Agnes is buried at Rome—
mighty girl, famous martyr!
Lying in sight of the city’s towers,
the virgin watches over the Romans,
preserving their safety.
When the Spanish-born poet Prudentius visited Rome in 402 to 403, he travelled out along the via Nomentana to pray at the grave of Agnes; soon after, while still in Rome or perhaps back in Spain, he wrote a hymn in her honour, and this was how he began it. “The Hymn to Agnes” was one of fourteen poems he dedicated to martyrs who had been put to death in Spain and Italy; his purpose was to praise them as Christian heroes. Prudentius, a former civil administrator who had held a position at the imperial court, was steeped in the culture and traditions of the Roman empire. His Christian poetry sang a new theme in ancient Roman verse; and when he told of the heroic deeds of Christians, insisting on the utter difference of the new ideals from the ones being superseded, he nevertheless spoke of a greatness of soul that any ancient Roman could admire, even if unwillingly.
This is always the way with the stories of heroes: they tell of unexpected and extraordinary deeds, but they must do so using at least some of the old terms of reference. For without these, the audience will not feel closely involved in the story—will not see for themselves the extent of the discrepancy between old and new that heroes always demonstrate. For a hero is “made” by the rest of us: other people (we) must agree that he or she is great. Prudentius, as poet, is charged with the important role of showing how and why this heroic individual has come to be so highly valued. He has to communicate with his readership; otherwise, he cannot express for them their own admiration.
Standing outside the shrine built over the small grave, and near the great cemetery basilica erected by Constantina in honour of Agnes, Prudentius looked back at the world’s most splendid and powerful city and saw the massive walls encircling it. They had been built by the Emperor Aurelian (270–275 A.D.) and finished under Probus (276–282); a mere ten years it had taken to complete them. There were nearly twelve miles of walls; prodigious engineering and organizational skill had gone into the constructing of them, and millions of perfectly laid bricks. Three hundred and eighty-one tall rectangular towers projected from the walls, every one a hundred Roman feet from the next, except for the stretches along the riverbanks. There were seventeen gates, each flanked by massive semicircular towers; they included the Porta Nomentana, through which Prudentius had passed to travel to Sant’Agnese’s. During the very years Prudentius was in Rome the walls were being doubled in height, to more than forty feet. In spite of enormous damage done in the past hundred years, considerable sections of the walls still stand. One of these is the stretch of wall Prudentius would have seen from Sant’Agnese’s.
But the point of Prudentius’ poem was that Rome did not depend on these massive battlements for its eternal safety. Greater far than this staggering display of power was the choice that had been made by a twelve-year-old girl: what had inspired her and then sustained her as she was murdered for her convictions. She had faced threats of torture at the hands of her persecutors, but refused to sacrifice to idols. She had been punished for her obduracy by being dragged off to a brothel. Miraculously, she had been preserved from rape. Agnes was and is Rome’s hero but, the poet tells us, she also listens to strangers like him: Agnes in death has become more than a local manifestation of this new energy abroad in the world. And her glory is twofold, “a double crown” of virginity as well as martyrdom. Agnes is glorious—and intact.
Virginity for a female is the state of being intact, unviolated. In the ancient world a woman “pierced” by sex was laid open to the male: if married, she was in many ways his property; if unmarried, she was spoiled goods, and marriage was henceforth out of the question. If a woman lost her virginity outside marriage, or had extramarital sex, whether consensual or not, it was a matter of shame rather than guilt. Her “fault,” if any, was grave, but in the end incidental: whether she had willingly complied or had been forced, the result was the same. “My body only has been violated,” said the Roman heroine Lucretia after she had been raped. “My heart is guiltless [insons], as death shall be my witness.” She goes on to add, in the manner of Oedipus before her: “Though I acquit myself of the sin, I do not absolve myself from punishment,” and she plunged the knife into her heart.1 Neither Oedipus nor Lucretia was to blame. He, however, had indeed committed parricide and incest and so polluted Thebes; and she had—no question—ceased to be “a chaste wife.” To be “shamed” is less a crime than a state of being; shame, unlike guilt, cannot be forgiven.
A woman, ancient Romans easily saw, was very much like a city. If her purity—her walls—had been successfully assailed, she was delivered over to the rule—or simply the power—of men. From time immemorial men have besieged cities, and after battering down the cities’ defences, they have celebrated their victory with an orgy of raping women—partly because to do so insulted the defeated men, but also partly because one deed was reflected in and therefore readily led to the other. Men were raped too—”shamed” by being forced to submit to being treated as women. Rape continues in our day to be used as a weapon of war.
Ancient Romans, and Greeks before them, protected through cultic observances the walls around their cities. A group of female virgins, devotees of Hestia (Roman Vesta), tended the fire at the circular shrine of this virgin goddess of the hearth. The hearth of a house was often literally, and always symbolically, round; a circle is a quintessentially female sign. The hearth contained the utterly “male” element, fire. Hestia/Vesta was worshipped at the hearth (focus in Latin, a word that includes in its connotations what we now mean in English by “focus”) that lay at the heart of every house. It was tended most especially by the still-virgin daughters of the family, women who continued to be devoted to their fathers, not having yet left home to join a husband’s family. A woman taken away to share her spouse’s “hearth and home” had to be sexually pure at marriage, and remain faithful thereafter to the man who would give his name to her children. His family’s bloodline required her purity: everyone knows who is the mother of a newborn child, but a great deal of “culture” is required to be certain who is the father.
The virgin goddess Vesta was given a public cult, echoing private household worship, at her circular shrine, the city’s “hearth” in its main square; the fire that constantly burned there was tended by six officially appointed, sexually pure women, known as vestal virgins. To let the fire go out in the cultic city hearth was severely punished: it meant that the vestals had placed the defences of the city in peril. The penalty for a vestal virgin caught copulating was to be scourged and then buried alive.
