Crowns of the Martyrs

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–3.193 · 4.1–7.65 · 8.1–10.545 · 10.577–10.1089 · 11.1–14.97

1. 1.1The two martyrs of Calahorra, whose names are written in heaven, are honored by pilgrims who find their prayers heard through the martyrs’ intercession; death by the persecutor’s sword is a glorious door to heaven.
2. 1.33The two soldiers leave the army for the Cross; in a persecution that forced Christians to sacrifice, they stand ready for any torture, declaring that they have paid Caesar his due and now owe themselves to God.
3. 1.65The records of the martyrs’ passion were destroyed by a persecutor, but it is remembered that at their execution a ring and a handkerchief were carried up to heaven; the poet calls on the once-pagan Basques to see the martyrs’ power over demons.
4. 1.97At the martyrs’ shrine the possessed are delivered as the demons are tormented and flee, and the sick are healed; the people of the Ebro valley are called to celebrate the feast.
5. 2.1Rome, once mother of temples, has conquered its idols through the martyr Lawrence; Bishop Sixtus, on the cross, foretold that his deacon would follow him in three days.
6. 2.33Lawrence, chief of Rome’s seven deacons, kept the church’s treasury; the greedy prefect, believing gold was hidden in the churches, summoned him and demanded it.
7. 2.65The prefect alleges that Christian bishops use gold and silver vessels and that the faithful sell their estates to enrich the churches, and demands the treasure for the state, quoting Christ’s saying about rendering to Caesar.
8. 2.97The prefect taunts that Christ brought no money and taught in words alone; Lawrence calmly agrees that the Church is richer than the emperor and promises to bring out Christ’s treasures if given a little time.
9. 2.129Given three days, Lawrence gathers from all the streets the blind, the lame, the sick and maimed whom the Church fed, and records their names.
10. 2.161When the day came, Lawrence led the prefect to the church door, where the crowds of the poor stood as the Church’s treasure; the prefect was enraged, and Lawrence began to contrast them with gold dug from mines.
11. 2.193Lawrence argues that gold corrupts chastity, peace and law, while the true gold is light and humankind; bodily weakness humbles and strengthens the soul, and disease of the mind is worse than disease of the flesh.
12. 2.225The poor, though weak in body, are sound within; the rich are diseased inwardly: the proud man with dropsy, the miser with crippled hands, the lustful man with filth, the ambitious man with fever, the gossip with an itching heart.
13. 2.257The prefect, a worshiper of demons, is himself diseased; the poor he despises will rise whole and crowned in heaven, while the powerful will appear in the soul’s true state, ragged and foul, for nothing is more hideous than a sinner.
14. 2.289Lawrence presents the poor as the Church’s gold and the consecrated virgins and widows who refused second marriage as her jewels; the prefect, furious at being mocked, turns on him.
15. 2.321The enraged prefect refuses Lawrence a quick death and orders him roasted slowly on gentle coals as an example to all Christians.
16. 2.353As Lawrence is stripped and bound, his face shines like Moses’ coming down from Sinai and Stephen’s at his stoning; the newly baptized see the light, but the blind impious do not, as in the plague of darkness on Egypt.
17. 2.385The smell of the roasting martyr is a stench to persecutors and nectar to believers, for Christ is a fire that lights the righteous and burns the guilty; Lawrence jests from the gridiron and then prays to Christ for Rome.
18. 2.417Lawrence prays that Rome, which Christ made ruler of a united world so that the gospel might bind all nations in one, may itself become Christian, for its senate still worships the old gods.
19. 2.449Lawrence prays that Christ will end pagan worship in Rome, where Peter and Paul, slain by Nero, already reign, and foresees a Christian emperor who will close the temples.
20. 2.481Lawrence dies at the end of his prayer; senators carry his body, converted by his freedom, and from that day pagan worship in Rome declined, for the martyr’s death was the death of the temples.
