Hymn 10

10. The Sayings of Saint Romanus the Martyr against the Heathen.

Romanus, brave champion of Christ the God,

move the organ of my tongueless mouth, my patron,

grant a polished song to one most unskilled in speech,

make me sing in harmony the wonders of your praises,

for you yourself know that the dumb can be made to speak.

A savage torturer tore out the quill of your palate

and throat, yet did not enjoin silence

upon the mouth with which you confessed God.

The voice that witnesses to truth cannot be quenched,

not even if it throbs with its passages cut away.

So our halting speech, with a feeble tongue,

stammers and labours in discordant measures,

but if you sprinkle the heart with heavenly dew

and water the breast with spiritual milk,

a hoarse voice will loosen its hindered sounds.

The evangelist wrote that the Messiah himself

gave such precepts to the apostles:

“Do not, when my mystery is to be

proclaimed, seek out your words with forethought;

I will supply to the unprepared what they shall speak.”

I myself am dumb, but mighty in eloquence

my tongue, Christ, will speak clearly.

He himself will explain what tumults the demon,

with his last breath, while he is being tamed, has stirred up,

a worse plague in his fury at the very end.

So a serpent, wounded by the stroke of a dart,

bites back at the iron, and, fiercer with pain,

lingers, shaking it, with clenched teeth,

but the shaft stays fixed the deeper,

and it feels no vain peril of its bites.

Galerius, as it chanced, ruled the state of the Roman

world as commander, as antiquity reports,

cruel, savage, harsh, implacable.

He had sent edicts far and wide into all the world,

that whoever would rather live should deny Christ.

This the serpent dictates with a royal mouth,

who, coming forth from the tombs of the dead,

cries out: “Why before the time, by your swift coming,

do you dissolve my realms? Spare me, Son of the Highest,

or bid me at least possess the hearts of swine.”

The prefect, intent on these affairs,

Asclepiades, commands his soldiers to go

and to drag the churchman straight from the sanctuaries,

a people to be handed over to chains

unless it should spurn the Nazarene discipline.

Soon, thinking to burst into the temple himself

and eager to ravage the holy of holies,

the profane man, with impious arms, made ready

to lay the altar’s shrine utterly low

and to break the very doors into ruin.

A herald runs ahead, these things being suddenly known,

Romanus, a hero of keen excellence,

announces that the enemies are coming in arms,

forearming the spirits of the fearful with exhortations,

that they may stand ready and not yield to the whirlwind.

The Christian flock conspires, leagued

in one spirit, an undaunted band

of mothers, men, little ones, and virgins;

fixed and settled in all is the resolve

to guard the faith or gladly to die.

The soldier, repulsed, reports back to the benches

that Romanus is the leader of the rebellious people,

that all blaze with stubborn boldness,

that they obstinately offer their bared throats,

so that the strong may meet a glorious death.

Romanus is thereupon ordered to be seized in haste

and, as the sole instigator and torch of all,

to plead the cause on behalf of the defiant people,

he goes without resisting and asks to be bound,

and of his own accord twists his bent hands behind his back.

Love of the crown almost forestalls the savage

art of the lictor, offering of its own will his bared

ribs to be cut by the cloven claws.

He bursts in over the high threshold and, while the heralds

are dumb with amazement, he himself drags the torturer along.

To him standing before him the tyrant thus begins:

“Infamous monster, vile, accursed,

you, agitator of the city and flighty storm

of the crowd, you stir up their unstable minds,

that the ignorant mob may not yield to the laws.

Something popular, under the colour of glory,

the unlettered throng has believed,

that they will be consecrated through the ages

if they wage wars against the gods like giants

and, conquered, are overwhelmed by the flames of mountains.

This spectacle you have prepared, lost wretch,

of bloody slaughter, by the killing of citizens,

whom, as profane and guilty of the unhallowed age,

it is necessary, with you for their master, to put to death:

you are the cause of their death, you the standard-bearer of their woes.

Unless I err, it is just that what, a wicked author,

you compelled many to endure, you as their executioner,

should recoil upon you, and for so great slaughters,

which are soon to come, you first should pay with destruction,

and yourself bear what you had urged should be borne.”

To this that man replies with a free mouth:

“I embrace it, O prefect, nor do I withdraw,

that for the faithful people I alone be sacrificed,

worthy to undergo all things, if you ask me,

whatever your cruelty shall command.

It is not lawful for the slaves of idols and demons

to enter the holy house of our salvation,

lest the pure place of prayer be polluted;

I trust in the Holy Spirit that never will it

be granted you to touch that blessed threshold with your foot,

unless perhaps, made one of ours, into our flock

you should deserve to be received, which may God the Father bring to pass.”

Kindled by this, Asclepiades had ordered

the body to be disembowelled, to hang aloft

on the rack, and to be stretched by hooks and bonds.

But the attendants suggest to the raging man

that he is noble by an ancient lineage

and, by his many merits, first among the citizens,

he bids the death-dealing stake be removed,

lest a plebeian punishment condemn an illustrious man.

“Let his back,” he says, “be beaten with frequent blows,

and let his neck, lashed with lead, swell up.

Each person is fittingly punished

and it matters much whether he is base or noble;

by the rank of the accused the manner is given to the torments.”

So the martyr, beaten by that hail of blows,

after he sang a hymn amid the leaden strokes,

standing upright begins: “Far be it that birth

of my parents or the law of the senate should make me noble:

the noble sect of Christ ennobles men.

If you would reckon what is the first origin

of our cradle in the weaving of a pedigree,

we begin from the mouth of God the Father,

whom each man serves, that man is truly noble:

rebellious to the Father he is found base.

A new honour then accrues to the pedigree

and a vast splendour, as a magistracy comes,

if the branded wounds of iron and fire

mark a faithful witness who confesses the name

and an illustrious death follow the force of pains.

Beware that you be not perversely willing to be kind,

nor, relenting, spare me gently;

press upon my limbs, torturer, that I may be noble,

enlarged by these, if I may enjoy such successes,

I will count the lineage of father and mother at a straw.