Ancient Greeks and Romans also created an embodiment of the good fortune, the beauty and tranquillity, the continuance in safety, of a city. She was Tyché or Fortuna, a comely woman serenely seated, wearing on her head a crown made of the city’s walls unbroached.2 Before the Aurelian Walls were built Rome was surrounded by the smaller periphery of the so-called Servian Walls. Just outside the Porta Collina in these walls (Porta Collina was where the via Nomentana originally began) was the temple to Fortuna Publica Populi Romani, the “Public Fortune of the Roman People.”3 As Turrigera, “Tower Wearer”—a reference to the virgin goddess’s battlemented headdress—Fortuna’s statue stood in her temple at the gates of the earlier wall around Rome. The vestal virgins, on the other hand, attended the goddess Vesta at the centre of the city, in the Roman Forum. (The shrine’s ruins, and those of the house the vestals lived in, are visible there today.) Virginity at the heart of the city, virginity at her walls: together they represented and preserved the city’s integrity.
The Christian hero Agnes, who according to Prudentius now watches over and preserves the safety of Rome’s citizens, died a virgin—or so it was said. Prudentius tells us in his poem that Agnes was given a fiendish choice by her persecutor: either to lay her head on the altar of the virgin goddess Minerva and beg her pardon for refusing to sacrifice to her, or to cease to be a virgin herself. Agnes again refused to commit idolatry. She was therefore stripped naked and made to stand at a public place, publicitus… flexu in plateae, as Prudentius put it.4
In Piazza Navona today rises the magnificent baroque church of Sant’Agnese in Agone.5 Underneath it is a series of vaulted rooms that may still be visited. They are the remains of three parallel galleries of arcades that once lay beneath the seats on the outer periphery of the stadium built on this site in the first century A.D. by the Emperor Domitian. The Piazza Navona6 espouses the outline of the stadium exactly. These vaulted arches, here and in other stadia, were known in Latin as fornices. So common were brothels and stands for prostitutes in such places that the word fornix came to mean “brothel,” and is the root of the English word “fornication.”
Tradition claimed that it was here that Agnes was exposed to the passing crowds; and this would indeed have been a likely place for such a punishment. Prudentius might well have heard that the event took place at this spot. Moreover, it was here that she was also generally believed to have been killed. An oratory dedicated to Agnes existed on the site in the eighth century and is mentioned in the Itinerary of Einsiedeln: “Circus Flaminius. Ibi sea Agnes.” (Domitian’s circus was then known as the Circus Flaminius.)7 Pope Calixtus II built a church on the site of the oratory in 1123. This building was in turn replaced in 1652–1657 by Rainaldi’s and Borromini’s church, which still stands.
Agnes, then, is the patron saint of two sanctuaries in Rome: one outside the walls, and one downtown; one for her virginal death in “the place of shame,” and one for her burial. In the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone her skull is venerated; the rest of her bones are buried in her church outside the walls. Like the vestal virgins and the goddess Fortuna before her, the virgin Agnes came to occupy both the centre of the city and its periphery.8
Most Christian martyrdoms were, of course, never recorded. Many died—and still die—for their faith, and remain uncelebrated, “their names known to God alone,” as Christians frequently remind themselves. Concerning the martyrs who were remembered during the earliest centuries A.D., there was little that could be done to check the facts about their deaths, unless written reports had survived. Fama refert, says the Damasus inscription about Agnes: “Many people say.…” He is referring particularly to the girl’s family, who were, presumably, in a position to know something about the circumstances of her death. Until Damasus wrote his eulogies, the martyrs’ stories at Rome were handed on orally. There remained, of course, the graves of the heroic dead, and the fact that Christians, often at considerable risk, had continued to honour them at these burial sites, and in that manner remembered them.
But there is an important sense in which heroes—in this instance Christian saints—are not only real people; they are also mythic beings. Heroes must do deeds of heroism, and many of their actions will be “known to God alone.” But they are heroes only insofar as their deeds are known to other people and their stories told, for it is other people who decide that someone is a hero. These “others” will often not scruple to alter the facts if they can, in order to shape the hero’s actions into the story they want to hear. This tendency is powerful even today, when we have far greater means than ever before of recording, preserving, and checking “the facts.” With heroes it is the story—what ancient Greeks called the mythos—that counts. Very often a myth—a trajectory of the soul—is told again and again, in different versions and with varying protagonists. It is the task of heroes to enact the story—on behalf of us, the audience.
The founding story of Christianity is the life of Christ. The Christian religion continues to consist of people’s response to Christ’s coming as the revelation of God’s love: attention to his words; contemplation of his life, his death, and his Resurrection; and obedience to his desire that love of him should be expressed in love for other human beings—all of them: no one is to be dismissed. The liturgy of the Catholic Church includes a year-long “reliving” of the events of the life of Christ, one after the other, and a constant reminder of the stories of people who have paid attention to them, heroically.
Each Christian is called to aspire to sanctity. “Saints,” as the word is used among Catholic Christians today, are those who, in the opinion of other people, have succeeded in this enterprise. The Roman Catholic Church “canonizes” certain saints, placing them on a list (canon) of those given the seal of its approval, after long study and a process of discernment.9 There are far more saints not in the canon than there are in it; and many a saint in the canon receives little or no veneration from people today: it is always the people who finally decide that someone is, for them, a hero. The Church understands that saints, their prayers, their lives, are for people on earth, and that sainthood, as an earthly honour, is not coveted by the saints themselves.
Every Christian saint’s life is lived in emulation of the life of Christ—even though each new narrative is utterly different from all the others because it takes place with a new hero, in a new time and context; and it arises out of different circumstances. A saint’s life is therefore always new and surprising—but always “the same.” As hagiography, the life is recounted on behalf of the listeners, in order to clarify the issues for them, to inspire them, and to confront them with choices that only they can make, for themselves. And a story, like an architectural space, can both express and recall epiphany.
Early Christian martyrs must have been young girls comparatively rarely. Yet the figure of the female virgin martyr was one of those that most fired the Christian hagiographical imagination, especially from the third century to the early Middle Ages. The church of Sant’Agnese has a string of these virgins depicted in fresco on the walls above the gallery.10 The women are all different, and from different places, but their stories strikingly resemble one another, and of course they recall the story of Agnes herself.
