1. L. Stephanie Cobb, Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 10.
1. http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2013/07/17/michael-landy-saints-alive-a-first-hand-experience-of-the-national-gallery-exhibition/
2. See www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/michael-landy-saints-alive (31 July 2013); Colin Wiggins and Richard Cork, Michael Landy: Saints Alive (National Gallery London) (London: National Gallery London, 2013).
3. Joseph Flaherty, “This Steampunk Exhibit Invites You to Torture Famous Saints,” Wired, 10 July 2013, www.wired.com/2013/07/torture-saints-at-interactive-exhibit/
4. Landy makes this statement in an advertisement for the exhibit in Mexico City: https://youtu.be/oLlEXJSRFi4
5. www.wired.com/2013/07/torture-saints-at-interactive-exhibit/
6. I have argued elsewhere that the martyrs’ actions might be usefully interpreted as destructive—though not self-destructive. Their single-mindedness for attaining martyrdom fractures the social fabric built on families. See L. Stephanie Cobb, “Women’s Leadership in the Early Church: Possibilities and Pushbacks,” in Frontiers in Spiritual Leadership: Discovering the Better Angels of Our Nature, ed. Scott Y. Allison, Craig T. Kocher, and George R. Goethals. Jepson Studies in Leadership (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 17–33.
7. This is not to say that ancient culture was oral rather than literary. As Carol Harrison notes, antiquity was “a culture of the book . . . but it depended on educated, literate, articulate individuals to continue and communicate it to an illiterate majority” (The Art of Listening in the Early Church [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 38). On literacy, see William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 1–41.
8. Darryl Tippens, “Reading at Cockcrow: Oral Reception and Ritual Experience in Mark’s Passion Narrative,” Essays in Literature 20 (1993): 146.
9. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 39.
10. Jane P. Tompkins, “The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response,” in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 206. Tippens makes a similar case for understanding the Gospel of Mark: “Mark’s Gospel is a narrative of action designed, like most texts from the ancient world, to elicit action in the auditor” (“Reading at Cockcrow,” 147). See also M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 20–21; and Robert M. Fowler, Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1996), 23, 50.
11. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
12. Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), xvi.
13. See Harrison, Art of Listening, 1; Gamble, Books and Readers, 30, 204; and David Rhoads, “Performance Criticism: An Emerging Methodology in Second Testament Studies—Part I,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 36 (2006): 118–33.
14. Augustine, Serm. 313A.3. Discussed in Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 86.
15. Augustine, Serm. 313A.3. Discussed in Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 87.
16. Michael Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 145.
17. Peter Brown argues that martyr texts “brought the past into the present. . . . When the passio was read, the saint was ‘really’ there: a sweet scent filled the basilica, the blind, the crippled, and the possessed began to shout that they now felt his power in healing” (The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 82). Roberts makes a similar point: “Observers before a picture of the suffering saint feel themselves observers of the event itself.” This is true not only for the visual image, but also for the reception of the narrative: “the narration of the martyrdom and the picture of the same event are essentially equivalent” (Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 138–39).
18. Stephen D. Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 95. See also Lou H. Silberman, “‘Habent Sua Fata Libelli’: The Role of Wandering Themes in Some Hellenistic Jewish and Rabbinic Literature,” in The Relationships among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. William O. Walker Jr. (San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press, 1978), 215.
19. Tippens rightly reminds us that “If we forget the recipient, we lose one of the important coordinates by which we map meaning” (“Reading at Cockcrow,” 147).
20. Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 12–13. Both Mart. Pol. and the Pass. Perp. seem to imagine recitation in communal gatherings. The Concilium Hipponense of 393 explicitly affirms the reading of martyr acts in church services. See discussion in Valeriy A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 171–72.
21. Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 165–72. See also Elaine Hatfield, Megan Carpenter, and Richard L. Rapson, “Emotional Contagion as a Precursor to Collective Emotions,” in Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology, ed. Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108–22. On the role of group focus on a particular object as required for emotional contagion, see J. David Knottnerus, “Religion, Ritual, and Collective Emotion,” in Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology ed. Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 315–16.
22. Hatfield et al., Emotional Contagion, 169.
23. Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 213, 217.
24. Randall Collins, “Interactional Ritual Chains and Collective Effervescence,” in Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology ed. Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 299. Knottnerus suggests that the arena games are examples of highly focused group attention that could lead to emotional effervescence (Knottnerus, “Religion, Ritual, and Collective Emotion,” 316). Theories of emotional contagion or collective effervescence do not, however, require that all individuals in a group experience emotions at the same level. See James M. Casper, “Emotions, Sociology, and Protest,” in Collective Emotions: Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Sociology, ed. Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 348.
25. Gamble surmises that Christian readers were assigned particular texts because “public reading would have required study of the texts in advance.” He continues, “that different readers should have different books may indicate that each reader was practiced only in certain texts” (Books and Readers, 147). “Practice” is likely related not merely to the ability to read the texts orally but to deliver them appropriately, that is, according to ancient standards and expectations. Douglas Burton-Christie discusses the difference between reading texts and an oral experience of them in “Listening, Reading, Praying: Orality, Literacy and Early Christian Monastic Spirituality,” Anglican Theological Review 83 (2001): 197–221.
26. Cicero, De Or. 2.189–94; Quintilian, Decl. 6.2.26–36.
27. Discussed in Harrison, Art of Listening, 44.
28. Harrison, Art of Listening, 42.
29. Aristotle, De an. II.8; Probl. 31–35; Philo, Abr. 149–50; Augustine, Conf. II.14.147. Philo devalues hearing to sight by likening the former to woman’s passivity and the latter to masculine activity, but both are, nonetheless, associated with philosophy and “hold the leading place” over “the three most animal and servile” sensations: taste, smell, and touch. That hearing was a passive sense—dependent on a prior external act—is almost universal in ancient theories. On ancient theories of sight and hearing, see David Chidester, Word and Light: Seeing, Hearing, and Religious Discourse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
30. Plutarch discusses the power of words to disfigure a person’s character or to cleanse it (Mor. 38B, 42B).
31. Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 131.
32. Diane Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview: Prudentius’ Pedagogical Ekphrasis and Christianization,” Journal of Late Antiquity 7.1 (2014): 140.
33. Harrison, Art of Listening, 35. Miller writes, “Like Augustine, Prudentius used a technique of visualization in order to make the martyrs present in the reader’s eye” (Corporeal Imagination, 90). On ekphrasis, see also Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 135–38; and Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). On ancient theories of sight, see Frank, Memory of the Eyes; and Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 86–87.
34. Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata 7.118. See discussion in Andrew Sprague Becker, The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 25.
35. Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine, trans. Hugh Jackson Lawlor and John Ernest Leonard Oulton (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1927), 1:329.
36. Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 105.
37. Becker, Shield of Achilles, 25.
38. Trans. Edmund Hill, Sermons III/8 (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1994), 296. See discussion in Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 87.
39. Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 136. This is so much the case, Fruchtman argues, that “orators would create verbal pictures that bore the same emotional and evidentiary weight that a bloody cloak or bit of bone brought into a courtroom might achieve” (137).
40. Trans. John Leemans, Wendy Mayer, Pauline Allen, and Boudewijn Dehandschutter, Let Us Die That We May Live: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs from Asia Minor, Palestine, and Syria c. 350–450 AD (New York: Routledge, 2003), 104.
41. Leanne Bablitz, Actors and Audience in the Roman Courtroom (London: Routledge, 2007), 50; cf. 325.
42. Gamble, Books and Readers, 8.
43. On the ways in which a martyr text might interpret Scripture, see L. Stephanie Cobb, “Polycarp’s Cup: Imitatio in the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” Journal of Religious History 38 (2014): 224–40.
44. Raymond van Dam, Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 135.
45. Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 136.
46. Brown, Cult of Saints, 81. On locating martyr texts within particular liturgical moments, see Candida R. Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11–15.
47. Augustine, An. orig. 1.10.12; cf. Maureen Tilley, “The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas,” in Searching the Scriptures, vol. 2: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 835.
48. Pliny complains about bad audiences in Ep. 1.13 and 6.17.
49. Harrison, Art of Listening, 144.
50. Harrison, Art of Listening, 145. See also Frederik van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: Religion and Society at the Dawn of the Middle Ages, trans. Brian Battershaw and G.R. Lamb (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 339–40; and Robin Lane Fox, “Literacy and Power in Early Christianity,” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145.
51. Harrison, Art of Listening, 159. See also Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 83–84; Leemans et al., Let Us Die, 45–47; and Alexandre Olivar, La predicación cristiana antigua (Barcelona: Herder, 1991). Plutarch describes the listener as a “participant in the discourse and a fellow-worker with the speaker” (Mor. 45D). Van Dam characterizes Christian sermons as “dialogues” (Becoming Christian, 101–50). Van der Meer likewise characterizes some of Augustine’s sermons as “dialogues” (Augustine the Bishop, 427). Cf. Jaclyn L. Maxwell, Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity: John Chrysostom and His Congregation in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 79; and Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 46. Neil Adkin discusses the Fathers’ “complaints about noisy congregations,” sometimes due to idle chatter, but sometimes due to “the fervor of a zealous congregation” (“A Problem in the Early Church: Noise during Sermon and Lesson,” Mnemosyne Fourth Series 38 [1985]: 161–62). Van der Meer comments that
Augustine’s congregation were in the habit of reacting to whatever was read or preached with all the liveliness of their temperament. They shouted comments, sighed, laughed, like children at the cinema. When a few stereotyped expressions occurred such as “Have mercy on us,” or at the word Confiteor or at “Forgive us our trespasses” in the Our Father, they made a practice of very audibly beating their breasts. When the speaker made some telling remark they loudly acclaimed him, and protested as loudly when there was anything in his utterances of which they disapproved. (Augustine the Bishop, 339; see also 427–32)
See also Lane Fox, “Literacy and Power in Early Christianity,” 145.
52. On the Carthage amphitheater, see D.L. Bomgardner, “The Carthage Amphitheater: A Reappraisal,” American Journal of Archaeology 94 (1989): 85–103. In The Story of the Roman Amphitheater, Bomgardner estimates the seating capacity of the Carthage amphitheater to be greater than he does in “Carthage Amphitheater”: 44,400 versus 30,000 (The Story of the Roman Amphitheater [London: Routledge, 2000], 159).
53. Quintilian, Decl. 9.6; trans. Garret G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 305.
54. Participatory responses to literature are discussed in Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 65–96, 158–59.
55. Tertullian, Spect.; Augustine, Serm. 51.2, 280.2, 301A.7.
56. As van der Meer notes, “where a modern audience might do no more than slightly nod their heads or purse their lips, the people of antiquity would use their voices to let the speaker know that they had understood him, that they had recognized a text or grasped a pun” (Augustine the Bishop, 427–28).
57. For a concise distinction of these classifications, see Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), ix; and Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
58. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 38. For an analysis of LaCapra’s contributions to historiography, see Clark, History, Theory, Text, 126–29, 141–43.
59. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,” in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 68.
60. On occasion, scholars suggest that the early martyr texts are products of a sadomasochistic impulse and that they are a form of early Christian pornography. David Frankfurter has offered a compelling reading of martyr texts through this lens. He writes, “in framing graphic, often explicitly sexualized, scenes of violent atrocity within the context of Roman judicial savagery, early Christian martyrologies allowed their audiences to contemplate in safe form scenes that were so fascinating, even titillating, that they could not legitimately be enjoyed otherwise” (“Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 [2009]: 217). Other scholars, however, argue that characterizing martyr texts as sadistic or masochistic is unhelpful, at least in terms of understanding the ancient audience’s interests. Gillian Clark, for instance, asserts that “it may be unjust, or simply anachronistic, to assume that the authors and audiences of martyr-acts were deriving sadistic or masochistic pleasure from the spectacle of pain” (“Bodies and Blood: Late Antique Debate on Martyrdom, Virginity and Resurrection,” in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity, ed. Dominic Montserrat [London: Routledge, 1988], 106). Similarly, Candida Moss suggests that “we might reasonably infer that Sanctus enjoys the experience of suffering for Christ, but it is not necessary, or even appropriate, to categorize his experience as masochistic” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012], 110).