These very summits of your dignities,

what do you think they are? Do they not pass in a rush,

the fasces, the axes, the chair, the bordered togas,

the lictor, the tribunal, and the three hundred badges

with which you swell, and soon you grow flat again?

When you enter the consulship, as house-slaves are wont,

(I am ashamed to say it) you feed chickens with grain;

from an ivory eagle its bearer takes arrogance

and is proud, puffed up with the bone of a beast

whose shape is that of a bird.

Now if beneath the altars, at the feet of little images,

you lie below, set under a sawn oak,

what could I think more abject for you?

I know the toga’d nobles bare their feet

before the carriage at the rites of the Idaean Mother.

A blackish stone, to be borne on a chariot,

set in the face of a woman, shut in silver,

which, while you lead it forward to the washing,

rubbing your feet, your shoes removed,

you go all the way to the brook of Almo.

What of that foul procession? Surely it shows

you to be ignoble, when you run as Luperci.

Whom of the little slaves should I not deem the basest,

if, naked, running through all the streets,

he should strike the girls, struck with a sportive lash?

I pity your rites and your princes,

and your morals, Rome, supreme head of the age,

come, let us unfold, if you please, the mysteries,

prefect, that are yours: now you must needs hear,

whether you will or not, what filth you worship.

Nor does that madness, with which you swell, frighten me,

that, scowling, supine, and stiff,

you threaten the torments of a harsh death:

if you strive to move me by any means,

contend with me by reason, not by fury.

You bid me, forsaking the rites of the Father and Christ,

to adore with you a thousand females and males,

goddesses and gods, and, of a double sex,

sons, grandsons, great-great-grandsons brought forth,

and the whole sordid offspring of so many debaucheries.

Girls wed, are often beguiled by tricks,

are oppressed by the frauds of their lovers,

incests burn, the thefts of adulterers grow hot,

the husband deceives, the wife hates the concubine,

chains bind the adulterous gods together.

Show me, I pray, at what altars you command

that my turf should smoke with a slaughtered sheep?

Shall I go to Delphi? But the corrupt fame

of the wrestler-youth forbids it, whom your god

made effeminate by the licence of the gymnasium.

Soon the unclean one wept for the boy slain

by the heavy discus, and consecrated the flowery minion.

The same god, hired, fed another’s flock,

then, suffering the thief of the lost herd,

a slothful herdsman, he even lost his very weapons.

Or shall I go to Cybele’s grove of pines?

But the Gallus-boy stands in the way, who for lust,

through a sad wound and through a cut disgrace,

safe from the embrace of the unchaste goddess,

a eunuch to be wept for through the Mother’s many rites.

But, I suppose, I shall embrace the threshold of great Jove,

who, if he were summoned as a defendant by your laws,

entangled in the snares of the menacing Julian law,

conquered, would pay the stern Scantinian law too,

with you for judge, fit to go to prison.

What? Do you reckon that the founder of the golden

ages should be worshipped? Whom you do not deny

to have lurked in flight by stealth while he dreaded harm;

whom, if Jupiter hears living happily,

he must needs punish the accomplices of his hiding.

What, amid the altars of discordant deities,

do you think should be done? The offended valour

of Mars will be indignant if the Lemnian is worshipped,

each will feel Juno’s anger who consecrates

Hercules as a god with an image or a shrine.

You say the poets freely invent these things,

but they themselves too are dedicated with you

to such mysteries, and what they describe, they worship,

why do you so gladly read over the abomination?

Why is it applauded in the theatres, with you watching?

The swan-seducer sins upon the stage,

the player dances the Thunderer with a bull’s horns:

you, the spectator of these, sit as chief pontiff

and laugh yourself, nor wash it away by denying,

while the fame of so great a god is defiled.

Why are you, a consecrated man, dissolved in laughter

when the god feigns himself Alcmena’s husband?

A stage harlot openly bewails the wounded Adonis

with lustful passion,

and the brothel of holy Cypris does not move you?

What of the fact that the truth lies open in the very images,

shaped in bronze by the traces of crimes?

What does the seal mean, always fixed to Jove,

of the attendant bird? Surely the swift squire,

a pander, who bore off the minion to the tyrant.

Ceres holds out a torch with her robe ungirt:

why, if none of the gods seized her virgin daughter,

whom the mother, seeking by night, wanders ever-watching?

We see the Tirynthian spinning the threads:

why, if he was not the mockery of Neaera?

What? Shall I detest the monsters of the rustics as gods,

Fauns, Priapuses, presiders over the pipes,

swimming nymphs and watery dwellers,

set beneath a deep lake, after the manner of frogs,

a right of divinity in cheap seaweed?

To worship these you call me, good censor?

Can you reckon any such thing, if you are of sound mind,

as holy? Does it not move the lungs

with derision to gaze on these absurdities

which drunken old women fashion in their dreams?

Or if anywhere there is any mystic vanity

to be worshipped by us, begin first yourself:

adore indiscriminately whatever is sacred on earth,

the Latin gods and the Egyptian gods,

to whom Rome makes offering, to whom Canopus prays.

You pray to Venus; pray to the ape as well.

You like the consecrated asp of Aesculapius:

why do the crocodile, the ibis, and the dog displease you?

Set up religious little altars to leeks,

venerate the bitter onion, the biting garlic.

Are the sooty household gods appeased with incense,

and the consecrated little vegetables spat out?

Or why is a greater majesty believed to belong to the hearths

than to what is born in the hoed gardens?

If there is divinity in pots, there is divinity in leeks too.

But a fair thing it is, a form carved in bronze.

What shall I imprecate upon the workshops of Greece,

which have founded gods for foolish nations?

The tongs of Myron, the hammer of Polyclitus

are the nature and origin of your heavenly ones.

An art effective in sowing errors,

while it curls about the stiff beard of Jove,

while, gently bending the flowing hair,

it files the locks and the clusters of Liber,

and while it roughens Minerva’s breast with snakes,

it cast a black dread into the terrified,

that they should shudder at the bronze as the Thunderer’s bolt,

tremble at the poison of the hissing Gorgon,

and think that the youth, after the Indian triumphs,

can strike with the thyrsus, though he is drunk.