The first in the series is Victoria (whose Acts are a contemporary report). Aged about twelve, she jumped out of a window on her wedding day in order to avoid being saddled with a husband, and then refused to pretend to be insane in order to save her life; she died in a prison in Carthage. Lucy would not marry her suitor; she was sent to a brothel, but remained a virgin. Burning her failed, and she was then stabbed to death. (These events are the same as those told of the death of Agnes). Lucy’s name (from the Latin for “light”) is thought to have prompted the story of her eyes being put out; she is the patron saint of people with eye trouble. Agatha was sent to a brothel in vain, then tortured to death. The virgin Barbara (whose story is taken to be wholly mythical) struggled valiantly with her horrible father until he killed her, but she forgave him before she died. Barbara’s story involves a tower, the windows of which she deliberately increased in number from two to three, in honour of the Trinity. She became the patron saint of architects and builders—and also of gunners.
Cecilia (who appears again on the ceiling of the church) was given in marriage to Valerian, whom she persuaded on their wedding night to drop sex forever. (Instead of paying attention to the wedding celebrations, she “sang in her heart to God,” which made her the patron saint of music.) Valerian and his brother Tiburtius were beaten to death, and Cecilia condemned to suffocation in the saunalike bathroom of her own house; she finally had to be beheaded. Martina, another of the patron saints of Rome, was tortured and then killed by stabbing under the emperor Septimius Severus. Milk flowed out of her wounds instead of blood. Bibiana (Vivian) was first sent to a brothel “to have her mind changed,” and when that did not work, she was beaten to death; two other young women died with her. Their bodies were exposed to be eaten by dogs, but the dogs refused to comply. (She, like Cecilia and Martina, is the patron saint of her own church in Rome.)
Rufina and her sister Secunda, daughters of a Roman senator, were engaged to Christian men who apostatized under threat. The girls, however, refused to renounce Christianity; they were scourged, tortured, and beheaded. The church in Rome dedicated to these women is now enclosed inside a convent; it is said to be at the site of their family house. Columba, aged sixteen, was condemned to be mauled by a bear before the crowds in the amphitheatre at Sens in France. The occasion was the visit to the city of the Emperor Aurelian (he who built the walls of Rome). The bear is said to have protected her from rape in the jail, and then to have refused to attack her in the arena.11 Columba was later decapitated; as often happens in the stories of the martyrs, a fountain sprang up where her head was buried. Julia, after being sold as a slave, travelled with her owner on a ship and had many adventures before being killed by pirates who first tore her hair out and then crucified her. She is the patron saint of Corsica where she was killed.
Apollonia was not a teenager but an aged deaconess. A mob of pagans knocked out all her teeth, but she continued to refuse to blaspheme Christ. She is the patron saint of dentists and sufferers from toothache. On being threatened with burning, she leaped into the flames of her own accord. Flora was beheaded by the Saracens at Cordoba; as she awaited her death, she was encouraged by Eulogius, who afterwards wrote a (surviving) narrative of the events. Catherine of Alexandria argued with a crowd of philosophers and converted every one—as well as hundreds of other people. Refusing to be married to a powerful man because she had already committed herself in mystic marriage to Christ, she was condemned to be torn on a spiked wheel (a “Catherine wheel”). But it flew apart, and she had to be beheaded instead. She used to be the patron saint of spinsters, the celibate clergy—and wheelwrights. Because her story is now believed to be completely mythical, she has been withdrawn from the canon.
Susanna refused to marry Maximian, son-in-law of the emperor Diocletian, but instead converted the emperor’s go-between, her uncle Claudius, who was trying to arrange the marriage. Claudius and his brother Maximus, also converted by Susanna, were burned to death and the girl beheaded. The church of Santa Susanna in Rome has magnificent frescoes that tell her story, including the miracle of her protection, by an angel, from rape in prison. Her head on a dish is carved above the front door of the church. The body of Candida, the last of the procession of virgin martyrs and “companions” of Agnes depicted on the walls at Sant’Agnese’s, was brought to the church of Santa Prassede by Pope Paschal I in 817; her name appears in close proximity to that of Emerentiana, on the famous stone inscription still preserved in that church, giving the names of the martyrs whose relics were brought for safety within the walls. There is a tradition that Saint Peter himself baptized Candida at Naples, together with Asprenus, who later became the city’s first bishop. It may be recalled that Peter traditionally baptized near Sant’Agnese’s when he was in Rome.
Most of these stories have large accretions of legendary material gathered around a small core of facts; some are entirely made up. The Gospel accounts of the life of Christ, as Scripture, could not be altered; but the authors of these “sacred biographies” felt free to indulge in what today we might call “creative fiction.” The cultural traditions and expectations of the audience deeply affected what was said; indeed, it can fairly be claimed that the real authors of these accounts were to a large extent their audiences.12 All of the stories can be read as deliberate reflections, in narrative form, upon Scripture.
Many of them must have been based on no more than names and places. The facts about Agnes are hardly more plentiful: we know of her “for a fact” only her name, the site of her burial in her family’s plot, her extreme youth, the day of her death, and that she was martyred. The date of her death is likely to have been after the fourth edict of the persecution of Diocletian, which in March 304 ordered all Christians without exception to sacrifice on pain of death; Agnes probably died on January 21, 305. Even the manner of her death is told to us in several different versions: beheading, stabbing in the throat, and/or burning.
None of the early hagiographies says very much about the lives of the saints before their martyrdom. With modern martyrs—of which there are huge numbers: more Christians have been killed for their faith in the last century than in all of the previous nineteen13—it is very different. We have far more documentation about the lives of these people, and often more facts about their deaths, in spite of the preference for secrecy in modern methods of persecution. But with the early virgin martyrs it was an account of the actual death that the audience wanted to hear: horror unable to overcome innocence, conviction triumphant over seduction, the drama of brave faithfulness and purity of heart—and rape miraculously averted.14 Another demand was for the telling and retelling of an ancient and archetypal heroic plot, one that was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and valued to this day, wherever stories are told.
