II - The written record

Summary

In the first poem of his anthology of lyrics on the crowns of martyrdom (Peristephanon Liber), the Christian Latin poet Prudentius finds that his zeal for recounting the excruciating tortures suffered by the martyrs is severely limited by the loss of records about them. “Alas,” he exclaimed, “for the all too common forgetfulness of the voiceless past [o vetustatis silentis obsoleta oblivio]!” When we are denied the details, the story itself may be extinguished. Long ago, according to Prudentius, a blasphemous soldier took away the records of martyrs so that subsequent generations, trained in the preservation of memory by written account, should not disseminate to posterity, in sweet language, “the order, time, and manner that was handed down about the martyrdom.”

The fundamental written texts, what Prudentius called the tenaces libelli, obviously contained the raw material for those inspiring stories of martyrdoms that circulated in the Roman empire from the middle of the second century onwards and perhaps even earlier. These were texts that were adapted, expanded, altered, and imitated throughout the Roman imperial and Byzantine periods. Since the formative period of martyrdom was over by the early fourth century, when the empire became Christian, there could be no more documents of the struggles of the early Church against an intolerant and polytheist bureaucracy.