THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

THE MARTYRS IN THE THEBAID.

(ABOUT A.D. 302.)

 

"ONE cannot but admire", says Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, "those who suffered in Egypt, their native land, where thousands, both men, and women, and children, despising the present life for the sake of our Saviour's doctrine, submitted to death in various shapes. Some, after being tortured with scrapings and the rack, and the most dreadful scourgings, and other innumerable agonies, which one might shudder to hear, were finally committed to the flames; some plunged and drowned in the sea, others voluntarily offering their heads to the executioners; others dying in the midst of their torments, some wasted away by famine, and others again fixed to the cross.

Some, indeed, were executed as malefactors usually were; others, more cruelly, were nailed head downwards, and kept alive, until they were destroyed by starving, on the cross itself. But it would exceed all power of detail to give an idea of the sufferings and tortures which the martyrs of Thebais endured. These, instead of hooks, had their bodies scraped with potsherds, and were mangled in this way until they died.

Women, tied by one foot, and then raised on high in the air by certain machines, with their naked bodies wholly uncovered, presented this most foul, cruel, and inhuman spectacle to all beholders; others again perished, bound to trees and branches. For, drawing the stoutest of the branches together by machines for this purpose, and binding the limbs of the martyrs to each of these, they then let loose the boughs to resume their natural position, designing thus to produce a violent action, to tear asunder the limbs of those whom they thus treated.

But all these things were doing not only for a few days, or for some time, but for a series of whole years. At one time, ten or more; at another, more than twenty; at another time, not less than thirty, and even sixty; and again, at another time, a hundred men, with their wives and little children, were slain in one day, whilst they were condemned to various and varied punishments.

We ourselves, when on the spot, saw many crowded together in one day, some suffering decapitation, some the torments of flames; so that the murderous weapon was completely blunted, and having lost its edge, broke to pieces; and the executioners themselves, wearied with slaughter, were obliged to relieve one another.

Then, also, we were witnesses to the most admirable ardour of mind, and the truly divine energy and alacrity of those that believed in the Christ of God. For, as soon as the sentence was pronounced against the first, others rushed forward from other parts to the tribunal before the judge, confessing they were Christians, most indifferent to the dreadful and many kinds of tortures that awaited them, but declaring themselves fully, and in the most undaunted manner, on the religion which acknowledges only one Supreme God. They received, indeed, the final sentence of death with gladness and exultation, so far as even to sing and send up hymns of praise and thanksgiving, until they breathed their last."

The names of these blessed ones, whose bones are strewn over the deserts of Egypt, are unknown to us; but they are written in the Book of Life. At the day of the general Resurrection they will rise and stand, on their feet, a great army.