The stories of virgin martyrs as “imitations” of the passion of Christ portray innocent victims, people done to death for their beliefs. The martyrs refuse to worship idols or to shift allegiances. As women, they express their heroism and loyalty by first exerting extraordinary sexual attraction, then turning down the advances of rich, noble, powerful Roman men: they proclaim that their allegiance has already been granted, to Christ. Female witness to Christianity was especially outrageous and jarring to Greek and Roman ears—but there were important precedents; the message could find a space for its telling.
Ancient Greeks are notorious for their misogyny, and yet their mythology includes stories of outstandingly powerful women, not to mention great goddesses. Strictly speaking, heroism was for men. It is about prowess, usually in public action. Women were by definition weak, themselves in need of protection by “heroes,” and their role was wholly private. The heroic myth conventionally includes a journey, in the course of which prowess is demonstrated and adventures undergone: heroes almost invariably travel about. But women’s place—and that included their religious and mythic space—was in the home. They stayed in one place; indeed, they were often the goal of the hero’s journey. Greeks went so far as to make “movement” male and “immobility” female.15 Women were under the control of men, on a lower level entirely. For all these reasons female heroes—Electra, Medea, Penelope, Alcestis—were highly paradoxical figures.
But all heroes to a certain extent break the heroic mould, and question it. Indeed, the difference between the official pattern or set of criteria for heroes, and the behaviour of any particular hero, is the very stuff out of which stories are made. An author telling us a story says, in effect, “You think that this character is unheroic—rowdy and lustful (like Heracles), much too clever—heroes are rarely allowed to be “smart”—(like Odysseus), or incapacitated by a terrible wound (like Philoctetes). But I tell you, this is a hero.” And the narrative proceeds to show us that it is so. Heroic figures from other cultures and times range from the simple-minded Parsifal and the too-complicated Hamlet to the foppish or apparently colourless detective; from the cowboy with a crime in his past to a man confined to his apartment with a broken leg but who nevertheless saves the day. Disabilities are overcome, disadvantages and personal defects surmounted: they merely serve to help the audience understand how truly great the hero’s qualities are.
Women, given their inherent inferiority within the cultural system, and given the love of paradox that is perhaps inseparable from the very idea of heroism, have always made excellent heroes, although there have traditionally been far fewer of them than of men. An outstanding Greek example is Antigone, who, in Sophocles’ play of the same name, confronts the state, in the shape of her powerful uncle Creon (his name means “Powerful One,” “Ruler”). Creon has decreed that Antigone’s dead brother, a traitor to the city, shall not be buried, but will be left to be ripped to pieces by birds of prey.
Antigone buries him, knowing the danger to herself. For this, Creon decrees an appropriate punishment: she is herself entombed in a cave—alive. The result is not what Creon expected. The city is polluted—the birds themselves are revolted—because the king has been profoundly mistaken, as Antigone has not: he has “confused the upper and lower worlds,” leaving the dead unburied and burying the living. Antigone hangs herself in her underground prison. Antigone’s fiancé—Creon’s son—commits suicide, and Creon’s wife stabs herself to death. Creon is left alone, his life destroyed. (He does not die. Heroes die; Creon is merely bereft, condemned to a “living death.”)
In this story Creon ought to have been the hero—king as he is, a powerful male, attempting to carry out “justice” on behalf of the state. But Creon is a mere politician—a manipulator of facts, a man of “common sense,” a compromiser (he keeps changing his mind, which is fatal for the heroic “pattern” and unthinkable in Antigone). It is Antigone who is the hero. With heroic singleness of heart, she refuses to be disloyal to her brother. Nothing can sway her or frighten her. Antigone’s name means “Born Against”: she says no, accepts the consequences—and breaks Creon. The people of Thebes take her part. She has done what is right, they sing—and therefore she, and not Creon, is the hero. Even though Antigone’s goals and thoughts are far from Christian, she bases her behaviour on a statement that could have been made by a Christian hero. She acted, she says, out of love for her brother, no matter what he had done: “I cannot share in hatred but in love.”
The myth of Antigone finds many echoes in the story of Agnes, and of other Christian martyrs, male and female, as well. Antigone tells Creon that he has no right to forbid her to bury her brother; Agnes refuses to “render unto Caesar the things that are God’s.”16 Antigone points out in the play that her allegiance to her brother comes first—it long preceded either the love of Creon’s son for her, or Creon’s decree. Agnes says she is already totally committed, to Christ. Both young women run away from home (their “place”), to complete against all the odds a heroic journey. Antigone refuses to hide the fact that she was the one who disobeyed the state’s decree; Agnes cannot bear to keep quiet about her belief, knowing that Christianity is proscribed, and knowing that she will be put to death for speaking out. (Heroes must make their actions and convictions known. How else is society to see what they have done and, amazed, decide that they are heroes?)
Both Antigone and Agnes—and many of the other martyrs too—present their reasons for their actions in a confrontation with a person representing law and power. Such a scene is known in Greek as an agon, a struggle, one on one. Christian art has often portrayed the scene: the little girl (Thecla or Catherine or Eulalia), finger raised, confuting the philosophers, or fearlessly stating her case before the furious enthroned governor and his shocked courtiers. The fact that the confrontation has archetypal dramatic power does not mean that such “struggles” never occurred in real life: written reports of actual trials exist, where Roman officials questioned Christian prisoners, and the words used have come down to us. These court documents are every bit as dramatic as stones known to be legendary.17
Both Agnes and Antigone achieve what males alone, and few of them, are supposed to find possible: what the ancients called “a beautiful death.” This is a death that is brave, famous, and honourable, one that demonstrates greatness of soul, and shows forth the strength and beauty of heroic commitment.18 All these qualities are made manifest by Agnes, and also by Antigone, whose sister reminds her in vain that she is a mere woman, and “women do not do battle with men.” A great many early Christians, given the choice between idolatrous worship of the emperor or death, had given in and abjured their faith. Agnes, a mere girl who courted confrontation with the edict and could not be broken in spite of her age, was admired as a marvel and a standing reproach.