21. 2.513Romans of every rank, even former pagan priests and a Vestal, now honor the apostles and martyrs; the poet, far away in Spain, envies those who can pray at Lawrence’s tomb in a Rome full of saints.
22. 2.545The poet honors Lawrence in heaven, a citizen and perpetual consul of the heavenly Rome who grants the prayers of the Romans, and asks him, as patron, to intercede for the sinful poet Prudentius.
23. 3.1Eulalia of Merida, a girl of twelve who as a child already scorned ornaments and play, rose up when the persecution forced Christians to sacrifice, determined to confront the persecutors.
24. 3.33Her parents hid Eulalia in the country, but she slipped out at night and, guided by heavenly light as Israel was by the pillar of fire, walked to the city and at dawn confronted the governor at his tribunal.
25. 3.65Eulalia declares herself a Christian, calls the gods and the emperor Maximian nothing, and dares the torturer to do his worst; the enraged governor orders her punished.
26. 3.97The governor urges Eulalia to think of marriage and her family and to escape torture by touching a little salt and incense; she spits in his face and overturns the idols, and the torturers tear her with claws.
27. 3.129Eulalia reads her wounds as Christ’s name written on her body and sings without tears; when the torches set her hair aflame she drinks in the fire, and a white dove is seen leaving her mouth for heaven.
28. 3.161The executioners flee at the sight of the dove; snow falls and covers Eulalia’s body as a shroud; her relics now rest in a splendid marble shrine at Merida beside the river Anas.
29. 3.193The poet calls the young to strew flowers at Eulalia’s shrine and offers his own garland of verse, venerating her bones and the altar over them; she, at God’s feet, favors her people.
30. 4.1Saragossa keeps the eighteen martyrs in one tomb; at the judgment each city will bring its martyrs to Christ: Carthage Cyprian, Cordoba Acisclus and Zoellus, Tarragona Fructuosus and his two deacons, Gerona Felix, Calahorra its two.
31. 4.33The list of cities and their martyrs continues: Barcelona, Narbonne, Arles, Merida, Alcalá, Tangier; Saragossa will bring eighteen, a gift scarcely surpassed by Carthage or Rome.
32. 4.65The martyrs’ blood guards Saragossa from demons; the city is a homeland of martyrs, the home of the deacon Vincent and the episcopal family of the Valerii, and has given martyrs in every persecution.
33. 4.97Vincent, though martyred elsewhere, belongs to Saragossa, where he was trained; Engratia also lies here, the only martyr who survived her tortures, which were more cruel than a swift death.
34. 4.129Engratia, crowned as a martyr though she survived, makes Saragossa the house of a living martyr; the poet names the eighteen: Optatus, Lupercus, Successus, Martial, Urbanus, Julia, Publius, Fronto, Felix, Caecilianus, Evotius, Primitivus, Apodemius and others.
35. 4.161Four martyrs named Saturninus complete the eighteen, whose names are written in the book of heaven; Engratia, Vincent, and the confessors Caius and Crementius are added; the martyrs beneath the altar pray for the city’s sins, and the poet calls the city to prayer at their tombs.
36. 5.1The poet hails the feast of the deacon Vincent, now among the angels in a robe washed in blood; the governor first tried gentle persuasion, ordering the Christians to sacrifice by imperial decree.
37. 5.33Vincent, one of the seven deacons, refuses to worship stones and wood and confesses the Father and Christ his Son as the one true God; the governor Datian threatens death, and Vincent defies him.
38. 5.65Vincent mocks the idols made by craftsmen and declares that the spirits behind them are demons who incite persecution yet tremble at Christ and confess themselves demons when exorcized; the judge orders him silenced.
39. 5.97Datian orders Vincent stretched on the rack and torn with claws; Vincent laughs at the torturers, who tire before he does.
40. 5.129Datian is enraged that Vincent smiles under torture and orders a pause so the wounds can be reopened; Vincent challenges him to torture him himself, for the inner man cannot be harmed.