Then, because they see Diana softly girt,

they greatly fear the bow of the hunting virgin;

if perchance the molten mass has fashioned the face

of a grimmer Hercules with a wrinkled surface,

he is believed to threaten with his club unless he is worshipped.

Now what terror seizes the hearts of the fearful

if the artist has neatly expressed Juno’s anger!

As though, gazing with averted glances,

she turned her face from the sacrificing victim,

the stone with stern brow counterfeits threats.

I wonder that you did not consecrate Mentor himself,

and that Phidias himself has no temple and altars,

the makers of the gods, or the parents of the deities,

who, if they had stood more slothfully at the forges,

there would be no molten Jupiter.

Do you not blush, fool, given over to your village,

that you have always wasted so many viands

which, foolish, you offered to such gods,

whom a ladle, a basin, a tankard, a frying-pan,

broken and melted vessels, have furnished?

Yet I pardon these things in the foolish common folk,

whom party-coloured wool on a post frightens,

whom a lying mountebank often deceives,

to whom everything is holy that the rancid

songs of toothless hags have urged should be feared.

But you learned and lettered men I wonder at,

whom the weighed rule of life governs,

that you know not by what law either things divine

or things mortal stand, how great a majesty rules

whatever is created, which created all things.

God, eternal, a thing beyond all reckoning,

is not enclosed by thought, nor by sight,

he surpasses every measure of the human mind

and cannot be grasped by our gaze,

and outside and within he fills and overflows.

Timeless, before the first day,

he obtains to be and to have always been, the One;

himself the true light, and author of true light,

though he was light, he poured out his light:

from light this radiance born is the Son.

One is the power of the Father, one too the power of the Son,

and one, sprung from one light, the splendour begotten

shone again with the full deity of brightness.

The simple nature of the one God prevails,

and whatever is anywhere, one power founded,

heaven and earth, the force of the sea-deep,

the orbs that preside over days and nights,

the winds, storms, lightnings, rains, clouds,

the northern stars, the evening stars, heat, snows,

fountains, frosts, and metals, and rivers,

crags, plains, the valleys of the mountains,

beasts, birds, creeping and swimming things,

beasts of burden, cattle, draft-animals, monsters,

flowers, shrubs, buds, herbs, trees,

those that are for fragrance and those that flourish for food.

These God wrought not by labour and art,

but by a command, which his power put forth,

he bade them be; things were made that were not,

by the Word he created the all-formed engine;

the Father’s power was ever in the Word.

You have known him: now learn the rite

and manner of worship, what kind of temple,

what offerings he has ordained to be dedicated,

what vows he asks, what priests he wills,

what nectar he commands to be sacrificed there.

A temple for himself he founded in the mind of man,

living, serene, sentient, breathing,

incapable of being dissolved, nor destructible,

fair, lovely, eminent in its summit,

painted over with distinct colours.

There a priest stands on the consecrated threshold,

and the maiden Faith guards the first doors,

her hair entwined with royal bonds;

she asks that victims be sacrificed to Christ and the Father

which she knows please him, white-robed, simple:

modesty of brow, innocence of heart,

the quiet of peace, chastity of body,

the fear of God, the rule of knowledge,

the sober frugality of fastings,

a hope not cast down, and an ever-bountiful hand.

From these victims a pleasant vapour rises,

surpassing the fragrance of balsam, incense, saffron,

the moist airs of Persian spices.

Lifted thence, it is borne all the way to heaven

and, made prosperous, delights the kind God.

Whoever, hostile, forbids this discipline,

forbids the approved man to live and to follow the holy,

forbids the vigour of the mind to strain on high,

and calls the keen edge of our fire down to the earth,

nor suffers the force of prudence to be roused.

O blindness of the heathen, sunk in mire!

O fleshly hearts of the nations!

O dense error! O dark race,

a friend to the earth, given over to the corpse,

ever gazing on things below, never above!

Is it not the height of frenzy and the last madness

to think them gods who are begotten in marriages,

to seek a spiritual thing in an earthly way,

to consecrate the elements of the world upon altars,

to believe that what is created is the creator,

to make supplication to a stake hewn with an axe,

to sprinkle inscribed stones with the blood of a boar,

to entreat altars with bits of beef,

when you know that those you consecrate were men,

to lick the carrion-urns of the accused?

Cease, judge of the age, to command so great a crime

to men who are strong and free,

nothing is loftier than the love of truth.

To those who maintain the name of the eternal God

there is no cause for fear; death itself lies subject.”

Long had Asclepiades been seething within,

while the martyr discoursed, with a treacherous anger,

fretted with deep gall, while he is long silent

and conceives bile in his hidden heart;

at last he vomits out the force of his latent fury:

“By Jupiter! What is this that I hear from this man?

He stands among the altars and the images of the gods

and, what I am compelled to confess, in the midst of the forum,

while I am silent, and the lost wretch declaims,

defiling all that is sacred with his impious mouth.

O the law of our forefathers! O the state of the old custom!

The inventions of the Pompilian kings, for the public welfare,

our age carps at,

what new error has brought in these sophists,

who argue that the gods are not to be worshipped?

Now the Christian dogma is born to us

after a thousand consuls have at last been unrolled

from the city of Rome, not to recount the Nestors.

Whatever rises new, once was not.

Do you wish to know the supreme power of things? Consult Pyrrha.

Where was that supreme God of yours then,

when, by the favour of the gods, the boy of Mars,

Romulus, was founding the seven-hilled citadel?

That Rome is mighty, founded under good auspices,

she owes to Jupiter the Stayer and the other gods.

This is holy from of old, this handed down from our ancestors:

that we must appease the shrines for the prince’s triumphs,

that a favourable campaign may second his glory,

and that, the enemies subdued,

the leader may curb the quiet world with laws.

Gird yourself then, whoever you are, most worthless,

to pray the gods duly with us for the imperial

life, or, what for a public enemy

must be suffered, pay the penalty with your blood,

to have scorned the temples is to have spurned the prince.”