Christianity adds to the heroic mythos its own special take on the greatness of the so-called weak. One of its foundation texts extols the blessedness of the gentle, the pure of heart, the poor in spirit, the persecuted, and those despised and hated because of Christ. It is a religion that eschews spiritual “technique” and “prowess” in favour of its first command: “simply” to love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself. It insists that it is easier for those not bloated by possessions to get through “the needle’s eye” into the kingdom of God; and Jesus thanked God that the truth has been revealed not to the learned or the brilliant but to “little ones.”19 In short, the ideal of Christian saintliness turns the entire concept of heroism on its head. That does not mean that it rejects, or even changes, the heroic picture: it keeps it, but reverses it, so that its heroes protest always that they are not heroes, not strong, not outstanding, not worthy, not able. The majority, of course, knows better: it makes such people its heroes. Saint Francis of Assisi, “the little poor one,” il Poverello, is one of the greatest heroes—that is, one of the closest imitators of Jesus—in the Christian canon.
The De virginibus of Ambrose, the Ambrosian hymn Agnes beatae virginis, the “Hymn to Agnes” by Prudentius, and the passio of Agnes were all written in the closing years of the classical era. Christianity had arisen out of Judaism and become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The original mythos, however, remains forever unofficial. Antigone can be neither confined nor muzzled by Creon, although the battle continues. Prudentius fully understood the enormity of the paradox when he made Agnes, not the Aurelian Walls, the protector of the Roman people: “mighty girl, famous martyr!”
But Agnes, unlike Antigone, apparently had to endure not only a martyr’s death but also an attack on her sexual integrity, her virginity. This aspect of her story grew—we can actually see it growing—as the poems, sermons, and passios gradually elaborated upon the memory of the death of this little girl.
The Damasus inscription was probably the earliest written narrative. He says that even as she died, in modesty Agnes covered her body with her hair. And he ends with a prayer to Agnes, famous martyr, glorious in her pudor (“shamefastness” as it used to be called). For Damasus, she died modest to the last, like many a martyred heroine, both classical and Christian, before her. The hymn Agnes beatae virginis, probably by Ambrose, calls her a virgin but speaks only of the moment of her execution, describing her pudor as she drew her clothing around her after her executioner had stabbed her, and covered her face with her hand as she fell.20
When Ambrose alluded to the story in De virginibus (ca. 377 A.D.), he openly turned it into a eulogy of the virginity of Agnes, her purity, her perfection as a model for all virgins. Ambrose tells us, for the first time among the sources that have reached us, how the Roman prosecutor, whom he calls “the tyrant,” desired her sexually, how he tried to seduce her by flattery and promises of marriage—but she refused him, having made her choice in advance. Ambrose avoids describing the actual blow that killed her, contenting himself with the calm and courageous behaviour of Agnes despite her age: “Intrepid, she prayed; she bowed her head.”
“You have, therefore,” he goes on, “in one victim a double witness [in una hostia duplex martyrium], of purity and of faith!” Ambrose concludes, “She both remained a virgin and achieved martyrdom: et virgo permansit et martyrium obtinuit.” We shall look again at Ambrose’s last sentence. But the “double crown” of Agnes, as Prudentius was to call it, remains a feature of her story down to the present day, with the two lambs at her yearly festival. The tradition has remained that Agnes was martyred, but died intact.
The fifth-century Latin passio amplified the story, devoting considerable energy to explaining how it came to pass that Agnes remained inviolate; in doing so, it sensationally exploited the sexual drama merely hinted at by Damasus and Ambrose. Symphronius, the Roman prefect, we are told, was the father of a young man who had been in love with Agnes, and whom she had resoundingly rejected. In revenge, he reported to his father that she was a Christian, and the prefect ordered her to appear before him. He threatened her, and tried to seduce her with sweet promises, but she remained adamantly faithful to her original commitment.
The prefect declared his determination to make her into a vestal virgin, who would be forced to offer idolatrous sacrifice to the goddess night and day for the rest of her life. He came off very badly, however, in the battle of words that followed. Enraged, he changed his tack and gave her the choice: either be a vestal virgin or be condemned to sexual slavery in a brothel. She chose the latter, convinced that her guardian angel would protect her, that Christ would be for her “an impenetrable wall.” Symphronius commanded that she should be dragged through the streets naked, to the brothel.
The Damasus inscription had briefly alluded to her having “covered her body with her hair” out of modesty. The passio of Agnes, however, improved considerably on this detail. It says that when she was stripped of her clothing to be escorted by the military to the fornix, her hair suddenly grew so long that it became a veil and covered her body.21 When she arrived at the brothel, a brilliant light shone about her, and as she prayed a beautiful white garment appeared before her. She put it on, and it was so white and fitted her so perfectly that everyone said it must have been ready made by the hands of the guardian angel who, as she had told the prefect, would certainly protect her.
The prefect’s son with a group of his friends went to the brothel with the object of “insulting” her there. But as he stretched out his arm to touch her, he fell choking to the ground. The cry went up that Agnes was a death-dealing witch. The prefect himself came to the brothel on hearing the news. But Agnes prayed to God, and the prefect’s son not only came round, but proclaimed his conversion to Christianity.22 At this, the Roman priests stirred up the people, who even more angrily denounced Agnes as a witch. The prefect himself now wished he could save her from execution, but he could not go against the priests. (In this inability to act he resembles Pontius Pilate, in the Passion of Jesus.23) The vicarius or deputy of the emperor, Aspasius by name, now took charge. He had a fire built up to burn the witch. Agnes was thrown into the flames, but they divided in two, flew out, and burned the crowd instead. She stood there, her arms raised in a prayer of ecstatic joy (“Behold, what I believed I now see; what I hoped for, I have; what I desired, I now embrace”), and gradually the fire went out.24 Aspasius, terrified that the people would rise up against him, stepped forward and plunged his sword into her throat.25
Prudentius’ poem, which probably predated the passio, does not tell of the miracle of Agnes’ hair. The crowd, he says, refused to look at the girl standing naked in the fornix: they were ashamed to do so. (Shame is a positive force as well as a negative one: it is supposed to prevent violations of the moral system.) But one man did look, and was struck blind by a thunderbolt for his baseness.26 Agnes rejoiced because her virginity remained to her. She then prayed for the young man, and his sight was restored. She was applying the new heroic standard of virtue in forgiving her enemy.27 But the judge, as he is called in the hymn by Prudentius, did not repent. Merely angered because the girl had won the struggle between them, he ordered that Agnes should die for not obeying the emperor. She bowed her head, and with one blow the executioner cut it off. The soul of Agnes rose heavenward; she laughed for joy. A “double crown,” duplex corona, was hers as martyr and virgin; she had been killed, but never violated.