61. There are disagreements among scholars as to the dates of many of the early Christian martyr texts. The arguments of this book are not affected by the specific dates of the texts because I am more interested in the theological functions of the texts. I do not differentiate between “orthodox” texts and “heretical” (e.g., Donatist) texts since they are all examples of martyrological storytelling in the early Christian world. In general, I assign the pre-Constantinian texts as follows. Second century: Acts of Justin; Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs; Martyrdom of Polycarp; Acts of Carpus, Pamfilus, and Agathonike; Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons. Third century: Passion of Perpetua; Martyrdom of Pionius; Martyrdom of Fructuosus; Martyrdom of Montanus and Lucius; Martyrdom of Marian and James; Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, Chione; Acts of Cyprian. Fourth century: Martyrdom of Irenaeus; Acts of Gallonius; Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs; The Passion of Saints Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda; Letter of Phileas. I place these pre-Constantinian texts alongside later, post-Constantinian texts—such as Prudentius’s Peristephanon, The Martyrdom of Conon, The Passion of Maximian and Isaac, and The Martyrdom of Marculus—to illustrate the resonances among them regarding their claims to impassivity and impassibility. It is not only the later texts, that is, that make these claims; they are also found in the earliest extant martyr texts.
62. Catharine Edwards, “The Suffering Body: Philosophy and Pain in Seneca’s Letters,” in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 253.
1. Glenn Most, “disiecti membra poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in Neronian Poetry,” in Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992), 400.
2. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 3.
3. Apuleius, Flor. 16, quoted in Perkins, Suffering Self, 1.
4. Perkins, Suffering Self, 61.
5. Ibid., 2.
6. See Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 4; and Gail P.C. Streete, Redeemed Bodies: Women Martyrs in Early Christianity (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 15.
7. See, for instance, Judith Lieu, Neither Jew Nor Greek: Constructing Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark, 2002).
8. See, for instance, Catherine Conybeare, “The Ambiguous Laugher of Saint Laurence,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 (2002): 175–202; and Cobb, Dying to Be Men.
9. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
10. Perkins, Suffering Self.
11. Ibid., 142. Perkins writes, “The discourse of the martyr Acts, representing pain as empowering and death a victory, helped to construct a new understanding of human existence, a new ‘mental set’ toward the world that would have far-reaching consequences” (122–23).
12. Joyce Salisbury, The Blood of the Martyrs: Unintended Consequence of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
13. Susanna Elm, “Roman Pain and the Rise of Christianity,” in Quo Vadis Medical Healing: Past Concepts and New Approaches, ed. Susanna Elm and Stefan N. Willich (New York: Springer, 2009), 49. Elm argues that “Since public killings are traditional means to establish dominance, the victim’s endurance represents a reversal of the power-dynamic” (49). On the relationship of torture and power, the classic study is that of Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
14. David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 13. Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall describe a similar contrast between participant and observer. Discussing an East African ritual during which large portions of participants’ scalps and muscle are removed and the skull is scraped, Melzack and Wall write:
Films of this procedure are extraordinary to watch because of the discomfort they induce in the observers which is in striking contrast to the apparent lack of discomfort in the people undergoing the operation. There is no reason to believe that these people are physiologically different in any way. Rather, the operation is accepted by their culture as a procedure that brings relief of chronic pain. The expectation of relief, the trust in the skill of the doktari as well as other psychological factors appear to alter the experience of pain. (The Challenge of Pain [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 29–30)
15. Morris, Culture of Pain, 129. The late second-century philosopher Sextus Empiricus observed, “sometimes the patients themselves bear a surgical operation, while the bystanders swoon, because they hold the opinion that it is a horrible experience” (Pyr. 3.235f, quoted in Josef Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum on Pain,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10 [2002]: 212). Miller suggests a similar phenomenon occurs in reaction to Prudentius’s Liber Peristephanon: the author’s descriptions make the torture “seem so real that the reader cannot help but imagine it in a visceral way” (Corporeal Imagination, 92).
16. Morris, Culture of Pain, 129. For a discussion of medieval art and its communication of pain, see Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, The Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 75. Merback, for instance, describes the thieves crucified alongside Jesus as struggling “in painful torpor against the binding cords, refusing to bend to the will of the apparatus” (75).
17. Hippolyte Delehaye, The Work of the Bollandists through Three Centuries, 1615–1915 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1922), 12.
18. Ibid., 113.
19. Ibid., 93.
20. Edmond Le Blant, for instance, using legal vocabulary to differentiate authentic from fictional martyr accounts, argued that instances of miracle “should create a doubt of their antiquity.” He states baldly that “there are no miracles” in historical acts (Les Actes des Martyrs: Supplément aux Acta sincera de Dom Ruinart [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1882], 37). See also, Adolf von Harnack, Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1958); and Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1996).
21. E.C.E. Owen, Some Authentic Acts of the Early Martyrs (London: SPCK, 1933), 11. Owen dismisses this view by differentiating authentic from inauthentic acts. In defining the “marks of authenticity,” Owen includes “absence as a whole of the miraculous” (13).
22. Joseph Barber Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers II.I: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp (London: Macmillan & Co., 1885), 627.
23. Though historicity has not completely been erased, as is clear in Timothy D. Barnes’s Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
24. In the preface to his collection of early Christian martyr texts, Herbert Musurillo explains that he has chosen texts that he considers “most reliable” (Acts of the Christian Martyrs [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], xii).
25. Translations of early Christian martyr texts are based on the text of Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, unless otherwise stated.
26. Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 4.
27. As David Aune has noted, “By repeatedly emphasizing that these courageous martyrs experience no human suffering, the author demonstrates his thesis that ‘pious reason’ overcomes the passions” (“Mastery of the Passions: Philo, 4 Maccabees, and Earliest Christianity,” in Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-Roman World, ed. W.E. Helleman [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994], 137).
28. Trans. Leemans et al., Let Us Die, 119.
29. Ibid., 131.
30. It is worth noting that an emphasis on pain does not require that pain per se is a text’s locus of meaning. Ellen M. Ross, for instance, argues that twelfth- to fourteenth-century interest in the pain and agony of Christ “functions as the primary scriptural symbol for conveying the depth of a merciful God’s love for humankind. Jesus Christ’s endurance of agony and death reveals a God of boundless love seeking to heal the breach between humanity and God” (The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 5). She continues with an observation that is applicable both here and to the discussion of the function of texts in chapter 2: “The flooding of viewers’ senses with extravagant depictions of pain and anguish comprises an urgent appeal to the audience to respond to Jesus Christ’s expression of love” (6).
31. Esther Cohen, “Towards a History of European Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Ages,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 47–74.
32. Esther Cohen, “The Animated Pain of the Body,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 62.
33. Cohen, Modulated Scream, 6. Richard Kieckhefer has likewise argued that for fourteenth-century mystics, “atonement came not from charitable works, not from prayer, nor from enlightenment, but from pain” (Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-century Saints and Their Religious Milieu [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 89).
34. Jacobus de Voraigne, The Golden Legend, as Englished by William Caxton, vol. 7, trans. F.S. Ellis (New York: AMS, 1973), 43.
35. Ibid., vol. 6, 203.
36. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 290. See also Alain Boureau, La Légende dorée: Le système narritif de Jacques de Voragine (+1298) (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984), 60–61, 115–33.
37. Sherry L. Reames, The Legenda aurea: A Reexamination of Its Paradoxical History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 98.
38. Reames, Legenda, 98.
39. Cohen, Modulated Scream, 235.
40. Ibid., 243.
41. Ibid., 243, 250.
42. Ibid., 244.
43. Aquinas, ST III.15.5.
44. Aquinas, ST II.II.123.8. Cohen notes that for Aquinas, when martyrs exhibit both fortitude and charity, they may possess impassibility (Modulated Scream, 246–47).
45. Some scholars note the literary motif of painlessness. Thomas Heffernan mentions the “analgesic state” of Perpetua and Blandina, observing that immunity to pain becomes a “conventional topos in later vitae sanctarum” (Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 196–97). Judith Perkins observes, “By rejecting that they experienced pain or defeat, Christians rejected the power structures surrounding them, and rejected the social order these supported” (Suffering Self, 117; see also 180). Candida Moss comments on Sanctus’s painlessness in the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, noting that he “appears to feel no pain” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 109). Moss writes further on miracle and painlessness in “Miraculous Events in Early Christian Stories about Martyrs” in Credible, Incredible: The Miraculous in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Tobias Nicklas and Janet E. Spittler (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 283–301. Here Moss argues that miraculous events are typical of later hagiographical writings but rare in pre-Decian texts. I agree that later texts are often even more filled with the miraculous; I argue that this is also an important aspect of the earliest martyr accounts. While Heffernan, Perkins, and Moss mention the motif of painlessness, none offers an interpretation of martyr texts that fully accounts for it.
46. Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17; Ariel Glucklich, “Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self,” Harvard Theological Review 91 (1998): 402; Ariel Glucklich, “Self and Sacrifice: A Phenomenological Psychology of Sacred Pain,” Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 479–506. Glucklich draws on the work of Melzack and Wall, who argue that the absence or delay in feeling pain is due to the “Gate Control Theory.”
47. Glucklich writes,
Neuropsychology can explain why the soldier experiences less pain than the car passenger. But in experiential terms the soldier is relieved that the loss of his hand will remove him from the battle and the possibility of far greater harm. In fact, the injury to the hand may well have saved his life. In other words, the soldier feels as though he had sacrificed a “part of himself” for a more urgent goal—the survival of the person. (“Self and Sacrifice,” 489)
Another explanation of painlessness is posited by Daniel de Moulin, who notes, “it became apparent as early as 1778 that hypnotic trance may be accompanied by insensitivity to pain” (“A Historical-Phenomenological Study of Bodily Pain in Western Man,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 [1974]: 543–44). It is possible to explain Perpetua’s insensitivity to being tossed by the heifer as a side effect of a hypnotic trance; she is, after all, described as “being in ecstasy.” This explanation, however, may be unnecessarily reductive of the narrative work as a whole.
48. Such an interpretation may apply to Ignatius in his epistle to the Romans (esp. Rom. 4.1, 3, 5.1–3, 6.3, 8.3).
49. Perkins, Suffering Self, 34.
50. This is true even if one accepts the first-person account in Pass. Perp. as authentic. Since the first-person narrative does not include a description of her death, even in this case we do not have unmediated experience related to us.
51. Morris, Culture of Pain, 16. See the insightful discussion of pain by Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl Enenkel, “Introduction: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture,” in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, ed. Jans Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1–18.
52. Modern views of the inextricability of the physical from the emotional in experiences of pain often scapegoat Descartes as the origin of this dualistic view, though Descartes’s work on pain was more complex than these discussions often allow. See Dijkhuizen and Enenkel, “Constructions of Physical Pain,” 2; and G. Duncan, “Mind-Body Dualism and the Biopsychosocial Model of Pain: What Did Descartes Really Say?” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 25 (2000): 485–513.
53. Melzack and Wall, Challenge, 16.
54. See discussion in Melzack and Wall, Challenge, 72–86.
55. Allan I. Basbaum, “Unlocking the Secrets of Pain: The Science,” in 1988 Medical and Health Annual, ed. Ellen Bernstein (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1987), 95.
56. Basbaum, “Unlocking the Secrets,” 95.
57. Henry K. Beecher, “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle,” Annals of Surgery 123 (1946): 96. See also Patrick D. Wall, “On the Relation of Injury to Pain,” Pain 6 (1979): 253–64. See also P.L. Carlen, P.D. Wall, H. Nadvorna, and T. Steinbach, “Phantom Limbs and Related Phenomena in Recent Traumatic Amputations,” Neurology 28 (1978): 211–17.
58. Beecher suggests that one reason a soldier wounded in battle might report less pain than expected is that “his wound suddenly releases him from an exceedingly dangerous environment, one filled with fatigue, discomfort, anxiety, fear and real danger of death, and gives him a ticket to the safety of the hospital.” On the other hand, a civilian similarly wounded in a car accident might report the feeling of pain much differently because “the civilian’s accident marks the beginning of disaster for him” (“Pain,” 99).
59. This division is responsible for the tendency to translate dolor as “grief” rather than “pain,” even though it does not—as the discussion below demonstrates—necessarily indicate nonphysical sensations.
60. Morris, Culture of Pain, 9. See also Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (New York: Norton, 2000), 56–57; and Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 145.
61. See Alan Fogel, “Emotional and Physical Pain Activate Similar Brain Regions,” Psychology Today, April 19, 2012; Naomi I. Eisenberger, M.D. Lieberman, and K.D. Williams, “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” Science 302 (2003): 209; and Ethan Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith, and Tor D. Wager, “Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 (2011): 6270–75. A new study suggests slightly different neural passages are used for processing social rejection: T.D. Wager, L.Y. Atlas, M.A. Lindquist, M. Roy, C.W. Woo, and E. Kross, “An fMRI-based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain,” New England Journal of Medicine 368 (2013): 1388–97.
62. Matthew Botvinick, Amishi P. Jha, Lauren M. Bylsma, Sara A. Fabian, Patricia E. Solomon, and Kenneth M. Prkachin, “Viewing Facial Expressions of Pain Engages Cortical Areas Involved in the Direct Experience of Pain,” Neuroimage 25 (2005): 312–19. This is true at least for those considered to be in-group members: Xiaojing Xu, Xiangyu Zuo, Xiaoying Wang, and Shihui Han, “Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses,” Journal of Neuroscience 26 (2009): 8525–29.