Then he: “Never for the welfare and the greatest

and bravest cohorts of the prince

will I pray otherwise than that they may serve faithfully

and be reborn to the Father in the waters of Christ,

and themselves receive the Paraclete from heaven,

that they may spurn the darkness of idols,

that they may behold that light of eternal hope,

flowing not into juicy eyes

nor flashing through the windows of the body,

but which shines within for pure minds.

The thick pupil of the flesh sees the thick,

and a perishable thing sees what must be dissolved:

the soul’s fluid is fit for seeing fluid things;

a fervent nature alone takes the glittering force

of the most fervent deity.

I wish that your emperor might know this light,

and mine—if he is willing to become mine;

for if he resists the Christian name,

that emperor of mine will be no such thing:

believe me, I will never serve one who commands a crime.”

“Do you stand still, ministers?” the judge cries out,

“Do you stand still and hold back your avenging hands?

Do you not split the flesh broken with furrows,

and search out the soul hidden within,

whence the profane voice bursts forth against the prince?”

The soldiers split, with a gaping blade, on both sides

the side of the hanging man,

they plough long wounds, trailing, through his limbs,

they cut the slanting across the straight, the straight across the crosswise,

and now his breast grows white, the bones laid bare.

Striving, they pant, they melt with sweat,

while the hero on whom they rage is at peace.

Amid these things Romanus of his own will adds to speak:

“If you wish, O prefect, to know the truth,

all this, whatever we are mangled with, does not pain me.

It pains me that error has lodged in your breast,

that you drag these lost peoples with you.

They run in throngs from every side to the spectacle,

the heathen crowd—alas, bodies to be lamented—

and tremble at the raw example of our lot.

Hear, all of you: I cry afar and proclaim,

I send forth my voice the more loftily from the rack:

Christ, the splendour of the Father’s glory, God,

creator of things, and likewise our partaker,

promises perpetual salvation to believers,

the salvation of the soul, which alone does not perish

but, enduring continually, undergoes unequal lots;

either it shines with light or is sunk in darkness;

having followed Christ, it enters the Father’s glory,

sundered from Christ, it is made over to Tartarus.

The quality of the merchandise must be cared for, what kind

of everlasting substance may one day fall to me;

for I count it of little worth in what way my limbs fall,

destined surely to fall by the law of their own nature.

Ruin is at hand; let what must be dissolved fall.

Nor does it matter whether fire and cords rage,

or a harsh weakness racks the sick body,

since often a greater savagery arms diseases.

Not so great is the force with which the claws dig the side

as the cruel pleurisy strikes with its point,

nor does the skin burn so, branded with plates,

as the fever eats the veins with black gall,

or fire, drawn over, cooks the surface of the skin

and a hot seething rouses blisters:

you would think one was burned with hissing cauteries.

You think it wretched that I hang with arms twisted back,

stretched out, that my feet are wrenched away,

that the framework sounds with cracking sinews:

so the wailing bones cry that they are parted

in those whom knotted gout and arthritis rack.

You all shudder at these hands of the executioners,

are the hands of healers any gentler,

when the Hippocratic butchery rages?

The living flesh is cut and fresh blood

wets the scalpels while the rot is scraped away.

Think that surgeons bring the grim iron

against my ribs, which cuts for health;

it is not bitter, that by which health is restored:

these men seem to tear my wasting limbs,

but they give a remedy to the things alive within.

And who does not know how great is the corruption

of the defiled and dissoluble flesh?

It is foul, it swells, it melts, it stinks, it pains,

it is inflated with anger, it is unstrung by lust,

and, mostly tinged with gall, it draws on bruises.

Is not heaped-up gold acquired for the flesh?

Embroidered garment, gem, silk, purple

are sought with a thousand tricks for the use of the flesh,

the luxury of devouring fosters the fat of the flesh,

the pleasure of the flesh rushes through every wickedness.

Heal, I pray, executioner, such great evils,

cut down, tear away the tinder of sins,

make that, the wasting state of the flesh cut away,

the mind may survive free of all pain

and bear nothing further for a tyrant to amputate.

Nor be frightened by the crowd of bystanders:

I lose only this, which will perish for all,

for king, for client, for poor and rich;

so the flesh of house-slaves, so of senators

wastes when it is laid up in the deep tomb.

A cheap loss bites, and a slight harm,

if we dread to lose what must be lacked:

why does the will not anticipate what is necessary?

Why does it not turn nature to a matter of glory?

Let us reckon a lawful loss among rewards.

But let us see what the form of rewards may be

for the brave, namely that which never perishes,

the spirit, poured back to heaven, will soar up,

will enjoy the light of God the Father

standing in the royal citadel while Christ reigns.

One day heaven will be folded like a book,

the orb of the wheeling sun will fall to earth,

ruin will destroy the monthly sphere;

God alone surviving, and the just at once

with the everlasting angels, will remain.

Despise the present advantage, O prudent man,

what must be ended, what must be left to you;

let go the body, the thing of the tomb and the grave;

stretch toward the glory to come, go on to God;

know who you are, conquer the world and the age.”

Scarcely had the martyr finished this speech

when Asclepiades, raging, breaks in:

“Let the executioner turn the stroke

into the mouth of the speaker, and carry his hand

to his jaws, the sharp furrows and the cords.

Let the very place of his wordiness be broken,

that his talkativeness may lose the gushing

airs of his speech, the bellows pierced through,

on which no law sets a measure to his sounding;

and the very words of the speaker I wish to be racked.”

The impious lictor fulfils the commander’s words;

he scores both cheeks with writing claws,

and cuts the face with bloody marks,

the skin, shaggy with beard, is loosened piecemeal,

and all the face is split right up to the chin.

The martyr speaks amid the flowing blood:

“Great thanks I owe you, O prefect,

because, opening many mouths, I now speak Christ,

a single passage cramped the proclamation

of the great name, unequal to the praises of God.

The voice sent forth has found open clefts

and, poured through many gapes, returns sounds

from this side and that, the more, and proclaims everywhere

the eternal glory of Christ and the Father,

lo, as many mouths praise as there are wounds.”