Because of the survival of several different documents telling of her martyrdom, the Agnes story is particularly revealing of how a virgin martyr myth evolved. The sexual theme (nubile girl totally at the mercy of a benighted and ruthless male ruler or judge) is fully dramatized. Yet it became clear, as the myth was told and retold, that Agnes must not, could not have been raped. Indeed, nothing in these documents suggests that she did not die a virgin. On the contrary: miracle after miracle occurs to ensure that Agnes remains inviolate. In order to be considered a hero, Agnes was apparently required to achieve both moral and physical integrity: to keep both her courage and her physical virginity intact. If that was so, then hers is still a Greco-Roman rather than a Christian myth.
It is probable that many, even most, early Christian virgins executed for their faith were, in fact, first raped. One of the most shocking incidents in the story of Agnes cannot be dismissed as a lurid invention: Christian women are known to have been punished by being forced into brothels. The equivalent for men was consignment to work in the appalling conditions of the ancient Roman mines. In a rhetorical address to Roman persecutors of Christians, Tertullian mentions a woman who was forced into prostitution. “In condemning a Christian woman to a brothel,” he wrote, “instead of to death by being mauled by a lion, you were admitting that to us such a fate is more terrible than any punishment and any death.”28 During the trial of Pionios before his martyrdom at Smyrna in 250, Sabina, one of Pionios’ companions, was interrogated by Polemon. The court secretary recorded the words spoken in the encounter. “Those who will not sacrifice are made to stand in the brothel,” Polemon reminded her. Sabina’s reply was, “God most holy will take care of that.”29
Ancient Romans felt uncomfortable about killing—especially stabbing or beheading—a virgin. Their unease came from the violation of religious and social categories. In Greek and Roman myths women who commit suicide usually hang themselves, take poison, or leap off cliffs—anything rather than use the phallic sword, death by which was the quintessence of a gloriously “masculine” end, but for a woman symbolized rape. True, the mythical Roman heroine Lucretia had stabbed herself—an appropriate gesture in this case, since she had been raped; and moreover she was a wife, not a virgin. Eurydice, in the Antigone, stabs herself, but she is Creon’s wife. When mythical virgin women are killed with a sword, it is a terrible affair, as the death of Iphigenia—and its reverberating outcome—shows.30 Tacitus tells us that when the daughter of Sejanus was murdered, she was violated first by the executioner, then strangled, “because capital punishment of a virgin was unprecedented.”31 In practice it was safer, even perhaps more “aesthetic,” first to change the virgin’s status—and easily done.
To a modern sensibility, the fact that virgins were probably routinely raped before being put to death not only rings hideously true, but makes these martyrdoms more terrible—and more moving.32 It seems very odd to us that tales of martyrdom should dwell in detail upon blood and pain, but always take care to insist that a female hero could never have been raped. (The insistence is continual: look over the short list of virgin martyrs painted on the walls of Sant’Agnese’s, and see how many of them were sent to brothels but miraculously remained inviolate.) Death was different. Death in the passios of virgin martyrs can involve flaying by hooks, being rolled in barrels of glass shards, having breasts lopped off, or teeth broken; it often features whips and wild beasts, burning and dismemberment. These are described and (later) depicted. But rape? Never.
One reason must be that rape was still held, in the culture, to have the power to render a woman “shamed,” and a “shamed” hero was a contradiction in terms. Female heroes, therefore, against every likelihood, had to maintain their virginal status. We know that thinking Christians accepted the implication of their faith, that a raped woman was in no way “polluted” or “reduced” by what had been done to her. Saint Augustine (354–430), for instance, spoke of “the chastity preserved in the spirit,” which cannot be destroyed by the physical violence of a rapist.33 When it came to the stories of the virgin martyrs, the myth was capable of accepting that a torn and mutilated body could paradoxically declare the extent of a martyr’s psychic integrity. But sexual assault, even in brothels, is invariably and triumphantly warded off by these heroines. Presumably, popular thinking could still not accept that a woman who was the victim of rape might have kept her purity of soul intact, and so remained heroic: when people told her story for the admiration of others, they apparently felt obliged to make editorial improvements.
The endurance in a Christian setting of the very kind of thinking that the Christian revelation sets out to dispel is deplorable. We should consider, nevertheless, the historical context to which the virgin martyr stories belong. The martyr legends were told after the great persecutions had ended, among Christians who were much less likely to be called upon to die for their faith. The enthusiasm of the heroic among them was now channelled instead into asceticism. Some disappeared into the desert, for instance, to live as hermits. Some decided to stay at home without ever marrying. Others chose to live in community, leaving their natal family and giving up the possibility of a procreative family in order to help form new groupings of “brothers” and “sisters” whose ties were spiritual, not physical. To renounce family was to renounce sex.34
Hagiographical stories, therefore, stressed virginity: they were intended to inspire men and women living or wanting to live celibate lives. These were people who might not aspire to Agnes’ two crowns, but could surely aim to achieve one of them.35 When Ambrose, addressing in De virginibus an audience of celibate women,36 spoke of Agnes’ “double witness” and then said that these were virginity and martyrdom, he was assuring his listeners that their virginity too was a form of martyrdom—martyrdom in the sense of “witnessing” to faith. It is important to add that the stories extolling virginity also addressed the majority of people, who had no intention of aiming for the total devotion expressed in a vow of celibacy.
During the first Christian centuries, celibacy for both men and women had come to be considered an outstandingly virtuous choice in life. As we have seen, one of the paradoxes of Christianity is its demand for both community and individualism. At first, individualism was the revolutionary ideal. To renounce sex and choose virginity, especially for a woman, was to maintain one’s “outline”—like a city that repels armies from its walls—and to avoid losing one’s individuality in the creation of a family. It meant freedom from much of the control of men, and freedom from the constraints and commitments inherent in child-bearing.