63. See, for instance, Madhukar H. Trivedi, “The Link between Depression and Physical Symptoms,” Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 6 Supp. 1 (2004): 12–16.
64. In the discussion of martyr texts below, I do not assume a distinction between mental and physical pain unless the text itself makes such a distinction clear. If an author uses the same word—for instance, dolor—to describe both an emotional state and a physical wound, I assume the use of the same word indicates a comparable state: pain. In other words, my translation theory is that distinguishing pain from grief—physical from mental pain—is a product of modern dualism that distances the mind from the body and, thus, I will resist importing that dualism into the ancient texts unless there is a clear case to be made otherwise. Roselyne Rey makes this point when she writes, “It must be said that the distinction between physical and moral pain is not an appropriate criterion for distinguishing the terms” (The History of Pain, trans. Louise Elliott Wallace, J.A. Cadden, and S.W. Cadden [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995], 12). Cohen observes that medieval authors “made no distinction between the physical and spiritual anguish of Christ. All his pains are listed together as one total experience of the soul” (“Animated Pain,” 46). It is the case that some ancient philosophers considered mental anguish to be a “sense” or pain to be an “emotion” but these discussions occur in contexts of debates over whether pain—of any cause—originates in the body or the soul. See, for instance, the discussion on philosophical debates over pain in Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum.” The translation point made above is sometimes borne out in these ancient discussions where, for instance, an author might differentiate affectus timoris and sensus doloris (see Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum,” 214). Similarly, Stanley E. Hoffer, writing about the topic of health in ancient epistles, states: “Epistolary discussions of health do not always distinguish sharply between bodily and mental health; the shared terminology . . . reflects a shared conceptual basis, the humoral theory” (“Cicero’s ‘Stomach’: Political Indignation and the Use of Repeated Allusive Expressions in Cicero’s Correspondence,” in Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography, ed. Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 97).
65. Morris, Culture of Pain, 4; Dean A. Tripp “A Biopsychosocial Therapy Model for Chronic Prostatitis/Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome,” in Chronic Prostatitis/Chronic Pelvic Pain Syndrome, ed. Daniel A. Shoskes (Totowa, N.J.: Humana Press, 2008), 145; John D. Loeser, “Unlocking the Secrets of Pain: The Treatment: A New Era,” in 1988 Medical and Health Annual, ed. Ellen Bernstein (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1987), 120–31; De Moulin, “Historical-Phenomenological Study,” 569. For a discussion of the major theorists Morris lists, see Melzack and Wall, Challenge, 195–208.
66. Described by D.D. Kosambi, “Living Prehistory in India,” Scientific American 216 (1967): 104–14. Kosambi also reports another ritual performed among some Indian tribes during which a chosen dancer “plunges his hand into a pan of boiling oil, evidently without ill effect” (107). For a discussion of other rituals that should be painful but, because of ritual meaning attached, appear not to be experienced as such, see Melzack and Wall, Challenge, 28–30, 31–32; and Doreen R.G. Browne, “Ritual and Pain,” in The History of the Management of Pain, ed. Ronald D. Mann (Park Ridge, N.J.: Parthenon, 1988), 31–39.
67. Kosambi, “Living Prehistory,” 111.
68. As Glucklich comments, “This constitutional sentiment, if taken seriously, situates the pain of parturition in a moral universe in which pain is not meaningless, or even merely biological. It is the automatic moral consequence in an iron logic of action and reward” (Sacred Pain, 16).
69. See René Fülöp-Miller, Triumph over Pain (New York: Library Guild, 1938). See discussion in Pamela Edith Klassen, Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 179; and Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 162–63.
70. William Henry Atkinson, “Discussions—Miscellaneous,” American Dental Association 12 (1872): 105. The convention adopted a resolution that recommended the abandonment of dental anesthesia, but for safety reasons, not theological ones (see 32–33). See also Martin S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Anesthesia, and Utilitarian Professionalism in Nineteenth Century American Medicine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
71. Morris, Culture of Pain, 1.
72. See Aristotle, De an. II.II, III.I.
73. See also Plato, Gorg. 2; Tim. 2; Phileb. 4. Pain also becomes an important element in Christological and anthropological debates. See, for instance, Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum.”
74. Edwards, “Suffering Body,” 257.
75. Thomas Dormandy, The Worst of Evils: The Fight against Pain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 10.
76. Lisa Wayne Smith, “‘An Account of the Unaccountable Distemper’: The Experience of Pain in Early Eighteenth-Century England and France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 (2008): 459–60. Jennifer Burek Pierce likewise notes that sixteenth- to nineteenth-century medical dictionaries used the term dolor as a synonym for “melancholy” and “mania,” drawing on classical understandings of the tradition that can be traced to Galen (“Defining Health, Melancholy and Mutation in Early Modern and Modern Medical Dictionaries,” in “Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors”: Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography, ed. Michael Adams [Monza: Polimetrica, 2010], 149). Pierce argues that over time, the term dolor was detached from definitions of melancholy and was used to refer to physical pain only (149–50).
77. Abraham P. Bos, “Aristotelian and Platonic Dualism in Hellenistic and Early Greek Philosophy and in Gnosticism,” Vigiliae Christianae 56 (2002): 273–91.
78. See, for instance, Eliezer Gonzalez, “Anthropologies of Continuity: The Body and Soul in Tertullian, Perpetua, and Early Christianity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 21 (2013): 479–502.
79. For a helpful discussion of πάσχω and its cognates, see the entry in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (V.904–39). Michaelis also states that πάσχω is sometimes translated saibar in Syriac, which means “to bear” or “to endure.”
80. This understanding of patior is also reflected in its common use during the Augustan period as a technical term to refer to the passive sexual partner. For a discussion of the sexual connotations of patior, see J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 189–90. There are also instances where πάσχω is used in this way (e.g., Aristophanes, Thesm. 201; and Menander, Dysk. 892).
81. Elm, “Roman Pain,” 44–45.
82. Karen King, “Martyrdom and Its Discontents in the Tchacos Codex,” in The Codex Judas Papers, ed. April D. DeConick (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 25.
83. Perkins, Suffering Self, 13. Perkins, though, does warn against overstating imitative suffering in martyr texts (216n9).
84. See Cobb, “Polycarp’s Cup,” 224–40; See also Michael W. Holmes, “The Martyrdom of Polycarp and the New Testament Passion Narratives,” in Trajectories through the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 424.
85. See, for instance, the discussion in Robert J. Karris, “Luke 23:47 and the Lucan View of Jesus’ Death,” Journal of Biblical Literature 105 (1986): 69. The meaning of pain—both humanity’s pain, generally, and Jesus’ pain, specifically, was the subject of debate among early Christian thinkers. For a discussion of Julian of Aeclanum’s views (particularly as opposed to Augustine’s) see Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum,” 203–43. Relatedly, it should be noted that the crucifixion is not a central theme in Christian art contemporaneous with the martyr texts. Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons, for instance, write, “Apparently—and this is the startling fact—a crucified Christ is not depicted in representational art by a Christian until the fifth century, and not with regularity until the seventh” (Illuminating Luke, vol. 2: The Public Ministry of Christ in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Painting [New York: T&T Clark, 2005], 2). See also Robin Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge, 2000), 143–48; Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985); Graydon F. Snyder, “Agape, Eucharist and Sacrifice in Early Christian Art,” in Interpreting Christian Art: Reflections on Christian Art, ed. Heidi J. Hornik and Mikael C. Parsons (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004), 60; Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 45–48; and Lucy Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2004), 119. On martyrological art, see F. Bisconti, “Dentro e intorno all’iconografia martiriale romana. Dal ‘vuoto figurativo’ all’ ‘immaginario devozionale,” in Martyrium in Multidisciplinary Perspective: Memorial Louis Reekmans, ed. M. Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 247–92; A. A. Grabar, Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l’art chrétien antique (Paris: Collège de France, 1946); J.B. Ward-Perkins, “Memoria, Martyrs’ Tomb, and Martyr’s Church,” in Studies in Roman and Early Christian Architecture, ed. J.B. Ward-Perkins (London: Pindar Press, 1994), 495–516; and A. Provoost, “Les Representations de martyrs à la fin de l’antiquité,” in Martyrium in Multidisciplinary Perspective: Memorial Louis Reekmans, ed. M. Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), 235–46.
86. The rejection of pain—or at least the appearance of impassibility—is part of the passion narrative in the Gospel of Peter (4).
87. Hilary rejects the idea that Jesus could feel pain in The Trinity X.23. See also Clement of Alexandria, who argues that Jesus was impassible (ἀπαθής; Strom. 6.9). Aquinas cites Hilary in his argument that Jesus did in fact feel pain (ST 3.15, obj 1 and reply to obj 1). See also Origen, “the first-born power was not hurt, as if it had not suffered anything” (Comm. Matt. 125; cf. Origen, Comm. Matt. 100; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 6.71.2). P. M. Head has argued that elements often assigned to “docetic” interests in the Gospel of Peter are really elements of second-century martyrological traditions, which have informed the construction of the Passion narrative (“On the Christology of the Gospel of Peter,” Vigiliae Christianae 46 [1992]: 209–24). See also Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 178; and Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 446.
88. Quoted in Kevin Madigan, “Ancient and High-Medieval Interpretations of Jesus in Gethsemane: Some Reflections on Tradition and Continuity in Christian Thought,” Harvard Theological Review 88 (1995): 163.
89. See, for example, Irenaeus, Haer. 3.18.
90. Morris, Culture of Pain, 42.
1. Miller, Corporeal Imagination, 91; Virginia Burrus, “Torture and Travail: Producing the Christian Martyr,” in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Maria Mayo Robbins (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 70.
2. As Streete notes, martyr texts engage “not only the actual audience that is watching but also the one that is intended to ‘watch.’” (Redeemed Bodies, 13).
3. Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative 14.3 (2006): 214. See also Mary-Catherine Harrison, “How Narrative Relationships Overcome Empathic Bias: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Empathy across Social Difference,” Poetics Today 32 (2011): 255–88. Harrison argues that readers empathize with protagonists more than with characters who align with their own “demographic similarity,” such as “race, class, age, or gender” (258). To connect to a character does not, however, demand that readers reject their identities altogether: “we might simultaneously imagine ourselves in multiple perspectives—not only protagonist and/or narrator but also other minor characters, narratee, and narrative audience—all the while remaining cognizant of our own spatiotemporal and emotional perspective as an actual reader” (264).
4. Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 216, 213. David Lodge makes similar claims about narratives disarming readers in Consciousness and the Novel: Collected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 87–88.
5. As Maia Kotrosits observes, “as swept up in any cultural zeitgeist as one might be, the mobility of affect means that its permutations are never single or predictable” (“Seeing Is Feeling: Revelation’s Enthroned Lamb and Ancient Visual Affects,” Biblical Interpretation 22 [2014]: 495).
6. Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 213. Elsewhere Keen writes, “Readers may and do sometimes respond indifferently to appeals to their feelings. This is not a matter of readerly incompetence; it reflects differences in readers’ dispositions and experiences” (“Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy,” Poetics Today 32.2 [2011]: 372). I discuss the issue of rejecting texts’ calls for empathy in the conclusion of this book.
7. Keen discusses three categories of narrative. What she labels “bounded strategic empathy” aims at securing feelings of empathy with an in-group; it is within this category that martyr texts should be placed. The other two categories she discusses are ambassadorial and broadcast. The former is addressed to a specific set of out-group individuals “with the aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specific end”; the latter aims to evoke empathy in all readers, often “by emphasizing common vulnerabilities and hopes” (“Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 215).
8. See David Aune, Westminster Dictionary of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and Rhetoric (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 339–42. Aristotle discusses the three proofs in Rhet. 1.2.3–6. See also Cicero, De Or. 2.114.
9. Affect theory, as Amy C. Cottrill notes, “brings into focus the reader’s corporeal experience and how this experience may illuminate the rhetorical and theological effects” of texts (“A Reading of Ehud and Jael through the Lens of Affect Theory,” Biblical Interpretation 22 [2014]: 431).
10. In discussing narrative empathy, Keen notes that “generic differences are likely to play a role in inviting (or retarding) empathic response” (Empathy and the Novel [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 85).
11. For a discussion of the history of scholarly categorization, see Gary A. Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts of Martyrs and Commentarii (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 2–7, 44–47; and Candida R. Moss, “Current Trends in the Study of Early Christian Martyrdom,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 41 (2012): 22. Moss identifies Christian martyr texts as lying at the “intersection of elements of court documents, philosophical bioi, and Greek novels” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 47). My interest is especially in ways the final form of texts—not their possible antecedents—informs audience expectations of the genre.