41. 5.161The body is only a clay vessel; the inner man is subject to God alone. Datian demands that Vincent at least hand over the Christian books to be burned; Vincent answers that God’s sword will avenge the sacred volumes on him.
42. 5.193Vincent warns Datian of the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah; the furious governor orders the gridiron, and Vincent climbs onto it willingly.
43. 5.225On the gridiron Vincent is burned with salt and dripping fat but remains unmoved, eyes raised to heaven; then he is thrown into the darkest dungeon with his feet in the stocks.
44. 5.257Vincent is laid on sharp potsherds in the dungeon, but Christ fills the prison with light, breaks the stocks, turns the shards to flowers, and angels come to speak with him.
45. 5.289The angel tells Vincent his passion is complete and Christ will crown him; light bursts from the dungeon, and the guard hears the martyr singing psalms.
46. 5.321The guard sees Vincent free and singing among flowers; Datian, defeated, orders him nursed so he can be tortured again; the faithful tend his wounds and keep cloths dipped in his blood, and the jailer believes in Christ.
47. 5.353Laid on a soft bed, Vincent, longing for death, dies, and his spirit rises to the Father by the way of Abel, welcomed by the saints and John the Baptist; Datian rages that he has escaped.
48. 5.385Datian throws Vincent’s body to the beasts so that no tomb may be honored, but no beast or bird touches it; a raven, like Elijah’s, guards it and drives off a wolf.
49. 5.417The wolf flees before the raven; Datian, defeated even by the dead body, resolves to sink it in the sea.
50. 5.449Datian orders the body sewn into a sack, weighted with a stone and dropped far out at sea; the soldier Eumorphius carries out the order.
51. 5.481The power that let Christ walk on the sea and parted the Red Sea makes the weighted body float; it outruns the sailors back to shore and is received by the land as a tomb.
52. 5.513Vincent’s body, first buried by the faithful, now rests beneath an altar; his soul is in heaven with the Maccabean martyrs and Isaiah, but he alone won a double crown, conquering both in death and after it.
53. 5.545Vincent, victor in death and after it, is asked to present the people’s prayers before the Father’s throne so that Christ may forgive them, and the poet prays that the flesh, which shared the martyr’s labors, may share his glory in the resurrection.
54. 6.1Bishop Fructuosus of Tarragona and his deacons Augurius and Eulogius are arrested; he encourages them on the way to prison, where they baptize, and after six days they are brought before the governor.
55. 6.33The judge Aemilian orders Fructuosus to worship the emperor’s gods; the bishop confesses the eternal God and Christ, and is sentenced to the fire; on the way he refuses a drink because he is keeping the fast until the ninth hour, as Christ refused the cup on the cross.
56. 6.65At the pyre in the amphitheatre Fructuosus refuses his friends’ homage, takes off his own shoes as Moses did at the bush, and promises to pray for all; a voice from heaven declares that this fire is not punishment but the reshaping of life.
57. 6.97The martyrs enter the fire; their bonds burn away and they raise their arms in the form of the cross, like the three young men in the furnace; at their prayer God takes them; a servant of the governor and the governor’s daughter see them borne into heaven.
58. 6.129The faithful collect the martyrs’ ashes, but the martyrs appear in white and command that the relics be laid together in one tomb; Tarragona rejoices in its three patrons, and the poet hopes Fructuosus will protect the city and himself at the judgment.
59. 7.1Quirinus, bishop of Siscia, martyred under Galerius, was thrown from a bridge with a millstone tied to his neck, but the river held him up while his people watched from the banks.
60. 7.33Quirinus encourages his frightened people from the water; fearing to lose his martyrdom, he prays to Jesus, recalling that Christ made the sea firm under Peter’s feet.
61. 7.65Quirinus recalls the Jordan turning back and asks Christ, whose power is now shown, to let him die for him; as he prays he dies, the stone sinks, and the waters take his body.