Freedom is not only “from” but also “for”: a choice of virginity could be (and still can be) in favour of living at the disposal of others, not necessarily those belonging to one’s family. Living as virgins in community expressed the paradox perfectly: single individuals, living as a group, with everyone’s attention turned towards helping all of their neighbours, both within the community and outside it. Such a life “witnessed” to this essential aspect of the Christian ideal as surely as dying for refusing to sacrifice to idols witnessed to one’s revolutionary faith in the Judeo-Christian God. And the exceptional nobility of the calling to a celibate life “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” had scriptural assurance in the words of Christ, together with the warning, “It is not everyone who can accept what I have said, but only those to whom it is granted.”37
From the point of view of the pagan world, however, especially before 300 A.D., Christianity was a threat precisely because it lured women away from their ancient social role. It broke up families, and caused women to become recalcitrant and opinionated. It encouraged many of them to abandon their duty to the state and the family, which was the bearing of children and the creation of family alliances through daughters being “given away” by their fathers to men whom the family wanted to count as members of their clan.38 The new Christian system gave scandalously high status to unmarried women and to widows—women outside the sphere where their usefulness might, in the pagan world, have been rewarded with honour.
Christians expressed their version of virginity as “marriage to Christ”; this meant that a heroic choice had been made, explicitly to prefer God to everything else. For centuries women have been initiated into religious orders in a ceremony that quotes the words spoken by Agnes in her passio when she refused the hand of the prefect’s son: “With Christ alone do I keep faith; for him do I reserve my devotion.… And after this my wedding, many will be the children that I shall mother.”39 The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are still taken in religious orders, male and female—and to this day the three vows directly and totally reverse (with revolutionary intent) the powers, lures, distractions, and pressures of “this world.” From a religious point of view, virginity is never merely biological.
But we must come back to the fact that martyred women may seldom have died virgins—except in the spiritual and metaphorical, but nevertheless real, sense that they remained faithful to their convictions, their souls undiminished. These women must often have been first raped and then killed: if so, they suffered a double martyrdom. It is this “double crown” that we wish the virgin martyr stories would acknowledge, and they do not.
Christianity changed human history when, taking up with renewed intensity a theme already present in the Jewish Old Testament, it insisted on a new view of scapegoat killings: the victim is innocent. This was one meaning of the crucifixion of Christ. Death on the cross was deeply shameful—a “double martyrdom” of pain and shame—so much so that the earliest Christians could not bear to depict their founder undergoing it. The nakedness of the victim was part of the shame. In the case of Jesus no miracles occurred to save him; he even shared the common experience of victims that they have been abandoned by God, crying out on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”40
Even so, it is perhaps only now that we can honestly look at the virgin martyrs as representatives of female heroism. An insistence on literal virginity (as opposed to integrity of mind and soul) as essential to female heroism is no longer acceptable. In this respect we are certainly closer now to the original Christian revelation. Christians (unless they take a fundamentalist stance) experience the revelation proceeding from Christ’s life and death as ongoing, always growing. The application of “shame culture” to women, which has persisted for nearly two thousand years after Christ’s coming, is increasingly revealed for the outrage that it is. Human beings are better able now—at least in this respect—to endure the light.
The parents of Agnes, recounts the last chapter of her passio, after burying her milk sister Emerentiana, spent night after night in vigil at their daughter’s grave. One silent midnight they saw a great light, and a multitude of virgins all clothed in gold appeared to them, moving in a long procession. Among them was their daughter. Her father and mother were amazed. Agnes asked for the procession to stop a moment. She spoke to her parents, telling them not to mourn for her but to share her joy, for now she lived among these marvellous companions, in total intimacy with the One she had loved on earth above everything else.
The scene is reproduced in the great mosaic that accompanies the nave on the clerestory wall of the sixth-century church of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna: it shows a line of women haloed and clothed in gold, each one wearing a jewelled pallium under her cloak and carrying in her veiled hands a martyr’s crown. Agnes stands out among them because beside her walks a white lamb with a tiny bell around its neck; it turns and looks up at her. The lamb is Agnes’ attribute or identifying symbol; she was one of the first Christian saints to have one.41
The lamb (agnus in Latin) is a visual pun on the girl’s name. In Greek (her name is, in fact, Greek) hagne means “full of religious awe” (hagos). In ancient Greek religion, sacred people, places, or objects—those that were considered untouchable and “fenced-off”—
had, and aroused, hagos. Examples were the holy ground occupied by a temple, holy objects inside a temple, or, from a sexual point of view, close family members, sex with whom was utterly taboo. Such untouchable people, places, or things were protected by a curse, or gave rise to pollution if they were tampered with. It is not surprising that the myth of Agnes should have endowed her with sacred virginity, for such a quality was suggested by her name. Just as the “virgin” Constantia in her hagiographical tale was constant, so Agnes must have been virginal or sacrosanct: hagne. The son of the Roman prefect had indeed attempted the impossible.
The philosopher René Girard42 has shown how the strategy of human sacrifice, masked by myths such as those of the Greeks, is fundamental to the birth of human culture. In moments of crisis human “togetherness” has been achieved—and still is, if we are not very careful—by the creation of scapegoats. A scapegoat is a person or a group of people blamed for the discord that periodically arises within human societies because of what Girard calls “mimetic violence.” Once order has broken down, social groupings degenerate into a murderous chaos that people can neither fathom nor control. Escape may be found when a scapegoat is blamed for the trouble. The many unite against the one: a vilified group, or a person upon whom blame can be foisted, becomes intolerable and must be persecuted—wiped out, if possible. “Society” has its way. In the creation of a common enemy, concord is re-established, as by a miracle.
In ancient or primitive societies, once peace has been restored, the survivors are grateful. Just as they once relieved their hatred for each other by blaming their victim, they now offer gratitude to the one—or the group—who appears to have saved them by accepting death. They begin to worship their enemy.43 The execrable has become its exact opposite: hagios, “holy.” In Greek the word hagos is used to mean “expiation” or “sacrifice” as well as “awe,” “curse,” and “pollution.”44 The victim has been the cause of evil; now he or she is shown to have been its remedy. (The Greek word pharmakos means “a remedy” as well as “a purificatory victim”; it is the root of the English word “pharmacy.”)