12. Maureen Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in Conflict in Roman North Africa (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), xix, xxi.
13. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 47. Although Tilley acknowledges the possibility of documentary origins for acta, she differentiates the genres primarily on the basis of narrative emphasis rather than source material.
14. Johannes Quasten, Patrology (Utrecht and Antwerp: Spectrum, 1950), 1:176.
15. Barnes admits that acta may demonstrate some editorial activity. Nonetheless, he argues—see discussion below—that the texts should be read as containing documentary evidence obtained by Christians from official court records.
16. This point is made clearly by Jan N. Bremmer: most classifications of martyr texts, he argues, impose “a unity on what is . . . an essentially heterogeneous corpus of texts” (“Perpetua and Her Diary: Authenticity, Family, and Visions,” in Märtyrer und Märtyrerakten, ed. W. Ameling [Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002], 78).
17. Martyr texts may also simultaneously serve as apologies, apocalypses, and heresiologies, among other things. For discussions of martyr texts having apologetic interests, see Cobb, “Polycarp’s Cup”; and Bart D. Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 493–508.
18. Grig dismisses the distinction of acta from passio: “It is clear that all martyr texts are, in some sense at least, literary products, and that the purported acta format is just one of these literary constructions” (Making Martyrs, 24).
19. Andrew Riggsby, Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 139–40.
20. Columella, Rust. 11.65. See discussion in Riggsby, Caesar, 146.
21. Riggsby, Caesar, 149.
22. Ibid. On the function of letters, see discussion below.
23. On commentarius-form martyr texts, see Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts, 5, 8–11.
24. Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts, 36. Bisbee draws on the work of R.A. Coles, Reports of Proceedings in Papyri. Papyrologica Bruxellensia 4 (Brussels: Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1966). See also Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs; Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 43–96; and Herbert Musurillo, Acts of the Pagan Martyrs: Acta Alexandrinorum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 249–51.
25. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 55. Barnes’s argument is based on the existence of “copies of official documents” such as “reports of court proceedings in all types of legal cases” (55).
26. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 58. Bisbee’s analysis demonstrates that narratives in commentarius form have been heavily edited (Pre-Decian Acts, 96, 117.)
27. This would be analogous to speech writing in ancient historiography, which was not a verbatim transcript but rather the invention of the author; speeches were required only to be appropriate to the person, time, and place of the speech. See discussion in Clare K. Rothschild, Luke-Acts and the Rhetoric of History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 1–23.
28. Fergus Millar, The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution, vol. 1 of Rome, The Greek World and the East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 35. Likewise, O.F. Robinson writes, “These stories of Christian martyrs were preserved to honour their memories; they are gesta, not court acta, and their purpose was hagiographic, not legal” (Penal Practice and Penal Policy in Ancient Rome [London: Routledge, 2007], 100).
29. Leonardus Spengel, ed., Rhetores Graeci (Leipzig: Teubner, 1854–56), 3:493.
30. Spengel, Rhetores Graeci, 2:119–20.
31. Keith Oatley writes, “Fiction transports the reader to the story world. No longer in this place and time, in this body, or even (sometimes) in this universe, we travel to the place of elsewhere, where strange and exciting things occur” (“Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock [Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002], 41). See also Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds. Lists of historical persons can be problematic for scholars wishing to claim historical authenticity for these accounts because there are often elements that cannot be reconciled. (An especially controversial example is that of the Mart. Pol., which has concerned scholars for centuries; see discussion in Ehrman, Forgery, 499.) On the affective work of such detail, see Cottrill, “Reading of Ehud and Jael,” 440.
32. Joseph Verheyden makes this point regarding Eusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine: the inclusion of historical data has “the effect that the events to be told are made all the more ‘real’ and that the reader is thrown into them as if he himself were present” (“Pain and Glory: Some Introductory Comments on the Rhetorical Qualities and Potential of the Martyrs of Palestine by Eusebius of Caesarea,” in Martyrdom and Persecution in Late Antique Christianity; Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter, ed. J. Leemans [Leuven: Peeters, 2010], 358).
33. Richard J. Gerrig and David N. Rapp discuss what they term the “willing construction of disbelief,” which involves “readers’ feelings of having been transported into narrative worlds. The data suggest that readers must expend strategic effort to reject the information they acquire from literary narratives”; “people must engage in effortful processing to disbelieve the information they encounter in literary narratives (as well as other types of narratives)” (“Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact,” Poetics Today 25 [2004]: 265, 267). In other words, data suggest that a reader’s starting point is belief, not disbelief; suspension of belief must be consciously activated. See also Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 65–66; and Daniel T. Gilbert, “How Mental Systems Believe,” American Psychologist 46 (1991): 107–19. Psychological studies such as Gerrig and Rapp’s complement historical studies of ancient “spiritual exercises” and their relationship to martyr texts. See, for instance, Nicole Kelley, “Philosophy as Training for Death: Reading the Ancient Christian Martyr Acts as Spiritual Exercises,” Church History 75 (2006): 723–47; and Perkins, Suffering Self, 104–23.
34. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 46–47.
35. Ibid., 42.
36. The introductory notice lists only six Christians, but the subsequent narrative relates the deaths of twelve. Musurillo supplies the remaining six names, positing they were accidentally omitted in the transmission of the narrative (Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 87).
37. John J. Winkler discusses the importance of narrator reliability, especially by means of relaying the sources of information, in Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 65–69. Grig notes that “Christian stories were supposed to have happened in historical time, often specifically and pedantically marked out as such, and were also firmly and fundamentally connected to a concept of time which linked this historical chronology with the supernatural past and future” (Making Martyrs, 5).
38. On the ability of narratives to transport readers to different worlds, see Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, “In the Mind’s Eye: Transportation-Imagery Model of Narrative Persuasion,” in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 315–41.
39. On the various types of and roles for audience members in ancient Roman courtrooms, see Bablitz, Actors and Audience, 51–70, 120–98. On texts as visual cues, see Chrysostom, Hom. 18.4; Augustine, Serm. 280.1, 301.1; and Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 98–99. Grig writes, “Rhetorical textbooks praised this vividness as a prime quality; one described it as ‘when an event is so described in words that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass before our eyes’” (Making Martyrs, 111). The technique of ekphrasis is often limited in modern discussions to descriptions of works of art, but as Grig reminds us:
What is important in defining an ekphrasis is not the object described but the effect the description should have on its audience. It wishes to communicate the experience of the subject described, including the judgements, and emotions of the describer, both a clear representation and a “thick description.” It can also be said to comprise a psychological aspect in its link to imagination and memory. It is important that we bear this broader definition of ekphrasis in mind when talking about pictorial images because it reminds us that authors were using figures from literary tradition as well as works of art, real or imaginary, to construct their ekphraseis. (Making Martyrs, 112)
See also Henry Maguire, Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–52; and Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs.
40. As I discuss below, emotional misalignment may occur—and may even be caused by the text itself—but when it does it serves to instruct; the misalignment is created and then rejected.
41. Grig, Making Martyrs, 5, 39.
42. On the importance of resistance to persuasion, see Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 72–76.
43. As Alison Goddard Elliott notes, the narratives are “directed beyond the seemingly intended receiver in the text—exceeding, therefore, their apparent dramatic function—to the audience at large” (Roads to Paradise: Rereading the Lives of the Early Saints [Hanover, N.H.: Brown University Press, 1987], 25). Similarly, discussing the Gospel of Mark, Tippens writes: “Pronouns and adverbs at the story level merge with pronouns at the level of discourse. ‘You’ and ‘I’ apply both to characters in the story and to listeners in the congregation. Often plural pronouns in Mark’s Gospel, as has been noted frequently, lack precise referents, making it easier for listeners to place themselves in the story (cf. Fowler [Let the Reader Understand] 200); ‘here and now’ in the story inevitably fade into the ‘here and now’ of the auditor” (“Reading at Cockcrow,” 151).
44. Grig, Making Martyrs, 46.
45. Elliott, Roads to Paradise, 18.
46. David S. Miall has suggested that characters’ motives, rather than their traits, account for the affective engagement and self-projection of readers into characters (“Affect and Narrative: A Model of Responses to Stories,” Poetics 17 [1997]: 259–72). See discussion in Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 218.
47. Elliott, Roads to Paradise, 18.
48. Charles F. Altman, “Two Types of Opposition and the Structure of Latin Saints’ Lives,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture n.s. 6 (1975): 2.
49. Ibid.
50. Similarly, Maureen Tilley argues that authors “expected the stories to proclaim the validity of the charismatic authority of the martyrs, to manifest martyrs as exemplars of virtue, and to show people how to react during interrogation by Roman authorities. Thus the readers were inscribed in the narratives as potential martyrs” (“Scripture as an Element of Social Control: Two Martyr Stories of Christian North Africa,” Harvard Theological Review 83.4 [1990]: 383). Also, Roberts argues that Prudentius “emphasized that the emotional force of veneration at a martyr’s shrine depends on sympathetic identification between devotee and saint” (Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 137).
51. Elliott draws on the work of Altman, who depicts early Christian passio as containing “diametrical opposition” (“Two Types of Opposition,” 1–2). For discussion of dualism in martyr texts, see Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 127–28; and Grig, Making Martyrs, 5.
52. The Latin recension is different on this point, counting Agathonike among the group arrested for being Christian (1).
53. Tertullian, Apol. 50. See also Mart. Apoll. 24. Justin Martyr says his conversion to Christianity was due to the martyrs (2 Apol. 12).
54. Keen notes, “The naming of characters (including the withholding of a name, the use of an abbreviation or a role-title in place of a full name, or allegorical or symbolic naming, etc.) may play a role in the potential for character identification” (“Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 217).
55. Elliott, Roads to Paradise, 20–21. Judith Lieu similarly argues that Christian identity is enacted in the confession, Christianus sum (Neither Jew Nor Greek, 213).
56. The status of Mart. Pol. as the first Christian martyr text has been questioned. See Ehrman, Forgery, 501; Candida R. Moss, “On the Dating of Polycarp: Rethinking the Place of the Martyrdom of Polycarp in the History of Christianity,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 539–74.
57. Giuseppe Lazzati, Gli sviluppi della letterature sui martiri nei primi Quattro secoli. Con appendice di testi (Turin: Società editrice internazionale, 1956). See discussion in Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 362–64.
58. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 363.
59. See discussion in Stanley K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 17–20. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World, trans. L.R.M. Strachan, rev. ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), 146–251, esp. 227. See also Francis Xavier J. Exler, “The Form of the Ancient Greek Letter: A Study in Greek Epistolography,” PhD dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1923, 16–18.
60. Jennifer V. Ebbeler, Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 21. She points out that there are serious problems with the distinction between real and non-real letters, “not least of which is the fact that authors themselves did not think in such terms” (21).
61. Concerning early discussions of epistolography, Ebbeler observes: “Absent to the discussion was any real appreciation of the extent to which even explicitly historical prose letters share in the rhetoric and textual strategies of their fictional counterparts” (Disciplining, 21). Modern scholars tend to recognize the fluidity of the epistolary genre. Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison, for instance, suggest a broad definition of the genre: “it is a medium for creating shared virtual space for communication” (“Editors’ Preface,” Ancient Letters: Classical and Late Antique Epistolography [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], v). They go on to argue that differences between technical, philosophical, and literary letters should be considered “matters of degree and not of kind” (vi). See also Owen Hodkinson, “Better than Speech: Some Advantages of the Letter in the Second Sophistic,” in Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, 285.
62. Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, vii.
63. See Jason König, “Alciphron’s Epistolarity,” in Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, 258–59. König draws on the work of Janet Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982).
64. John Henderson, “‘ . . . when who should walk into the room but . . . ’: Epistoliterarity in Cicero, Ad Qfr. 3.1,” in Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, 45.
65. Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, vii. König echoes the importance of recognizing the power inherent in letters’ claims to intimacy and immediacy: “letters so often stand halfway between sincerity and artificiality, purporting to offer us unmediated access to the authentic voice of the letter writer, while at the same time always relying on the projection of a more or less self-consciously fabricated epistolary persona” (“Alciphron’s Epistolarity,” 281).
66. Moss offers the salutary reminder that this martyr account is preserved only in Eusebius, who may have “refashioned the account to conform more fully to the genre of 1 Clement and the Martyrdom of Polycarp” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 103). It is also possible that Eusebius’s editorial activity altered the form of the letter so as to omit the traditional closing greetings. Since the letter is extant only in H.E. 5.1.1–2.8, it is impossible to adjudicate between the options; nor, however, is such adjudication necessary for my present purposes. Whether or not the letter was penned as an actual piece of correspondence does not change the way an audience is affected by the genre.