62. 8.1Inscription for a baptistery built on the site of a double martyrdom: where martyrs once went to heaven by blood, the baptized now go by water, both through the wounds of Christ from which blood and water flowed.
63. 9.1On his way to Rome the poet prayed at the tomb of Cassian at Forum Cornelii (Imola) and saw a painting of the martyr pierced by schoolboys’ styluses; the sacristan explains that Cassian was a teacher of shorthand, arrested for refusing to sacrifice.
64. 9.33The judge hands Cassian over to his pupils, who take revenge for his strictness by breaking their tablets on his face and stabbing him with their styluses; the shallow wounds prolong his torment.
65. 9.65The boys mock Cassian as they wound him, until Christ releases his soul; the sacristan invites the poet to pray to the martyr, who hears worthy prayers, and the poet embraces the tomb in tears.
66. 9.97The poet prays at Cassian’s tomb about his troubles and his journey; his prayer is heard, his business in Rome succeeds, and on his return he proclaims Cassian.
67. 10.1The poet invokes the martyr Romanus, whose tongue was torn out yet who still confessed God, to give eloquence to his stammering verse, trusting Christ’s promise to give words to his witnesses; the devil rages most when he is being defeated.
68. 10.33Like the demon of the tombs who cried out against Christ, the persecutor rages: the prefect orders Christians dragged from the churches and plans to destroy the church; Romanus warns the faithful, who stand firm, and he is arrested as their leader.
69. 10.65Romanus offers himself to be bound and tortured; the prefect accuses him of stirring the people to rebellion and martyrdom and condemns him to suffer first; Romanus accepts gladly, to die for the faithful.
70. 10.97Romanus refuses the prefect Asclepiades entry to the church unless he becomes a Christian; because Romanus is a nobleman he is beaten with lead instead of racked, and he declares that true nobility comes from God and from serving Christ.
71. 10.129Romanus says the wounds of martyrdom are his true nobility and mocks the honors of Roman magistrates, who feed sacred chickens, bow to idols, walk barefoot before the stone of Cybele and run naked as Luperci.
72. 10.161Romanus asks the prefect to reason rather than rage, and lists the immoralities told of the pagan gods: their marriages, adulteries and incests, Apollo’s love for Hyacinthus and his service as a cowherd.
73. 10.193Romanus continues: Attis, Jupiter (who would be condemned under Roman laws on adultery and sexual vice), Saturn the fugitive, and quarrelling gods are no objects of worship; the myths are not mere poetry, since the pontiffs themselves applaud them on the stage.
74. 10.225The statues themselves betray the gods’ crimes: Jupiter’s eagle and Ganymede, Ceres seeking her stolen daughter, Hercules spinning; the rustic gods are absurd, and if Romans worship gods, they might as well worship the Egyptians’ animals and vegetables.
75. 10.257The gods are the work of Greek sculptors like Myron and Polyclitus, whose art makes people fear bronze thunderbolts, a drunken Bacchus, Diana’s bow and Hercules’ club; the sculptors should rather be worshiped as the parents of the gods.
76. 10.289The idols are made from melted pots; the ignorant may be forgiven, but not the learned; Romanus then confesses the eternal, incomprehensible God, the true light, from whom the Son was born as radiance from light, one power and one nature, creator of all.
77. 10.321God created all things by his command through the Word; his temple is the human mind, where Faith guards the door and the sacrifices offered to Christ and the Father are modesty, innocence, peace, chastity, the fear of God, fasting, hope and generosity.
78. 10.353Romanus denounces the blindness of pagans who worship gods born of marriages, the elements, wood and stone, and men, and tells the judge that those who confess God fear nothing; Asclepiades at last explodes in anger.
79. 10.385Asclepiades defends the ancient religion of Rome against the new Christian doctrine and demands that Romanus pray to the gods for the emperor or die; Romanus will pray only that the emperor’s soldiers be baptized and receive the Spirit.
