haruspices, and to those who led the beasts up to the altar. Though I die, Romans, I have left the proof of all this in good hands. I stood the while where I saw it all.'
'Thou liest, slave,' cried the furious priest; and at the same moment springing forward and seizing an instrument from the hands of one of the tormentors, he struck it into the shoulder of Macer, and the lacerated arm fell from the bleeding trunk. A piercing shriek confessed the inflicted agony.
'Away with him!' cried Varus, 'away with him to the rack, and tear him joint from joint!'
At the word he was borne bleeding away, but not insensible nor speechless. All along as he went his voice was heard calling upon God and Christ, and exhorting the people to abjure their idolatries.
He was soon stretched again upon the rack, which now quickly finished its work; and the Christian Macer, after sufferings which I knew not before that the human frame could so long endure and live, died a martyr to the faith he had espoused; the last words which were heard throughout the hall being these;
'Jesus, I die for thee, and my death is sweet!'
When it was announced to the Prefect that Macer was dead, he exclaimed,
'Take the carcass of the Christian dog and throw it upon the square of the Jews: there let the dogs devour it.'
Saying which, he rose from his seat, and, accompanied by Fronto, left by the same way he had before entered the hall of judgment.
Soon as he had withdrawn from the apartment, the base rabble that had filled it, and had glutted their savage souls upon the horrors of that scene, cried out tumultuously for the body of the Christian, which, when it was gladly delivered to them by those who had already had enough of it, they thrust hooks into, and rushed out dragging it toward the place ordained for it by the Prefect. As they came forth into the streets the mob increased to an immense multitude of those, who seemed possessed of the same spirit. And they had not together proceeded far, filling the air with their cries and uttering maledictions of every form against the unhappy Christians, before a new horror was proclaimed by that blood-thirsty crew. For one of them, suddenly springing up upon the base of one of the public statues, whence he could be heard by the greater part, cried out,