The sacrificial remedy cannot work, however, unless society is completely convinced that the one who must die is to blame for the faults of the people. Oedipus really did cause pollution in Thebes. Pentheus certainly provoked the rage of Dionysus and his followers. The beggar of Ephesus, whom Apollonius of Tyana persuaded the citizens to stone to death, “really was” a devil that had caused all the trouble they were undergoing.45 For Girard, such myths mask the generalized violence afflicting the community, which was the true reason behind the deaths of all of these figures; the stories are there to camouflage the truth.
But Girard goes on to demonstrate how, in the Jewish Scriptures or Old Testament, a very different story began to be told. The Book of Job tells of a man who suffers. Other people believe that he must have done something wrong; his “comforters” try to persuade him that he must have deserved his misery. But Job refuses to accept that what has happened to him arose from his guilt. And—most important, for this is a story—the readers of the book are told the facts behind the hero’s pain. We know that Job is innocent; he is suffering, but blameless. This understanding lies at the heart of the Christian revelation. God—Jesus—dies the scapegoat’s death with all victims, and we know that he has done no wrong. “Don’t you see,” says the high priest before the decision to put Jesus to death, “that it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed?”46 The Crucifixion reveals once and for all that the “scapegoat mechanism” is a lie: the victim is innocent.
Christ, as the victim who reveals God’s love for us, is symbolized by a lamb.47 For Christians, he is the “lamb” described in the Book of Isaiah: “Harshly dealt with, he bore it humbly; he never opened his mouth: like a lamb that is led to the slaughterhouse, like a sheep that is dumb before its shearers, he never opened his mouth.”48 Lambs suffer violence; they do not inflict it. They are symbols, apparently in all languages and literatures, of innocence. And lambs have always been favourite animals for sacrifice. John the Baptist said of Jesus before his baptism, “Behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”49 John’s meaning was that Jesus was the Messiah, he who in his life and death would reveal the true nature of God.
Sheep and lambs are symbolic in the New Testament not only of Christ but also of his followers; in these cases Jesus becomes the shepherd and they his flock. He searches for the lost sheep until he has found it, leaving all the “safe” sheep to look after themselves in the meanwhile. Peter, to whom Jesus entrusts the Church, is told to “feed” his sheep and lambs. Jesus sends his followers out into the world with no weapons, no money, no power—”like sheep among wolves.”50 They must not expect an easy time, but rather the “blessing” of being despised and persecuted. People who die for believing in the revelation, for not defending themselves by partaking in violence, imitate Christ. To be martyred is to be “like a lamb that is led to the slaughterhouse.”
All these meanings, and more, are evoked by any representation of a lamb in Christian iconography. When we see Agnes accompanied by her attribute, a lamb, the animal represents Agnes, her death, her blamelessness: Agnes was an innocent victim. The lamb also links her sacrifice to Christ’s: she, too, was a “lamb of God,” Agna Dei. Included in her innocence was her inviolate chastity. However, insofar as the essence of that chastity is thought of in terms of physical inviolability, the Christian revelation is betrayed, because then Agnes is hagne in the Greek sense: a “space” untouchable, an “outline” protected by a curse (such as a thunderbolt ready to blind a man who would look upon her with lust). The implication is that if Agnes had lost her inviolability for any reason, including reasons utterly beyond her own choice or control, she would have been, permanently because in her very essence, shamed and “defiled.” Saint Augustine in the fifth century had already denounced this kind of thinking, as we saw, yet it persisted, and it still exists.
But if the innocence of the “lamb” Agnes is understood to be an aspect of her soul, a purity of mind and singleness of heart, and her virginity in the story is an expression of that innocence, then she is properly a Christian hero; for the equation of physical sacrosanctity with purity is inimical to the Christian religion. Christ refused sacrosanctity for himself; his death shows it. The Eucharist, the supreme mystery of the Christian religion, does not distance God or fence him off, but makes him profoundly, even humbly, available.
As a saint, Agnes is a person who has imitated Christ. As a martyr, she died like Christ; as a virgin, she kept her faith, hope, and love alive even in the midst of horror. Hagiographically speaking, she is a version of Christ, even though when she died she was twelve years old, a female, and living in Rome not Jerusalem. The lamb—her attribute, her name—is a symbol of Christ himself. Agnes, because she is remembered, is continuing proof that imitating Christ is possible, in the specific circumstances of every person’s own unique life.
After traversing the dim passage through the maze of catacomb galleries, a visitor today standing underneath the church before the grave of Agnes and Emerentiana may (if he or she wishes) consider many things, remember many a moment of insight. The silver coffin with the bones of two young women inside it can embody and recall, for example, a person’s deepest desire, or a specific experience of grace in the life of the beholder at the end of a long “dark night of the soul.” It can remind the visitor of seventeen centuries of faithful memory, of the long history of this place, and of the story of the death of Agnes.
It will certainly recall to Christians the words of Jesus: “I tell you, most solemnly, that unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields much fruit.”51 Because of the story of Agnes, the little grave caused an oratory to be built, then a church, and then this basilica, just as the Christian community grew from small, poor, and unpromising beginnings. The whole building is rooted in this coffin, just as the Church lives still out of the spiritual conviction, the courage, and the generosity of its members—out of the choice, continually to be made by Christians just as it had to be made by Agnes’ and Emerentiana, of love over hatred, greed, selfishness, and violence.
This simple church provides a place where Christians can meet and pray, listen to the word of Scripture, and celebrate together the mysteries of their faith. It reminds each person of his or her own past intimations of the light, and it proposes a renewed approach towards what it was that inspired these two Christian martyrs, and thousands of others like them. The story of Agnes, like the church building itself, reflects Christ. Both church and saint, through spatial disposition and through narrative, refract the light and the life. “And that life was the light of men,” wrote John the Evangelist.52 “The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never quenched it.”