67. See Morello and Morrison, Ancient Letters, vi.
68. Letters, Stowers argues, “elicit capacities for social bonding,” a point that is particularly germane to the present study (Letter Writing, 15). Seneca states that a letter transports him to his friend and brings reality to the events it describes (Seneca, Ep. 40.1). A papyrus fragment of a friendship letter to Isidorus—the author’s name is not extant—praises Isidorus’s letter “through which I experienced the feeling of seeing you” (Stowers, Letter Writing, 62).
69. William G. Doty labels Mart. Pol. a “letter-essay” and suggests that “letter-essays have pronounced epistolary features, especially in openings and closings, and follow epistolary restrictions as to range and style—usually one main topic—and the presentation is in fairly simple diction” (Letters in Primitive Christianity [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979], 8). Later he describes Mart. Pol. as “most closely related to the Hellenistic public letter in occasion and form” (Letters, 73).
70. There is ample evidence that ancient authors often had larger—or different—audiences in mind for their letters than simply the stated addressee. Cicero, for instance, appears to be writing to Caesar even more than to his brother, the ostensible addressee of his letter. See Henderson, “‘ . . . when who should walk into the room but,’” 37–85; Grig, Making Martyrs, 41; and Chris Frilingos, “‘For My Child, Onesimus’: Paul and Domestic Power in Philemon,” Journal of Biblical Literature 119 (2000): 98–104.
71. Ehrman has demonstrated the proclivity of forgers to utilize a first-person narrative. He notes that the eyewitness claims are conveniently located at moments of miracle; it is a tool by which “the author vouches for its occurrence by claiming to have observed it” (Forgery, 497; see larger discussion on 497–502).
72. Ehrman, Forgery, 498. This point is elaborated by Moss, who suggests that the voice heard in the stadium is an “allusion to scriptural accounts of the baptism of Jesus in which it is unclear whether passersby heard the voice of God (Mark 1:11; Matt 3:17; Luke 3:22)” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 61).
73. Ehrman, Forgery, 498.
74. Carlin Barton, “Savage Miracles: The Redemption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr,” Representations 45 (1994): 57.
75. The third-person report of Christian persecution in Mart. Pol. 1–4 does not necessarily negate audience empathy, as recent neurological studies suggest. Suzanne Keen writes, “Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal propose that witnessing or imagining another in an emotional state activates automatic representations of that same state in the onlooker, including responses in the nervous system and body” (“Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 211).
76. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 44.
77. In addition to creating intimacy, letters, as Owen Hodkinson argues, provide an opportunity for “the writer to be ‘heard’ out. . . . Letters are frequently employed to persuade the addressee of something” (Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982], 293). He continues, “A text is fixed, and a letter-writer can take advantage of this to produce an unbroken stream of rhetoric, ensuring his motives are not misunderstood—in short, attempting to get a proper ‘hearing,’ without argument or interruption” (292). That the martyr acts have a particular message to relate—that they need a hearing—is discussed below.
78. For a compelling argument that many of these texts are literary inventions—often with apologetic aims—see Ehrman, Forgery, 493–508. Regarding Mart. Pol., Ehrman writes, “It is clear even from a superficial reading of the ‘Martyrdom’ that it was never meant to be a disinterested account of the death of Polycarp, but had from the outset literary pretensions and apologetic motives” (494).
79. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 140.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., 141.
82. Although vitae are typically differentiated from passio, scholars recognize the biographical roots of both. See, for instance, Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 145; and Sebastian P. Brock, “Early Syrian Asceticism,” Numen 20 (1973): 2.
83. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 146.
84. Elliott, Roads to Paradise, 22.
85. Tessa Rajak, “Dying for the Law: The Martyr’s Portrait in Jewish-Greek Literature,” in Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire, ed. Mark J. Edwards and Simon Swain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 40. Grig characterizes the importance of the performative value of martyr acts this way: “they substituted for the martyr him/herself. The martyr became present in the text. . . . The much-vaunted charisma of the martyr was constructed through liturgical performance” (Making Martyrs, 52).
86. Streete, Redeemed Bodies, 24.
87. Ross, Grief of God, viii.
88. Ibid., 6.
89. Theory on the visual imagination is widely discussed. See, for instance, Jennifer Glancy, “Text Appeal: Visual Pleasure and Biblical Studies,” Semeia 82 (1998): 63–78; and Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 98–102.
90. Augustine gives us an indication that audiences did in fact imagine the scenes of martyr texts, when he introduces his homily on Perpetua by invoking the senses of hearing and seeing: “We heard of the encouragement they received in divine revelations, and of their triumph in their sufferings, as it was all being read; and all those things, recounted in such glowing words, we perceived with our ears, and actually saw with our minds” (Serm. 280.1).
91. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, I follow Musurillo’s labels for extant recensions of the martyr texts. The purpose of the sand was to absorb the blood so that combatants would not slip as the fight continued. See Bomgardner, Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 21.
92. For a survey of views of Roman power, particularly as displayed in the amphitheater, see Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 33–59.
93. Ray Laurence, Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome (London: Continuum, 2009), 129.
94. In the following discussion I am indebted to Winkler’s arguments in Auctor and Actor, when he describes a narrative element of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass as implicating the reader in an “I got you!” moment. He argues that The Golden Ass “contains many jokes, structural ironies, and explicit discussions concerning stories that take on new meanings at the end, particularly those that require a category shift or radical revision of sense” (Auctor and Actor, 12).
95. Winkler, Auctor and Actor, 9. Fruchtman argues that the renegotiation of meaning resulting from tension between expectation and ekphrasis would have been used by ancient audiences as an opportunity to reconsider their beliefs: “any inserted surprise—any ill-fitting imagery, any jarring or challenging authorial inclusion—would force the listener to take notice, to evaluate and to engage. When the narrative or the logic of the story could no longer be taken for granted, late ancient readers would have understood this moment as a signal of instructive detail, requiring their thought, engagement, interpretation, and renewed attention” (Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 138).
96. Winkler, Auctor and Actor, 9.
97. Augustine makes a similar distinction in Serm. 51.2. Castelli writes, “For Augustine in this sermon, those who look on with the eyes of the mind are akin to the gazing holy angels. They see beneath or beyond the somatic experience of the martyrs, beneath or beyond the surface of the image, focusing on a different spiritual scene where a splendid spectacle is visible and a different body of significations is available” (Martyrdom and Memory, 105).
98. On the possibility of conflict between a reader’s experience and a text’s appeal, see Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 214–15, 222; and Keen, “Empathetic Hardy,” 372.
99. PL. 8.762B.
100. PL. 8.765C.
101. PL. 8.765B.
102. PL. 8.765B.
103. PL. 8.765C.
104. PL. 8.772B–772C.
105. PL. 8.772C.
106. PL. 8.772D–773A.
107. PL. 8.773B.
108. PL. 8.773A.
109. Justinian, Dig. 47.10.15.41. Grig discusses the distinctive ways quaestio functions in martyr texts: “While torture sought to extract a confession from the recalcitrant villain, that of the martyr tended to be an inversion of this process. The Christian had already confessed his or her crime and what the torturer sought to force was a recantation” (Making Martyrs, 69). Moss, commenting on the quaestio in the Letter of Vienne and Lyons, writes, “The account reproduces the notion of torture as truth as a means of guaranteeing Christian authenticity—the martyr’s inflexibility and stubbornness under torture serve as markers of truth for the Christian audience” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 108). See also Kate Cooper, “The Voice of the Victim: Gender, Representation, and Early Christian Martyrdom,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 80 (1998): 147–57. For a discussion of the rationale of inflicting pain in the Roman world, see Chris L. de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 215.
110. As Moss observes, “The author creates a literary trompe l’oeil in which . . . the administration of pain solidifies the martyr’s body” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 109).
111. These types of stories are common in Christian hagiography and appear to underscore God’s protection of faithful Christians. A well-known example is the inability of pagans to kill Thecla because God repeatedly intervenes to thwart the execution (Acts of Paul and Thecla). In the Passion of Saints Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda, a hungry bear refused to harm the holy women (6). On the motif of animals refusing to harm holy persons, see Maureen Tilley, “Martyrs, Monks, Insects and Animals,” in The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York: Garland, 1993), 93–107.
112. Daniel 3:25–27.
113. Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 2001), 186.
114. PL. 8.762A.
115. On the relationships among the recensions, see F.C. Burkitt, “The Oldest Manuscript of St. Justin’s Martyrdom,” Journal of Theological Studies 11 (1910): 61–66; Gary A. Bisbee, “The Acts of Justin Martyr: A Form-Critical Study,” Second Century 3 (1983): 129–57; Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 63–64; and Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 89–93.
116. In James 2:22, to take but one example, Abraham’s faith was “perfected” (ἡ πίστις έτελειώθη) by his act of faith in preparing to sacrifice Isaac.
117. Musurillo’s translation in Acts of the Christian Martyrs focuses on dying rather than perfecting: Agape and Chione are said to “be consumed in the flames” (5.1) and Irene “died” (7.2).
118. Presumably σφραγίζω is used to denote a mark of approval, perhaps the sign of the cross.
119. On the narrative use of scent in early Christian texts, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
120. Grig, Making Martyrs, 82; Grig writes about Agnes, though the description of the audience’s gaze is equally applicable to Mart. Pol.
121. Prudentius’s account of Lawrence’s martyrdom presents an interesting complementary case, this time differentiated by faith allegiances. To pagans, Lawrence’s flesh smelled of roasting, whereas to Christians, his burning flesh smelled of nectar. “The same sense, varied by a different aura, in the one case brought on the nostrils an avenging horror, in the other charmed them with delight” (Peri. II.389–91).
122. Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 12.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid., 14.
126. Miller suggests a similar shift—though perhaps with different aims—in Prudentius’s poems: “A rhetoric of gore yields to a rhetoric of liberation. By giving the martyrs’ stories detailed narrative life, and by undercutting the surface realism of the narratives with surreal images of spiritual intrusion into human life, Prudentius gave visual immediacy not only to a dead person’s life but also to the religious ideas that gave that life meaning” (Corporeal Imagination, 94–95).
127. See Scarry’s important work on the political interests served by torture. Scarry, for instance, notes that “the problem of pain is always bound up with the problem of power” (Body in Pain, 12). For a discussion of the political capital of torture and the infliction of pain in the ancient world, see Thomas Weidemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992), 55–101.
1. Although it has been argued that modern (in this case, post-1845) people are more sensitive to pain than were earlier people, I am not arguing for (or against) such a conclusion. It is not necessary to enter into this debate in order to argue that the postanalgesic world has a different relationship to pain than did the preanalgesic world. For arguments that sensitivities are different, see J.H. van den Berg, Leven in Mervoud (Nijkerk: G F. Callenbach, 1963); E. Seifert, Der Wandel im menschlichen Schmerzerleben (Munich: J.F. Lehmann, 1960); and discussion of these and other works in de Moulin, “Historical-Phenomenological Study.”
2. Elm, “Roman Pain,” 42. See also Merback, Thief, 50. Rey writes,
When scanning this quite lengthy period from Homer’s time to that of the Hippocratic texts, because the participants throughout this period are not comparable, it would be dangerous to try to extract some constant factors or a uniformity of practice in the answers to pain in Greek society. It is possible to go back and discover attitudes which endured, however, such as the acceptance of pain as an inevitable fact of life for both the ill and healthy alike. (History of Pain, 22)
3. For a survey of common diseases in the ancient world, see Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine (London: Routledge, 2004), 19–36.
4. Morris, Culture of Pain, 71. Similarly, F.J.J. Buytendijk observes, “Modern man takes offense at many things that used to be accepted with resignation. He takes offense at growing old, at a long sick-bed, frequently even at death, but certainly at pain. Its occurrence is inacceptible [sic]” (Over de pijn, 2nd ed. [Utrecht and Antwerp: Het Spectrum, 1957], 14–15; quoted in Moulin, “Historical-Phenomenological Study,” 541).
5. There is little evidence that in the ancient world preoperative anesthetics were ever used broadly. This may be related to concerns in the ancient world that linked pharmaka with magic. On the use of pharmaka in magic (including its appearance in the Twelve Tables), see Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Much the same could be said for the early modern period as well. Van Dijkhuizen and Enenkel write, “early modern medicine also had a limited ability to mitigate pain (although some of the painkillers it prescribed are likely to have had at least some effect)” (“Introduction: Constructions of Physical Pain,” 8).
6. The leaves and bark of the willow tree contain one of the ingredients in aspirin—salicin—and references to the willow tree can be found in the Hippocratic Corpus.
