I - The making of martyrdom

Summary

Towards the end of the reign of the Roman emperor Commodus, in the last years of the decade of the 180s AD, a Roman governor in the province of Asia was conducting his normal judicial activities when a throng of excited people pushed forward to stand before his tribunal. Without provocation or prior accusation they all voluntarily declared themselves to be Christians, and by this declaration they presumably showed themselves unwilling to sacrifice to the Roman emperor — a test to which governors regularly put professing Christians. The pious mob encouraged the governor to do his duty and consign them all promptly to death. He obligingly had a few of them led away to execution; but, as the remainder clamored ever more loudly to be granted the same reward, he cried out to the petitioners in exasperation, “You wretches, if you want to die, you have cliffs to leap from and ropes to hang by.” The Roman official, who was a well-known member of a famous senatorial family at Rome, would hardly have confronted Christians for the first time on this occasion. He must have known their enthusiasm for death at the hands of the Roman administration. The philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius had, not long before, wondered to himself in his Meditations why it was that the Christians were so unreasonable and disorderly.