Checked by such constancy, the judge

orders the punishment to cease, then thus he says:

“By the fires of the sun I swear, which governs

our days with reciprocal circuits,

by whose return the light and the year are led,

that fires must now be prepared for you, of a grim pyre,

which with a fitting end may devour that body

which, persevering, so wickedly resists

the ancient rites, and, not conquered by the stabs

of pains, faints, and grows stronger by punishments.

What stupor has cast this stiffness into your breast?

Your mind is obstinate, all your body has grown callous,

so great a frenzy of a new dogma reigns:

for this Christ of yours surely was not long ago,

whom you yourself confess was fastened to a cross.”

“That cross is the salvation of us all,”

Romanus says: “this is man’s redemption.

I know you are incapable of the sacrament, impious one,

that you cannot, with blind senses, drink in

our mystery: night takes in nothing of the day.

Yet in the darkness I will bring forth a bright torch,

the sound man will see, the blear-eyed will cover his eyes.

‘Remove the light,’ the incurable man will say;

‘brightness is injurious to one who sees nothing.’

Hear, profane one, what, burdened, you will hate.

An eternal king brought forth an eternal king

abiding in himself and not lessened by time,

because time does not hold him; for he is the source, behind,

of beginnings and of days and of times,

Christ from the Father: this the Father is, which the Son.

He gave himself to be seen by mortals,

immortality took a mortal body,

that, while the eternal God bears the perishable,

our nature might be able to pass to the heavenly:

the man was slain and rose again as God.

Death engaged with God bearing limbs;

while it assails our part, it yielded to the immortal.

You think this foolish, sophists of the age;

but the supreme Father chose the foolish things of the world,

that the wise man of the age might be foolish before God.

You recount the antiquity of Romulus and the Martial

she-wolf, and the first omen of the vultures.

If you spurn new things, nothing is so recent:

scarcely with a thousand annals does it fill this little age,

the course of days from its founder, the augur.

I could bring forth six hundred kingdoms founded long ago

in all the world, if there were leisure,

illustrious long before Jupiter, the father of Mars,

is said to have sucked the Cnossian goat,

but those things are not, and these one day will not be.

That cross of Christ, which you call new,

when the world was being born, as soon as man was first made,

was expressed in signs, set forth in letters:

his coming, through a thousand miracles,

was foretold by the harmonious mouth of the prophets.

Kings, prophets, judges, and princes,

by valour, wars, worships, rites, and the pen,

did not cease to depict the form of the cross,

the cross was foreshown, the cross was shadowed forth before,

the ancient ages drank in the cross.

At last, the prophetic voices being restored,

in our age the proven antiquity

shone forth openly with a face to be seen,

lest the truth should waver with a doubtful faith,

if it did not lie open with sight as a witness close at hand.

Hence we believe that even the very body does not perish,

the body that is given to the tomb to be devoured,

because Christ bore the dead body in himself to the cross,

roused up with himself, to the throne of the Father,

and gave to all a way to rise again.

That cross is ours, we mount the gibbet,

for us Christ was slain and for us God

Christ returned, he who, dying, is man,

of a double nature: he dies and tames death,

and returns to that which knows not how to perish.

Let it suffice to have said a few things of the mysteries

of our salvation and of the progress of our hope.

Now, now I will be silent: we are forbidden to scatter

the pearls of Christ among unclean swine,

lest the muddy beasts bear off the holy thing.

But since it is not allowed to wrestle with you

in deep reasoning, let us consult the nearest things:

let the simple judgment of the natural

senses itself, without art, be questioned:

see that an arbiter unskilled in deceit be present.

Give a boy of about seven years or less,

who is free of favour and does not hate

anyone, nor falls into any vice of mind,

let us make trial of what fresh infancy

says should be followed, what the new vigour discerns.”

That voice of the holy martyr the other gladly

embraced, and bids that one of the band of children,

a little one, not long weaned from the milk, be taken

and, taken, be brought near. “Ask whatever you will,”

he says, “let us follow what the little boy approves.”

Romanus, burning to test the harmless

character of the rejoicing mouth, says, “Little child,

tell me, what seems to be true and fitting,

to worship one Christ and in Christ the Father,

or to pray together to gods of a thousand forms?”

The infant smiled and without delay replied:

“Whatever that is which men call God,

it must be one, and what is for the One is unique,

since Christ is this, Christ is the true God.

Even boys do not think there are many kinds of gods.”

The tyrant stood amazed, wavering in shame;

nor was it fitting to bring laws against

the harmless little age, nor did his savage fury

allow him to spare one speaking such things.

“Who is the author of this voice to you?” he says.

He answered: “My mother, and to my mother, God.

She, taught from the Father-Spirit, drank it in

that she might feed me with it amid my very cradle;

I, as I, a little one, drew milk from the twin

fountains of the breasts, drew in too to believe Christ.”

“Then let the mother herself be present, I yield, bring her,”

cries Asclepiades; “let the impious mistress

behold the grim outcome of her teaching,

let her be tortured, bereaved, by the death

of her ill-taught infant, and weep for whom she has corrupted.

Far be it that a vile little woman should weary

our ministers: for how slight a pain

will rack his limbs, with the help of a brief death!

The parent’s eyes will be punished more sharply

than if bloody claws should tear his limbs.”

Scarcely had he said this when he commands them to lift

the little boy on high and to strike his buttocks with the hand,

soon, his garment removed, to beat him with rods

and to cut his tender back with hard strokes,

whence more milk than blood should flow down.

Who, of a heart wary, could endure that spectacle,

what hardness of bronze or iron could bear it?

As often as the struck willow had touched the body,

the wet twigs reddened with thin blood,

which the blow had wept in dewy bruises.

They say the cheeks of the threatening scourgers

wept of their own accord, with drops streaming

over the faces that raged with barbarous mood,

and that the scribes themselves and the crowd of bystanders

and the nobles did not stand with dry eyes.

But the mother alone is free of these laments,

her brow alone shines with serene joy;

in the hearts of the pious a stronger piety stands,

defiant of pains through the love of Christ,

and it steadies the feeling of soft tenderness.