7. Dioscorides, De Materia Medica lib. 4, cap. 75; Pliny, NH. 37.25.94; Galen, Method. med. 12.1; Galen, De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis 5.19; Galen, De Compositione Medicamentorum Secundum Locos, 7.5; Celsus, On Medicine, V.25. For a discussion of ancient remedies for pain, see Dormandy, Worst of Evils, 9–33.
8. Dormandy notes the unreliable effects of anesthetics known in the ancient world: “All the plant extracts recommended as anodynes or narcotics could also be fatal” (Worst of Evils, 31). Indeed, he notes that although such treatments might have been offered for surgery, there is no evidence of them being used to treat acute pain.
9. Perkins, Suffering Self, 2.
10. The Acts of Carpus is extant in two recensions. In the Greek recension (A), the martyr’s name is Papylus; in the Latin (B), it is Pamfilus. I have observed this distinction throughout.
11. In the Greek recension, as Carpus endures being scraped by claws he cries out not in pain but in confession: “I am a Christian” (Χριστιανός εἰμι; A23). Thereafter he grows exhausted and silent. In the Latin version, Musurillo translates the term laborauit with the English term “agony” (B2.4). If, however, he is correct about the relationship of the recensions—that the Latin is a translation of the Greek—we should read laborauit in light of the Greek term ἔκαμνεν (A23) to mean “he was tired” or “weary.”
12. On Prudentius’s poem on Romanus see Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 144–68; and Robert Levine, “Prudentius’ Romanus: The Rhetorician as Hero, Martyr, Satirist, and Saint,” Rhetorica 9 (1991): 5–38.
13. Liddell-Scott defines αἴσθησις broadly as “sense-perception” and “sensation,” used “esp. of pain.”
14. That the moment of disrobing results in an epiphany about the true nature of the body is reminiscent of Perpetua’s fourth vision (Pass. Perp.10.7).
15. The interaction between Flavian and Cyprian, aimed as it is at the comfort of the not-yet-dead, is reminiscent of reports of Arria the Elder’s words to her husband Paetus: “Paete, non dolet” (Pliny, Ep. 3.16.6; cf. Dio Cassius, Roman History 60.16.6; Martial, Epigrams 1.13.5).
16. Seneca writes, “The mark of true greatness is not to perceive [sentire] a blow” (De ira 3.25).
17. Augustine asks, “What was she enjoying, that she did not feel this?” (Quo fruens, ista non senserat?; Serm. 280.4). Throughout this section Augustine relies on two terms, dolor and sentio. Dolor is what the martyrs should have felt, Augustine suggests, yet the martyrs were insensitive to it. In Serm. 280, therefore, we see a continuation in the narrative tradition that distances the martyrs’ bodies from the experience of pain. Augustine stands as an ancient witness to the horizon of expectation regarding martyr narratives, an expectation that is activated (i.e., they should feel pain) but that is promptly denied (they do not feel the pain).
18. The exception occurs in 21.9 and will be discussed in chapter 4.
19. Craig Williams, “Perpetua’s Gender: A Latinist Reads the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis,” in Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 68.
20. On the Acts of Gallonius, see Paolo Chiesa, “Un Testo Agiografico Africano ad Aquileia: Gli Acta di Gallonio e dei Martiri di Timida Regia,” Analecta Bollandiana 114 (1996): 241–68.3
21. PL. 8.761D.
22. PL. 8.762A. Grig explains that “the excesses of torture that follow demonstrate Marculus’ miraculous denial of pain” (Making Martyrs, 55).
23. PL. 8.769C. See discussion in Grig, Making Martyrs, 70.
24. PL. 8.693D.
25. PL. 8.693D. Tilley translates integer and inconcusus as “whole and unshaken” (Donatist Martyr Stories, 34). In a text that teaches that torture is “small and of no consequence” (10), however, we might understand the description of Dativus’s soul in stronger terms than this. The text asserts the impenetrability of the Christian spirit: the martyr’s body is wasted but his soul is “unhurt” (integer) and “unchanged” (inconcussus).
26. PL. 8.694C.
27. A similar claim may be found in Romanus’s speech as told by Prudentius. In comparing torture to various diseases and ailments, Romanus compares the torture to surgery: whereas the persecutors “appear to be rending my wasting limbs,” they are in reality giving “healing to the living substance within” (10.504–5).
28. Brent Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 309.
29. PL. 38.1253.
30. PL. 38.1254.
31. PL. 38.1256.
32. PL. 38.1256.
33. PL. 38.1256.
34. Clark, “Bodies and Blood,” 105 (emphasis added).
35. Isabelle Kinnard, “Imitatio Christi in Christian Martyrdom and Asceticism: A Critical Dialogue,” in Asceticism and Its Critics: Historical Accounts and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Oliver Freiberger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 141.
36. Thomas J. Heffernan discusses the semantic range of conforto in relation to the Passion of Perpetua: “The Latin conforto is nuanced—suggesting a shaping of ideas, a bringing into harmony, a training of the will, educating and causing to agree (OLD, s.v. conforto)” (The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 44).
37. The identity of the one who strengthens Pamfilus and endures for him is not specified. It is perhaps in episodes such as this that we are most clearly reminded of the development of early Christian theology: in some cases the martyr texts allow for positions that are closely akin to patripassianism, an ideology that would later become labeled heresy. This text is clearly uninterested in differentiating Jesus from God here.
38. The Passio has come down to us in both a Latin and a Greek form. Scholars are generally in agreement that the text was originally written in Latin. But there remains some uncertainty regarding the relationship of the extant Greek and Latin forms—whether, that is, the Greek represents an independent tradition, whether it is a translation of our Latin text, or whether the extant Greek and Latin texts share a common (no longer extant) Latin archetype. Also unclear is whether any of the visions were originally written in Greek, as opposed to the editorial prologue and conclusion, which appear to have been originally written in Latin. All critical editions of the text take up these issues. For a succinct history of the issues, see Bremmer and Formisano, eds., Perpetua’s Passions; and Jacqueline Amat, Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité suivi des Actes (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1996), esp. 51–66. J. Rendel Harris and Seth K. Gifford argue for the priority of the Greek text (The Acts of the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas [London: C.J. Clay and Sons, Cambridge University Press, 1890]). For arguments relating to the priority of the Latin text, see J. Armitage Robinson, The Passion of S. Perpetua (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891; repr. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2004), esp. 1–15; Cornelius Johannes Maria Joseph van Beek, Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1936); P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, “Osservazione sopra alcuni Atti di martiri da Settimio Severo a Massimino Daza,” Nuovo bollettino di archelogia cristiana 10 (1904): 6–8; and Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, xxvii. For arguments that both the extant Latin and Greek descend from an earlier Latin text, see Jan Bremmer, “The Motivation of Martyrs: Perpetua and the Palestinians,” in Religion and Cultural Discourse: Essays in Honor of Hans G. Kippenberg on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. B. Luchesi and K. von Stuckrad (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 535; James W. Halporn, Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Bryn Mawr, PA: Thomas Library, Bryn Mawr College, 1984), 3; and Amat, Passion de Perpétue, 65. Adolf Hilgenfeld argues that the extant text is a translation of an original Punic text (“Zu dem Martyrium der Perpetua,” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie 34 [1891]: 367–69); Paul Monceaux argues that Saturus’s vision was penned in Latin but Perpetua’s visions were written in Greek (Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne: Depuis les origins jusq’a l’invasion arabe, vol. 1: Tertullien et les origenes [Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1901], 70–90); and Åke Fridh argues that Saturus’s vision was written in Greek while the rest of the Passio was written in Latin; thus the document was originally bilingual. Eventually, the Greek was translated into Latin, and finally, the entire Latin text was translated into Greek (Le Problème de la Passion des saintes Perpétue et Félicité. Studia graeca et Latina. Gothoburgensia 26 [Stockholm: Almqvist et Wiksell, 1968]).
39. This exchange demonstrates that dolor should not be understood as “grief,” as many who adhere to a distinction between physical and emotional pain suggest. On the rejection of the distinction between physical and mental sufferings, see the discussion in the Introduction.
40. In 17.1 the author asserts that the martyrs will find joy in their endurance (passionis suae felicitatem). In this way, perhaps, the Passio recalls Stoic expectations of the wise man whose actions are not affected by the experience of pain. It is possible, therefore, to interpret these instances of dolor in the Passio as indicating that Perpetua and Felicitas endured pain but were not persuaded by their painful experiences to veer from the path of martyrdom. See discussion in Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum,” 211.
41. In the Greek version of the Passion of Perpetua, πάσχω should not be translated as a synonym for “pain,” as the episode in 20.8 demonstrates. Here the author explains how it is that Perpetua did not know she had been tossed by the heifer: she was “in the spirit and under the influence of [παθοῦσα] ecstasy.” Certainly this example does not rule out a wide semantic range for πάσχω—even within this particular text—but it does suggest that the term may be used to signal something other than physical discomfort. In this case, as also in the episode relating Felicitas’s labor, πάσχω indicates the endurance of an experience. Thus the martyr is aided and comforted by the presence of the divine, and in both cases communion with the divine results in the martyrs’ insensitivity to pain.
42. Lists of potential tortures serve similar ends as descriptions of performed tortures: they remind the audience of the bodily trauma possible in persecution. On the recitation of past torture, see Grig, Making Martyrs, 68.
43. The distinction is not held uniformly throughout the text, however. For example, in describing Blandina’s torture, the author employs πάσχω (1.41, 1.56). However, ὑπομένω is more frequently used of the martyrs.
44. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 113. Elsewhere Moss echoes this same sentiment: Blandina “plays Christ so well that she disappears, the audience sees only Christ” (The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom [New York: HarperCollins, 2013], 71). Moss uses the term “deidentification” to describe Jesus’ replacement of the martyr, and it is a theme she traces throughout the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons. I understand the relationship of martyr and Jesus differently, as discussed above. This type of “deidentification,” however, does appear in the fourth-century Donatist martyr text The Passion of Maximian and Isaac. In this case when the narrator describes the torture of Maximian, the human martyr drops out altogether and is replaced in the agon with Jesus: “From this point on, who could describe the strength of Christ or the savagery of those mangling him, the torturers’ punishments or the victories of Christ, the extended insanity of their rage or the constancy of his Christian endurance?” (5; trans. Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories, 66). Shortly thereafter, the narrator moderates the language such that Maximian is still present as the “clothing” Jesus wears: “But opposing them was Christ who was clothed in the limbs of his soldier” (5).
45. Elizabeth A. Goodine and Matthew W. Mitchell, “The Persuasiveness of a Woman: The Mistranslation and Misinterpretation of Eusebius; HE 5.1.41,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 13 (2005): 1–19.
46. Ibid., 4.
47. Ibid., 5.
48. Ibid., 4.
49. Streete, Redeemed Bodies, 16.
50. In the introduction to the letter, God is described as “the Father” and Jesus as “our Lord”; thus here I read “the Lord” as referring to Jesus. On the translation of this passage—and its importance within the letter—see Cobb, “Polycarp’s Cup.”
51. This is ultimately not a tenable position for the ideal reader to hold since the author repeatedly denigrates the bystanders as irrational. See the discussion of the crowd in Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 81–84.
52. The use of ἀποδημέω is much more evocative than Musurillo’s translation, “not present,” suggests. The term is used of those who journey abroad, who are away from home. In this case the body becomes the structure—the home—that is vacant; the martyrs have journeyed and now abide elsewhere, as the text goes on to suggest.
53. Χάρις does not appear to be used as a technical term in Mart. Pol., although it certainly carries much weight in other early Christian texts. In Mart. Pol. it seems most often to be a divine attribute (7.3, 20.2, 22.2). In 12.1 it is likely that Polycarp is filled with God’s χάρις. The only other use of the term is found in 3.1, where it is a formula for thanksgiving. In 2.3, then, I have translated the text as a subjective genitive. In two recent translations of the text, the difficulty in assessing the author’s meaning here is clear. Michael W. Holmes translates the phrase so as to highlight the ambiguity of the genitive: “the grace of Christ” (Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007], 309); while Bart D. Ehrman comes down squarely on the side of the objective genitive: “the gracious gift of Christ” (LCL, 369).
54. The manuscript tradition of Mart. Pol. 2.3 contains a variant: manuscript m reads ζωὴν and manuscript g reads κόλασιν: the martyrs either “purchase eternal life” or “buy off eternal punishment.” I have followed Lake (LCL) and Ehrman (LCL) in reading with manuscript m; though Holmes reads with g. Both readings make sense within the context of the passage.
55. Interestingly, the text sets up a scene in which none of the participants are understood to be human. The torturers are “inhuman” (ἀπανθρώπων) and the martyrs are “no longer human” (μηκέτι ἄνθρωποι). Thus the differences between them—evil versus good—are hyperexaggerated in the moment of torture.