80. 10.417Romanus prays that the emperor may see the light of God, which only the pure mind perceives, but will not obey him if he commands a crime; the judge has Romanus’ sides torn to the bone.
81. 10.449From the rack Romanus proclaims Christ, God and sharer of our nature, who gives everlasting salvation to the soul, which either shines in glory or is cast into darkness; the body must fall anyway, and torture is no worse than disease.
82. 10.481Romanus compares torture to surgery, which cuts in order to heal, describes the corruption, lusts and luxuries of the flesh, and urges the executioner to cut away the tinder of sin so the mind may be free.
83. 10.513All flesh perishes, so its loss should be made glorious; the martyr’s spirit will enjoy God’s light, and when the heavens are rolled up God and the righteous will remain; Asclepiades orders Romanus’ face and mouth to be torn.
84. 10.545With his face torn, Romanus thanks the prefect for giving him many mouths to praise Christ; the prefect orders a pyre and mocks Christ as a recent, crucified man, and Romanus answers that the Cross is the salvation of all.
85. 10.577Romanus confesses that the eternal King begot an eternal King, the Son equal to the Father and outside time, who as man met death and overcame it; he answers the charge of novelty by pointing to Rome’s own recent founding, and says the Cross was foreshown from the beginning.
86. 10.609The Cross was foreshadowed by kings, prophets and judges and fulfilled before witnesses; because Christ raised his dead body and took it to the Father, believers trust in their own resurrection; Christ, of twofold nature, died and conquered death; Romanus proposes that a child be asked to judge.
87. 10.641A small child is brought and asked whether to worship one Christ, and the Father in Christ, or many gods; the child answers that God must be one and that Christ is true God, taught by his mother; the prefect sends for the mother.
88. 10.673To punish the mother, the prefect has the child flogged until even the executioners weep; only the mother remains calm and joyful; when the child cries out for water, she rebukes him.
89. 10.705The mother tells her son not to fear but to thirst for the living fountain of Christ and to drink the cup of the Holy Innocents, recalling Isaac and the seven Maccabean brothers.
90. 10.737The mother recalls how the mother of the Maccabean martyrs encouraged her seven sons through frying, scalping and the cutting out of a tongue; she begs her own son, by her womb and her nursing, to persevere.
91. 10.769The mother tells her son to give back his life to God who gave it; the boy laughs at the rods; the boy is imprisoned and Romanus tortured again, mocking his torturers’ weakness, until the judge condemns him to the fire.
92. 10.801Romanus appeals to Christ; the judge orders the child beheaded and Romanus burned; the mother hands over her son with one kiss, asking him to remember her in Christ’s kingdom, sings Psalm 116 as he is beheaded, and catches his head in her cloak.
93. 10.833Romanus is brought to the pyre and foretells that he will not be burned; a sudden storm puts out the fire; the prefect, calling him a magician, decides to mutilate him first.
94. 10.865The prefect orders the physician Aristo to cut out Romanus’ tongue; Romanus submits without flinching, his chin and breast covered with blood like royal purple.
95. 10.897Brought back before the altars, the tongueless Romanus speaks: the God who made speech can make a man speak without a tongue and change the laws of nature he gave.
96. 10.929Romanus points to Christ’s walking on the sea and his healing miracles, of which his own speech is a proof; the bewildered prefect accuses the physician of having been bribed to cut badly.
97. 10.961The physician Aristo proves he cut out the whole tongue and cannot explain how the mute man speaks; the prefect suspects the blood is not Romanus’ own, and Romanus answers that it is his true blood, not bull’s blood like that of the pagan rites.
98. 10.993Romanus describes the taurobolium, in which the pagan high priest stands in a pit beneath a perforated platform and is drenched with the blood of a slaughtered bull.
99. 10.1025Romanus continues: the blood-soaked priest is adored by all; the pagans also offer hecatombs, and the devotees of Cybele slash their arms and castrate themselves.