The little one had cried out that he was thirsty:

the ardour of his seething soul amid the torments

demanded this, that he should ask for a draught of water:

whom the grim mother, gazing from afar, sternly

with face and severe words thus rebukes:

“I think, my son, you are disturbed by feeble fear

and the horror of pain, afflicting you, masters you,

I did not pledge to God that this offspring of my flesh

would be such, nor for this hope of glory

did I beget you, that you should know to yield to death.

You ask for water to drink, when there is for you

that living fount at hand, which ever flows

and alone waters all living things,

within and without, the spirit and the body at once,

granting eternity to those who drink.

You will come soon to that stream, if only

in your soul and marrow one ardour seethes,

to see Christ, which, once drunk to the full,

so allays all the blazing of the breast

that the blessed life now knows not how to thirst.

Here, here, my son, the cup must now be drunk by you,

which a thousand little ones drank in Bethlehem:

forgetful of milk and unmindful of the breasts,

their age, refreshed soon afterward with sweet

cups after the bitter, took the honey of blood.

Strive toward that example, O brave boy,

noble offspring, and might of your mother,

the Father has commanded that all years

are capable of virtues, he has excepted no day,

granting triumphs to the very wailings of infants.

You know, I have often told you, when you played at my teaching

and gave the signs of chattering words,

that Isaac was a little one, his father’s only son,

who, when, about to be sacrificed, he saw the altar and the sword,

of his own will offered his neck to the consecrating old man.

I told you too that noble and memorable

contest which, born of one mother, seven

boys waged, yet, in deeds, men,

the same mother urging, at the doubtful issue

of penalty and crown, that they should not spare their blood.

She herself beheld the very preparations of the funerals

of her own, present, and the parent was not moved,

rejoicing as often as either the hissing frying-pan,

with oil, had roasted the fried youth

or the dread pressing of plates had burned him.

The torturer had torn away the hair and skin of his head

from the brow, that the bare skull, without covering,

should disgrace the head all the way to the neck;

she cried out: ‘endure; with gems a crown

from a royal diadem will clothe this crown of the head.’

The tyrant had ordered the tongue to be cut off

from one of the youths; the mother said: ‘enough

glory has now been won for us; behold, the best part

of our body is sacrificed to God;

the faithful tongue is worthy to be a victim.

The interpreter of the mind, the announcer of the senses,

the minister of the heart, the herald of the hidden breast,

let it be offered first into the sacrament of death

and be the first redeemer of all the limbs;

the dedicated leader the rest will soon follow.’

With these goads the parent, urging on the Maccabees,

subdued the foe, subjugated seven times,

as many in fruitful births, so renowned in triumphs;

that one birth may render me fruitful of glory,

my life, lies in your hand.

By the faithful chambers of this womb,

by the hospitable dwelling of twice five months,

if the nectar of my breast is sweet to you,

if the soft lap, if the rattles, are dear,

persist, and claim the author of these gifts.

By what art you began to live within me,

and that nothing, whence the body came, I know not;

the one animator and maker of you alone knows it.

Spend yourself on him by whose gift you have your origin;

well will you pour back upon the giver what he gave.”

As the mother sang such things, the boy, now glad,

laughed at the rattling rods and the pain of the blows.

Here then the judge pronounces:

“Let the infant be shut in prison, and let Romanus,

the author of so great an evil, be tortured more sharply.”

Him they ploughed anew along the fresh paths

of his scars, and where they had drawn the sharp

iron a little before, soon, with the wounds

growing raw again, they followed the opened marks,

whom now the proud victor calls cowards.

“O strength not manly, O soft hands!

That you cannot, for so long, dismantle

one frame of a tottering little body!

It scarcely holds together now, yet does not utterly fall,

conquering the muscles of your sluggish right hands.

More quickly do dogs tear a corpse with their teeth,

and far more effective is the bite of vultures

for devouring the gobbets of dead flesh,

you grow faint with unwarlike hunger and tire,

your gullet is bestial, but your gluttony is feeble.”

At this the turbulent anger of the judge blazed up

and he rouses himself to the final sentence:

“If you repent of the delays, a swift end

you may undergo: you will be devoured by fires,

condemned, and now you will become thin ash.”

But that man, departing, as the savage ministers

snatched him from the forum, looking back behind, says:

“I appeal from that cruelty, faithless one, to my Christ,

not trembling for fear of death,

but that it may be proved that what you judge is nothing.”

“Why do I delay,” the other says, “to destroy both,

the boy and the master, accomplices of the impious sect?

Let the sword cut off the cheap, scarcely human head

of the infant, let the avenging flame burn that one,

let there be for these, under one end, an unequal death.”

When they came to the very place of accomplishing the slaughter,

the mother bore her son in her embrace and bosom,

so that you would think a first-born offspring was borne

to be offered to God by the offering of holy Abel,

chosen from the sheepfold, purer than the rest.

The executioner demanded the boy, the mother gave him,

nor did she linger in weeping, only a single kiss

she pressed: “Farewell,” she says, “sweetest,

and when, blessed, you have entered the realms of Christ,

remember your mother, now a patron, made from her son.”

She spoke: then, while the striker smites the little neck

with the sword, the woman, skilled to sing psalms,

sang a hymn of David’s song:

“Precious is the death of the holy man in the sight of God,

he is your servant, the offspring of your handmaid.”

Recounting such things, she spread out her cloak

and stretched her hands beneath the stroke and the blood,

that she might catch the streaming wave of the flowing

veins and the gush of the quivering mouth:

she caught it, and pressed the flesh to her breast.

But on the other part of the field a smoky burner

was weaving a monstrous pyre with dry pine,

strewing twigs mixed beneath and a heap of hay,

sprinkling them with the melted dew of boiling pitch,

so that the flame might grow more fiercely with such food.

And now, with his arms twisted back, on a fork from afar

Romanus, driven, was being thrust upon the pyre:

“I know,” he says, “that I shall not be burned,

nor is this kind of passion given to me,

and a vast miracle remains, which shall come to pass.”