56. This section of the letter does not ask the audience to imagine bodily torture apart from the analgesic presence of Christ. It is possible, however, given the emphasis on Christ’s aid to martyrs, that chapter 4 may be read as a warning about what happens when someone attempts to seek martyrdom apart from Jesus: rather than masculine fortitude, the person will become “unmanly.” This reading places God/Jesus as the main motivators of Christian endurance, rather than seeing the martyrs as unique examples of faithfulness. Whomever God chooses, in other words, is capable of endurance. The presence of God’s grace with the martyr also allows Polycarp to pray—he was “unable to be silent”—for two hours straight (7.3).
57. That the child was Jesus is made clear in Mart. Mont. 7.5.
58. PL. 8.761C-D.
59. PL. 8.761D.
60. PL. 8.762.
61. Interestingly, this text introduces a theme of food—and the avoidance of it—that may be reminiscent of Daniel. The martyrs are condemned to death during a ritual fast. Fructuosus’s Christian companions offer him drugged wine, but he refuses it, preferring to break his fast with the martyrs and prophets in heaven (3.2–3).
62. As Kinnard notes, “the martyrs story illustrates the continuing presence of Christ in the world and is thus reassuring” (“Imitatio Christi,” 141).
63. Serm. 274; PL. 38.1253.
64. Serm. 280.4; PL. 38.1283.
65. As Peter Brown has aptly observed, fourth- and fifth-century Christians came to martyria to “participate in the unearthly ‘glory’ of a moment of total triumph over pain and death. . . . For the martyrs had been rendered immune by God to the horrors inflicted on their flesh” (“Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity,” Early Medieval Europe 9 [2000]: 7). Brown goes on to note the sense of awe felt by late ancient Christians in the presence of one “in whose strangely altered body they sensed the presence of a mighty god” (“Enjoying the Saints,” 8).
66. PL. 8.762.
67. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 40.
68. PL. 8.762B.
69. A similar claim is made in the account of the martyrdom of Anahid: “Do not be amazed at this, sirs, for the Lord has sent his angel and he has healed my wounds by laying his hands on my body. If God can raise up the dead and restore them to life, how much more can he heal my wounds?” (The Martyrdom of Thekla, a Daughter of the Covenant and of Four Other Daughters of the Covenant with Her, 317, trans. Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 95).
70. PL. 8.713A.
71. PL. 8.713A.
72. The reference to his hair may be an allusion to Luke 21:18.
73. For a discussion of many of these themes in later Christian texts, such as Prudentius’s Liber Peristephanon, see Brown, “Enjoying the Saints.”
74. PL. 8.765B.
75. See the thorough discussion in Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 155.
76. Laurence’s statement is explicitly cast as humorous: Prudentius characterizes it as having been said “in jest” (ludibundus); during the repartee that precedes the execution, the prefect grows angry at Laurence’s speech because he appears to be laughing at the prefect; the prefect describes Laurence with the terms “mimus” and “saltas fabulam,” which place Laurence in the category of the comic (II.313–20). The Legenda Aurea offers an interesting emendation. In this version of the legend, St. Laurence says to Decius: “Learn, thou cursed wretch, that thy coals give to me refreshing of coldness. . . . And after this he said with a glad cheer unto Decius, Thou cursed wretch, thou hast roasted that one side, turn that other, and eat” (4.36). Conybeare demonstrates the gendered aspects of Laurence’s jesting, which stands at odds with the aggressive hegemonic masculinity of the persecutor (“Ambiguous Laughter,” 175–202). Beard discusses the portrayal of Laurence as scurra in Prudentius’s account (Laughter in Ancient Rome, 154–55).
77. James A. Thorson, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Morgue: Some Thoughts on Humor and Death, and a Taxonomy of the Humor Associated with Death,” Death Studies 9 (1985): 206.
78. Gary Meltzer, “Dark Wit and Black Humor in Seneca’s Thyestes,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 118 (1988): 309. Meltzer goes on to discuss the cannibalism at the heart of Thyestes: Thyestes “directs one’s attention away from the hideous spectacle of his children’s severed heads to the hideous condition of Atreus’ soul. The effect of Thyestes’ remark . . . is to shift the focus from the victim to the victimizer” (323).
79. The insightful work of Andrew McGowan on cannibalism is applicable here. “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism against Christians in the Second Century” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 413–442.
80. Meltzer, “Dark Wit,” 330.
81. E.B. White and Katharine S. White, “The Preaching Humorist,” Saturday Review of Literature 24 (1941): 16.
82. Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Moffat and Yard, 1916), 378.
83. Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor in Literature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 8. For discussions of other instances of gallows humor in ancient literature, see Dorota M. Dutsch, Feminine Discourse in Roman Comedy: On Echoes and Voices. Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 125–26; Erich Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer, eds., Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World: Cultural Interaction and the Creation of Identity in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 2.
84. As Paul Lewis observes, “It is humorous by virtue of insisting on the right to be humorous in spite of unpleasant facts” (“Joke and Anti-Joke: Three Jews and a Blindfold,” Journal of Popular Culture 21 [1987]: 71).
85. Ibid.
86. On the intentionality of gallows humor, see James A. Thorson, “Did You Ever See A Hearse Go By? Some Thoughts on Gallows Humor,” Journal of American Culture 16 (1993): 18.
87. Wendy Doniger relates one well-known story:
As World War II drew to a close, the advancing Russians came upon a town only recently vacated by the retreating Germans. They went to the Jewish ghetto and found that every single Jew, man, woman, and child had been hung from hastily erected gallows. As they stared in silence, one Russian said to another, “Look what a horrible thing those barbaric Germans have done; they have hung every single Jew in the town.” “Yes,” said the other, “it is a terrible thing. They didn’t leave a single one for us to hang.” (“Terror and Gallows Humor: After September 11?” www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/daysafter/911doniger.html)
88. Jean François Steiner, Treblinka (London: Weidenfelt and Nicholson, 1967), 204.
89. Willie Smyth, “Challenger Jokes and the Humor of Disaster,” Western Folklore 45 (1986): 254.
90. Lewis, Comic Effects, 69.
91. Elliott Oring, “Jokes and the Discourse of Disaster,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 284.
92. “Fast Chat The Onion,” Newsweek, 15 October 2011, p. 9, www.newsweek.com/fast-chat-onion-154021
93. Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, 18.
94. See the thorough discussion in ibid., 155.
95. Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories, 23.
96. The martyrs appear to be punning on the term fatuus, which can refer to tasteless food or to a foolish individual.
97. On consummo versus consumo, see discussion in Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 358. Heffernan prefers consumo because it dramatizes the moment more. But the Greek recension reads τελειοῦμαι, which recalls other martyr texts that focus on martyrdom as perfection.
98. See discussion in Garrett G. Fagan, Bathing in Public in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 76. Robinson refers to this episode as a “coarse jest” (Passion of S. Perpetua, 8). Margaret R. Miles suggests this may be a phrase from a ritual sacrifice to Saturn (Rereading Historical Theology: Before, during, and after Augustine [Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2008], 76). If that is the case, the potential for humor is elevated since the text rejects the pagan practice as it affirms Christian salvation through baptism. Another case of humor in martyr texts from pagans rather than Christians may occur in the Martyrdom of Fructuosus: “Aemilianus, the ruler, said to Fructuosus: ‘Are you a bishop?’ Fructuosus said, ‘I am.’ Amelianus said, ‘You were’” (2.8–9).
99. See Heffernan’s discussion of this pun, particularly his observation that the Greek author either misses it or rejects it (Passion of Perpetua, 359).
100. On double entendre in ancient humor, see Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, 117.
101. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 162.
102. Smyth, “Challenger Jokes,” 255.
103. Lewis, Comic Effects, 14.
104. Rod A. Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (Burlington, Mass.: Elsevier Academic Press, 2007), 19.
105. Erin Runions, “From Disgust to Humor: Rahab’s Queer Affect,” Postscripts 4 (2008): 52.
106. Oring, “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster,” 284.
107. Peter Farb, “Speaking Seriously about Humor,” Massachusetts Review 22 (1981): 764, 765, 766.
108. Linda E. Francis, “Laughter, the Best Medicine: Humor as Emotion Management in Interaction,” Symbolic Interaction 17 (1994): 147. See also Lewis, Comic Effects, 37. Important analyses of Jewish humor during World War II suggest that humor both “bolsters the resistance of the victims and, at the same time, undermines the morale of the oppressors” (Antonin J. Obrdlik, “‘Gallows Humor’—A Sociological Phenomenon,” American Journal of Sociology 47 [1942]: 713).
109. Oring, “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster,” 282.
110. Lewis, Comic Effects, 13.
111. The most recent discussion of the low rates of prosecution is that of Candida Moss, Myth of Persecution.
1. Grig begins her study of early Christian martyrdom with the assertion that early Christians “made” martyrs: “This ‘making’ was a matter of representation: of text and image. The story made the martyr” (Making Martyrs, 161–218).
2. De Wet, Preaching Bondage, 215.
3. This chapter expands our purview to include injury apart from explicit statements of pain. This broader perspective coheres with my arguments above relating to horizons of expectation. When audience assumptions about the relationship between injury and pain are not reframed, the preexisting expectation stands: injury leads to pain.
4. For example, Fructuosus and his companions were “happy” (4.2).
5. As Heffernan observes, the emotionality of this text differentiates it “from the idealizing propensity of many of the Acts of the Martyrs” (Passion of Perpetua, 161).
6. Pass. Perp. 3.6–9; Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 164.
7. Other terms used include sollicitus (3.6, 8, 9); suffero (3.5); tabesco (3.8); contristo (15.3); and luctus (15.2). For a discussion of dolor in Augustine, see Josef Lössl, “Dolor, dolere,” Augustinus-Lexikon 2.3/4 (1999): 581–91. For a discussion of patior, see below.
8. Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 97–107. Augustine comments on this section of the Passion: Perpetua “despised his words, but nonetheless felt pain [condoleret] at his beating. Certainly she felt pain [doluit] at the affront on her old parent” (Serm. 281.2).
9. During this time the most common form of marriage was sine manu, under which women remained part of their father’s family. For discussions of Roman marriage, see Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
10. Augustine (An. orig. I.XII [X]) understands this vision—the authorship of which, interestingly, he questions—to reflect the punishment of postbaptismal sin, from which Perpetua’s prayers saved her brother. Although we might label this type of pain “emotional” or “mental” pain (or “anguish”) and thus distinguish it from physical pain, Morris argues that this (“Myth of the Two Pains,” as he calls it) is a modern and artificial division (Morris, Culture of Pain, 9).
11. Perkins, Suffering Self, 108.
12. See also Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 170.
13. Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 212–13. Heffernan mentions a textual variant in manuscript N “which reads pati instead of petere, and thus has Perpetua say that she knew she was worthy to ‘suffer’ for him” (213).
14. Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 229. See also Jan N. Bremmer, “The Passion of Perpetua and the Development of Early Christian Afterlife,” Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 54 (2000): 109.
15. In terms of analogy—if not Christology—we might push the comparison even more: as Perpetua feels pain on behalf of Dinocrates (7.8), so Jesus will endure on behalf of the Christian martyrs (15.7). It is not necessary to assume an equivalence of vicarious suffering—that the martyrs are equal to Jesus—in order to see a type of foreshadowing in the vision.
16. Kate Cooper argues that Perpetua’s father may have been Christian, but of the antimartyrdom sort. Even if that were the case, Perpetua must still sever familial ties in her quest for martyrdom (“A Father, A Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage,” Gender and History 23 [2011]: 691).
17. See Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 103; on Perpetua’s separation from her family, see 97–107.
18. Augustine summarizes this section by asserting that Perpetua’s “pain did not hold back the firmness of her resolve and it added glory to her endurance” (proinde et dolor ille nihil retraxit robori fortitudinis, et aliquid addidit laudibus passionis; Serm. 281.2).
19. On the masculinization—and complications to this—of the female martyr, see Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 97–107.
20. This exchange demonstrates that dolor should not be understood as merely “grief.” See also the rejection of the distinction between physical and mental sufferings in Morris, Culture of Pain, 9. We need not, however, be militaristic in translation; there are times when “grief” or “sadness” is indeed the most appropriate translation of dolor, as for instance in Mart. Fruct. 3.2 where dolor is contrasted to gaudeo: the Christians were glad rather than sad.
21. In Pass. Perp. 17.1, the author asserts that the martyrs will find joy in their endurance (passionis suae felicitatem).
22. In this way, perhaps, the Passion recalls Stoic expectations of the wise man whose actions are not affected by the experience of pain. It is possible, therefore, to interpret these instances of dolor in the Passion as indicating that Perpetua and Felicitas endured pain but were not persuaded by their painful experiences to veer from the path of martyrdom. See discussion in Lössl, “Julian of Aeclanum,” 211.