100. 10.1057Romanus ends his account of pagan self-mutilation and branding, contrasting them with the Christians’ blood shed only by persecutors, and foretells his end; the judge orders him strangled.
101. 10.1089Romanus is strangled in prison; the prefect’s records perish with time, but an angel recorded every word and wound in the heavenly book to be read at the judgment, and the poet hopes that Romanus will intercede to move him from the goats to the lambs.
102. 11.1Writing to Bishop Valerian, the poet describes the countless martyrs’ tombs of Rome, many nameless, and the tomb of Hippolytus, once a follower of Novatian’s schism, who as a martyr urged his followers to return to the catholic Church of Peter and Paul.
103. 11.33The governor, having filled Rome with martyrs’ blood, had come to Ostia; he tortures Christians without making any recant, and orders them beheaded, crucified, burned or drowned.
104. 11.65The aged Hippolytus is brought before the governor as leader of the Christians; hearing his name, the governor orders that, like Hippolytus of legend, he be torn apart by wild horses, and the unbroken horses are yoked with the martyr tied behind.
105. 11.97With the prayer “Let these snatch my limbs; you, Christ, snatch my soul,” Hippolytus is dragged to pieces by the horses; a painting over his tomb shows the scene, his friends gathering the scattered remains.
106. 11.129Hippolytus’ friends gather every part of his body and every drop of blood and bury him at Rome in a catacomb, which the poet describes with its winding steps and light-shafts.
107. 11.161Beside Hippolytus’ tomb stands the altar of the Eucharist; the poet himself was helped there in prayer and credits Hippolytus with his safe return; crowds kiss the silver shrine daily, and on his feast all Rome flocks there.
108. 11.193On Hippolytus’ feast pilgrims come from all central Italy; since the crypt is too small, they gather in the great basilica beside it, which the poet describes; the feast is kept on 13 August.
109. 11.225The poet asks Bishop Valerian to add Hippolytus’ feast to the yearly feasts of his church, and prays that Valerian may guard his flock, bring back the poet as a sick sheep, and join Hippolytus in heaven.
110. 12.1A friend explains the Roman feast of Peter and Paul: Peter was crucified head downward at his own request, and a year later on the same day Paul was beheaded; their tombs lie on either side of the Tiber, Peter’s with a fountain.
111. 12.33The friend describes the baptistery at St Peter’s and the splendid basilica of St Paul on the Ostian Way built by the emperor; on the feast the people and the bishop go to both shrines in one day.
112. 13.1Cyprian of Carthage, whose writings will be read as long as the world lasts, was given by the Spirit as an expounder of Paul; once a young magician who used spells to corrupt chastity, he was converted by Christ, changed his life, and became bishop.
113. 13.33Under Valerian and Gallienus, Cyprian encourages his people to martyrdom; imprisoned in a dark cave, he prays to God, who washed away his former sins, to let him die for Christ.
114. 13.65At Cyprian’s prayer the Spirit fills the Christians of Carthage with courage; three hundred leap into a pit of burning lime rather than sacrifice (the White Mass); Cyprian (Thascius) confesses Christ and is beheaded; his writings still teach the whole West.
115. 14.1Agnes, whose tomb protects Rome, won a double crown of virginity and martyrdom; as a young girl she refused to sacrifice, and the judge threatened to put her in a brothel, but she trusted Christ to keep her chaste.
116. 14.33Agnes is exposed in the square; the people turn away, and one youth who looks on her with lust is struck blind by lightning, though some say she prayed for his healing; the defeated judge orders her killed by the sword.
117. 14.65Agnes welcomes the armed executioner rather than a seducer, prays as Christ’s bride to be taken to heaven, and is beheaded; her soul rises and laughs at the vanities of the world below.
118. 14.97Agnes tramples on the world’s vanities and on the dragon’s head; God crowns her twice, with eternal light and the hundredfold fruit of virginity; the poet asks her to look on his impurity and cleanse him.