These his words a measureless crash follows

of a rushing cloud, a downpour, wave upon wave, with a black

headlong flood of waters overwhelms the fires.

They say the torches were half-burned with the oil,

but the rain conquers the now-soaked tinder.

The foul executioner began to tremble, disturbed

by the strange events, and by what art he might hold on,

to turn the brands over with the moist ashes,

to cherish the coals with handfuls of tow,

and to seek the seed of fire among the waters.

When this was reported to the swelling judge,

it stirred the anger of his implacable gall:

“How long at last will this supreme magician

mock us,” he says, “skilled by the Thessalian spell

to turn punishment into mockery?

Perhaps his neck, if I order it to be cut,

bent beneath the sword, will not lie open to the wound:

or the blow dividing his severed neck

will join again and be glued back together,

and the crown of his head will stand out, added to his shoulders.

Let us try then first to lop with iron

some part of his surviving body,

lest the manifold criminal fall by a single death

or the faithless one meet his end by one slaughter:

as many limbs as he bears, by so many ways I wish him to perish.

I am pleased to make trial, as the Hydra is reported,

whether he sprouts up with limbs reborn,

and renews himself, fresh, by the losses

of his lessened body: then Hercules himself will be at hand,

wont to sear the Hydra’s wounds.

Now then let a craftsman skilled in cutting be present,

who knows all the borders of the flesh

or how to part the bonds bound to the sinews.

Give one who heals torn-out bones

or, mending, joins together what is broken at the joints.

Let him draw out first the tongue by the roots,

which alone, of the whole body, lives the more wickedly;

it, borne with shameless motion against our gods,

most evil, has profaned the ancient law,

and, bold, has not spared the prince himself.”

A certain physician named Aristo came when summoned,

he bids the tongue be put forth: at once the martyr

puts it forth, bared, and opens the depths of his throat;

the other handles the palate, and with his finger,

wandering over the exit of the voice, explores the place for the wound.

Then, drawing the tongue far from the mouth,

he drives the scalpel inserted right to the gullet.

As he cuts the threads gradually, one by one,

never did the martyr bite or press his mouth

with clenched teeth, nor did he swallow the blood.

He stood unmoved, with open jaws,

while the blood flowed gushing without;

fair, he bears his chin drenched with a red garland

and gazes on the glory of his bloody breast

and enjoys it as though it were the purple of a royal robe.

The prefect therefore, thinking the tongueless man

could be compelled to sacrifice, since, lacking words,

he would babble nothing to the disgrace of the gods,

bids him brought back, now silent and feeble,

long terrified by the whirlwind of his speaking.

He sets up the altars before the tribunal again,

and incense and living fire on the coals

and the entrails of a bull or the bellies of swine:

that man, entering, when he perceives these preparations,

blows upon them, as if he saw the very demons.

Asclepiades mocks at this, gladder,

then adds: “Are you ready to speak more harshly,

as you were wont? Are you prepared to say?

Speak out whatever you will, and declaim, and discourse.

I permit you to exercise your voice freely.”

Romanus, sighing long from a deep heart,

drew his complaint with a groan and thus began:

“To one speaking Christ the tongue was never lacking,

nor should you ask by what organ the words are governed,

when the giver of words himself is proclaimed.

He who made it that the force of the voice, pressed from the inmost

lung and twisted beneath the vault of the mouth,

now from the palate gives back echoed sounds,

now is tempered by the comb of the teeth,

and that for these workings the tongue is a moving quill,

if the same should command the pipes of the throat

thus to breathe, harmonizing with a concordant blast,

so that words unfold in those very passages,

or, at the mouth’s exit, to speak forth with cymbals,

the lips now pressed close, now gaping,

do you doubt that the state of nature can be changed

by him for whom the form was made, such as it was at first?

Surely the maker can change it as he pleases

and weave and unweave the laws he has laid down,

so that speech does not require the tongue as its minister.

Do you wish to know the power of our deity?

He pressed with his foot the waves of the liquid sea:

the flowing and thin nature coalesces into solid,

how unlike the laws by which it was founded!

It is wont to bear swimming; it bears footsteps.

This deity has this accustomed function,

which is truly worshipped by us in Christ and the Father,

to give speech to the dumb, a quickened step to the lame,

to restore to the deaf a hearing to be enjoyed,

to grant to the blind the day of unwonted light.

If anyone, mad, thinks these things fables,

or if you yourself reckoned them little to be trusted

before, you may now know them true:

you have one speaking, whose tongue you had

cut off: yield now to proven miracles.”

Horror creeps over the stupefied persecutor

and fear and anger turn his breast to darkness;

he knows not whether he wakes or dreams,

he marvels, faltering, what kind of portent it is,

fear breaks him, indignation arms him.

He can neither tame the force of his unbridled mind,

nor find where to turn the weapons of his fury,

at last, savage, he bids the innocent physician,

made a defendant, be summoned; he charges that this man

was bribed at a fixed price, agreeing to collude:

either that he turned the iron, doing nothing and ineffectual,

in the mouth in vain, or, with blunted touches,

or by some art inflicted a slight wound,

which, the part wounded, would injure the tongue

but not cut all the sinews everywhere.

That the harmony of the voice could not remain whole,

that words are pressed out in an empty hollow,

which the regulating little tongue makes resound,

granted that the breath echoes back in the hollow cave,

yet an echo comes thence, not speech.

The physician refutes this calumny with truths:

“Search even now yourself the hiding-places of the throat,

and carry your curious thumb within the teeth,

go round, or inspect the open passages,

whether anything lurks that governs the breathings.

Although perhaps, if I had touched the tongue

with a slight prick or a thin wound,

his speech would have been feeble, the quill faltering,

for when the mistress of the voice falls into a flaw,

the use of speaking too must needs perish.

Let a trial be made, if you please, of what kind

of complaint a four-footed beast utters with its tongue torn out,

and what grunt a tongueless sow may squeal;

whose voice is broken, whose cry is unformed,

I will prove that the dumb thing sounds nothing shrill.

I call to witness the welfare of the prince that I performed

the cutting with a simple art, most excellent judge,

that I served the public commands without fraud,

let this man know what god prompts him with words:

I know not whence the dumb man is eloquent.”

With these things Aristo clears himself, but on the other hand

these things move the impious robber of the Christians not at all;

more and more he is borne into madness,

he asks whether another’s blood sprinkled the man,

or whether it flowed from his own wound.

Romanus answered these things: “Behold, I am at hand:

this blood of mine is real, not a bull’s.

Do you recognize him whom I speak of, most wretched

heathen, the sacred blood of your bull,

with whose offered slaughter you are drenched?

The high priest, surely, beneath the earth, in a trench

driven deep, is plunged to be consecrated,

wondrously filleted, binding his festive temples with fillets,

then combed back with a golden crown,

his silken toga supported with a Gabine girding.

Above, planks lay a platform over him,

gaping with the joints of a loose framework,

they split the space here and there or bore it through

and pierce the wood with frequent points,

so that it lies open, thick with tiny gaps.

Hither a huge bull, with grim and bristling brow,

bound with garlands either over his shoulders

with flowers or with his entangled horns,

is led down, and the brow of the victim glitters with gold too,

and the gleam of gold-leaf stains his bristles.

Here, when the beast is set to be sacrificed,

they cleave its breast with a consecrated hunting-spear;

the broad wound belches a wave of boiling blood,

and into the woven platform set beneath

it pours a river of steaming gore and seethes far and wide.

Then through the thronging ways of a thousand clefts

the slipped-in shower rains a putrid dew,

which the priest, buried within, catches,

putting his foul head under all the drops,

befouled in his garment and his whole body.

Indeed he turns his face up, offers his cheeks to meet it,

puts his ears beneath, his lips, casts his nostrils forward,

and washes his very eyes with the liquids,

nor now does he spare his palate, and wets his tongue,

until he drinks in the whole black gore.

After the corpse, the blood discharged, grows stiff,

and the priests have drawn it back from that framework,

the high priest comes forth thence, dreadful in look,

and shows his wet head, his heavy beard,

his dripping fillets and his drunken garments.

This man, defiled with such contagions,

foul with the gore of a fresh offering,

all salute and adore from afar,

because cheap blood and a dead ox

have washed him lurking under foul caverns.

Shall we add, do you wish, that hecatomb of yours,

when a hundred animals fall by the iron,

and the abounding blood overflows with varied slaughter,

so that the augurs can scarcely move with bloody

swimmings through the deep of blood?

But why do I charge the fat shambles of the sacred couches,

why the manglers of the greatest herds,

raw with disembowelled flesh?

There are rites when you cut yourselves

and when votive pain lops off your own limbs.

The fanatic draws a knife upon his arms

and appeases the goddess Mother with his cut arms,

to rave and whirl is reckoned a mystic right;

a sparing right hand is held impious for the cutting,

the cruelty of the wounds earns heaven.

But here a man dedicates his genitals to be reaped,

appeasing the deity with his severed groin,

a half-man offers the goddess a shameful gift:

her he feeds with the vein of his male seed

torn away, swollen with flowing blood.

Each sex displeases the holiness,

he keeps the middle between the alternate kind,

he ceases to be male, nor does he become female,

the happy mother of the gods prepares for herself

beardless ministers with smooth razors.

What, when one to be consecrated receives the brand-marks?

They thrust tiny needles into the furnaces,

with these they go on to burn the limbs, when they have made them fiery;

whatever part of the body the hot mark

has branded, this they proclaim thus consecrated.

Then, when the spirit has left the dead man

and he is borne to the tomb with a funeral procession,

gold-leaf is pressed upon those very parts;

a glorious sheet of gold draws over the skin,

the metal covers what has been burned with fires.

These penalties the heathen world is compelled to bear,

by this law the gods constrain their worshippers:

so the demon himself mocks those whom he has caught,

teaches them to bear accursed insults,

commands torments to be branded upon the unhappy.

But this blood of ours flows from your

cruelty, you, with impious tyranny,

ulcerate the bodies of the innocent,

if you let us be, we live unbloodied,

but if we are punished bloodily, we conquer.

But now I will be silent; the due end is at hand,

the end of evils, the glory of the passion;

no longer will it be permitted, wicked one, as it was just now,

to torture or to cut our flesh;

you must needs yield, conquered, and now cease.”

“The torturer and cutter shall indeed cease henceforth,”

the judge threatens, “but the slayer’s hand

shall succeed them, the strangler of the throat;

otherwise the unquiet voice of the chattering mouth

knows not how to be silent, than if I break that trumpet.”

He spoke, and ordered the man to be dragged from the forum,

to be thrust into the darkness of the prison of the condemned;

there the unspeakable lictor crushes the martyr’s neck

with a cord, thus the passion was accomplished;

his soul, freed from its bonds, seeks heaven.

The prefect is said to have reported all the deeds to the prince,

adding the order of the volumes

and arranging the sequence of so great a tragedy:

the tyrant, rejoicing, refers every crime

of his own to the fasces, on living little papers.

But long age consumes those papers,

soot darkens them, dust covers them with mould,

old age frays them or buries them in ruins:

the page inscribed to Christ is immortal,

nor does any letter grow old in the heavens.

An angel, standing before God, caught up

both what the martyr spoke and what he endured,

nor only stored up the words of the speaker,

but, painting the very wounds, expressed with his pen

those of the sides, the cheeks, the breast, and the throat.

Every measure of the blood was noted,

how the furrow had ploughed each wound,

deep, open, near, long, short,

what force of pain, or what measure of the cut;

he lost no drop of blood.

This book is among the heavenly records,

keeping the memorials of indelible praise,

to be read again one day by the eternal judge,

who, with an even balance, will compare the weights

of evils and the abundance of rewards.

I would wish that, on the left among the herds of goats,

as I am to be, I might be discerned from afar

and, at his prayer, the best king should say:

“Romanus prays; transfer this goat to me;

let it be a lamb on the right, let it be clothed in fleece.”