23. The Greek text used in what follows is that of Amat, Passion.
24. Kate Cooper, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (New York: Overlook Press, 2013), 115–16. Maureen Tilley makes the argument about martyr texts providing templates for ascetic discipline in “The Ascetic Body and the (Un)Making of the World of the Martyr,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1991): 467–79. Augustine makes precisely this point—that Christians must resist the persuasion of family—in Serm. 159A, where he mentions specifically Perpetua and Felicitas (159A.11).
25. On the text’s emphasis on the divine sign and its import for this passage, see Cobb, “Polycarp’s Cup.”
26. Candida R. Moss problematizes the notion of voluntary martyrdom in “The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern,” Church History 81 (2012): 531–51.
27. On unmanliness in martyr texts, see Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 22, 87–90.
28. Mary Francis McDonald, trans., Lactantius: The Minor Works. The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 54 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 122.
29. PL. 7.201A.
30. PL. 7.201B–202A.
31. PL. 7.203A.
32. PL. 7.246A.
33. PL. 247A.
34. Cf. Eusebius’s account of Galerius’s death, H.E. 8.16.4–5, who adds that the physicians who were unable to cure Galerius were executed.
35. In relation to Donatist martyr texts, Grig has argued that the projection of pain “back onto the inflictor, as seen in the case of the Donatist martyrs, is only a foretaste of the mighty reversal of suffering to come at the end of time when the persecutors will become the persecuted” (Making Martyrs, 70). I argue that the same is true for the earlier martyr texts.
36. The fourth-century Acts are extant in two versions (I and II), both of which are shorter than the Passion, and may have been created to meet liturgical needs for a shorter account of the martyrdoms. On the production of the Acts for liturgical purposes, see Brent Shaw, “The Passion of Perpetua,” Past and Present 139 (1993): 36; Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 81, 442; and Robinson, Passion of S. Perpetua, 15. Most analyses assume a literary relationship between the Passion and the Acta. Important exceptions to the assumption of literary dependency are James W. Halporn (“Literary History and Generic Expectations in the Passio and Acta Perpetuae,” Vigiliae Christianae 45 [1991]: 223–41); and Ross Kraemer and Shira Lander (“Perpetua and Felicitas,” in The Early Christian World, vol. 2, ed. Philip Francis Esler [London: Routledge, 2000]: 1048–68).
37. Grig, Making Martyrs, 70.
38. See Grig’s discussion of Vincent’s martyrdom in Making Martyrs, 72. On Prudentius’s varying presentations of pain in martyrdom, see Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 144–45.
39. PL. 8.762A–762B.
40. PL. 8.693A.
41. PL. 8.696A.
42. PL. 8.696A.
43. PL. 8.698A.
44. PL. 8.770C. See discussion in Grig, Making Martyrs, 70.
45. Serm. 276 (PL. 38.1257).
46. Eusebius narrates a similar event in H.E. 8.7.2. In this case the animals that were to kill the Christians in Tyre did not approach them but instead attacked the persecutors.
47. ὥστε can indicate an accomplished act or the intention or goal of an act. Given this text’s insistence on the impassibility of Pionius and on the inability of torture to effect dissolution of the body, or even its disfigurement, I read ὥστε in the latter sense: the soldier hit Pionius in an attempt to wound him. The interpretation that follows is not, however, discounted by a reading that privileges accomplished action.
48. PL. 8.771A.
49. PL. 8.771B.
50. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 294.
51. Ibid.
52. See Heffernan’s discussion of the use of swords in Passion of Perpetua, 268.
53. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua, 174.
54. Ibid.; Peter Habermehl, Perpetua und der Ägypter oder Bilder des Bösen im frühen afrikanischen Christentum: Ein Versuch zur Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 77.
55. See Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 201; Peter Garnsey, “The Criminal Jurisdiction of Governors,” Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968): 52, 55; and A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament: The Sarum Lectures 1960–1961 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 8–10.
56. Amat, Passion, 242. See also W.H. Shewring’s note on this passage: “The narrator’s words are not clear, but seem to mean that Secundulus was beheaded in prison” (The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicity [London: Sheed and Ward, 1931], 34).
57. Heffernan is, to my knowledge, the only scholar to posit rumors of apostasy as an explanation for the author’s statement. Other commentators may nod at the vagueness of the phrase (e.g., Joyce Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman [New York: Routledge, 1997], 115; and Amat, Passion, 242). More commonly, however, it is simply not discussed.
58. Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 301. Secundulus’s name was included with the other martyrs’ on an inscription in Carthage, which suggests that any such rumors—if they existed—were not ultimately compelling to the church.
59. PL. 38.1284.
60. Indeed, the editor adds an aside to this effect. He writes, “It may be that so great a woman could not otherwise be killed, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, unless she herself willed it” (21.10).
61. Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 355.
62. Williams, “Perpetua’s Gender,” 75. See also Edwards, “Suffering Body,” 262; Shaw, “Body/Power/Identity,” 285–86; Cicero, Tusc. 2; and Seneca, Ep. 78.
63. On the gender implications of this scene, see also Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 107.
64. This same terminological shift also occurs in the scene in which Perpetua is tossed by the heifer: in pulling down her tunic, Perpetua thinks “more about shame [αἰδους] than distress [πόνων]” (XX.4). Although the Latin author introduces the possibility of pain here, the Greek author may work against that option: if πένομαι is used in distinction to ἀλγέω, then the author rejects pain as an experience in this scene. Interestingly, the Greek text contains what appears to be a secondary gloss—αἰδουμένη, μηδαμῶς φροντίσασα τῶν ἀλγηδόνων (“being ashamed, not paying attention to pain”)—that introduces, unequivocally, the experience of pain. This clause, however, has not been accepted by most translators (see Amat, Passion, 256) and seems to contradict the more general thrust of the Greek text.
65. Only rarely—according to Liddell and Scott—does the term refer to a cry of pain. While we must be sensitive to the limits of lexical work in assessing a term’s meaning in any particular context, it is nevertheless interesting that the terms chosen by both the Greek and Latin authors are not those that are widely associated with physical pain in the ancient world. See Liddell and Scott entry under ἀλαλαγή. For the use of ἀλαλαγή as a battle cry, see Xenophon, An. 5.2.14, 6.5.27. The use of both πονός and ἀλαλαγή, therefore, may bring martial imagery, as opposed to pain, into play.
66. In neither form of the Acta is there reference to Perpetua’s cry of pain when being struck by a gladiator’s sword, and there is no reference to her guiding the sword to her own throat. Thus later accounts of the deaths of Perpetua and Felicitas appear to be more adamant in their rejection of pain as an experience of martyrs.
67. The version of the text used by Eusebius contains a number of distinctive readings, many of which agree with the text extant in the Codex Mosquensis 159. See Bart D. Ehrman, trans., Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 363.
68. Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers; Holmes, Apostolic Fathers; Kirsopp Lake, trans., Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
69. Rufinus’s abbreviated Latin version contains no explicit references to pain.
70. See the discussion in Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, xlvi; and Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, 146–47.
71. Grig, Making Martyrs, 16.
72. Tertullian’s enthusiasm for martyrdom is often associated with Montanism. See, for instance, Graham Stanton, Studies in Matthew and Early Christianity, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 309 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 397.
73. ANF 3:231.
74. Ronald E. Heine assigns both of these statements to the Montanist prophets (The Montanist Oracles [Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989], 7).
75. Tertullian does discuss the pain experienced by souls in hell, in An. 7.1.
76. ANF 3:694. For an insightful discussion of Ad martyras, see David Wilhite, Tertullian the African: An Anthropological Reading of Tertullian’s Context and Identities (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 162–67. See also Gerald Bray, Holiness and the Will of God: Perspectives on the Theology of Tertullian (London: Marshall, Morgan, and Scott, 1979).
77. PG. 50.647.
78. PG. 50.647.
79. PG. 50.647.
80. See discussion in John Ernest Leonard Oulton and Henry Chadwick, Library of Christian Classics, vol. 2: Alexandrian Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 388–92; and Ronald E. Heine, “Origen,” in The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought, ed. D. Jeffrey Bingham (London: Routledge, 2010), 200. On Origen’s Exhortation and its relationship to 4 Maccabees, see David A. DeSilva, “An Example of How to Die Nobly for Religion: The Influence of 4 Maccabees on Origen’s Exhortatio ad Martyrium,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 (2009): 337–56. On Origen’s views of martyrdom more generally, see Thomas P. Scheck, Origen: Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel (New York: Newman Press, 2010), 18–21.
81. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 52; on the cultic and sacrificial imagery in Exhortation to Martyrdom, see Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 52–53. See also Prosper Hartmann, “Origène et la théologie du martyre d’après le ΠΡΟΤΡΕΠΤΙΚΟΣ DE 235,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 34 (1958): 773–824; and George Heyman, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2007), 206–9.
82. Rowan Greer, Origen, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 26.
83. PG. 11.600.
84. PG. 11.584.
85. PG. 11.584.
86. PG. 11.592; cf. 2 Macc 6:30.
87. PG. 11.596.
88. PG. 31.516.
89. PG. 31.517.
90. PG. 31.517.
91. PL. 38.1282.
92. PL. 38.1282.
93. PL. 38.1254.
94. PL. 38.1254.
95. PG. 50.670.
96. PG. 50.667.
97. PG. 50.667.
98. PG. 50.667.
99. PG. 50.667.
100. On this homily, see Johan Leemans, “Hagiography and Historical-Critical Analysis: The Earliest Layer of the Dossier of Theodore the Recruit (BHG 1760 and 1761),” in Martyrdom and Persecution in Late Antique Christianity: Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter, ed. J. Leemans (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 135–60; “Style and Meaning in Gregory of Nyssa’s Panegyrics on Martyrs,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 81 (2005): 109–29; “Grégoire de Nysse et Julien l’Apostat: Polémique antipaīenne et identité chrétienne dans le Panégyrique de Téodore,” Revue des études augustiniennes 53 (2007): 15–33; and Christopher Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 45–46.
101. PG. 46.737.
102. PG. 46.737.
103. PG. 46.748.
104. PG. 46.745.
105. Gregory’s homily is the earliest documentary evidence for the martyrdom of Theodore, followed by the Passion of St. Theodore. Although the Passion postdates Gregory, it is possible that Gregory was familiar with oral traditions of Theodore that influenced his account of the martyrdom itself. Leemans compares Gregory’s homily with the Passion in “Hagiography and Historical-Critical Analysis.”
106. Translation based on the Greek text of Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Légendes grecques des saints militaires (Paris: A. Picard, 1909), 130.
107. On the relationship of the Passion of Theodore and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, see P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, “Attorno al più antico testo del Martyrium S. Theodori Tironis,” in Note agiografiche III (Studi e testi 22), ed. P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri (Rome: Tipografia poliglotta vaticana, 1909), 91–107; and “La Passio S. Theagenis,” in Note agiografiche IV (Studi e testi 24), ed. P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri (Rome: Tipografia poliglotta vaticana, 1912), 179–85. See discussion in Christopher Walter, “Theodore, Archetype of the Warrior Saint,” Revue des études byzantines 57 (1999): 166; and Leemans, “Hagiography and Historical-Critical Analysis.”
108. Alternatively, the Passion may have reframed the materials. Leemans argues that the Passion and Gregory’s homily are not literarily related but rather represent independent streams of tradition based on existing hagiographical (written or oral) traditions (“Hagiography and Historical-Critical Analysis”).
109. PG. 46.768.
110. PG. 46.769.
111. For an example of the ways later texts reframe earlier ones, see Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 109–110, on Augustine’s sermons on Perpetua and Felicitas.
1. Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, 1874), vii.
2. As Brent Shaw has observed, the body is “the critical site of power discourses that flow through it and are inscribed upon it—a substance at the epicenter of the microactions and resistances that constitute and are power” (“Body/Power/Identity,” 309).
3. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4.
4. Lincoln, Discourse, 4. Lincoln argues that force is always “something of a stopgap measure: effective in the short run, unworkable over the long haul” (4).
5. Ibid., 8.
6. See discussion in ibid., 5.
7. As Heyman notes, “the more a less dominant subgroup like the early Christians could persuade ideologically and emotionally, the more they would destabilize the ideological borders of the dominant Roman world” (Heyman, Power of Sacrifice, 171). See also Lincoln, Discourse, 9, 23, 35.
8. Todd Klutz, “The Rhetoric of Science in The Rise of Christianity: A Response to Rodney Stark’s Sociological Account of Christianization,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 184.
9. As Brent Shaw reads the discourse of martyrdom: “bodies could be self-inscribed with ideologies that ran wholly contrary to those of the dominant power. Individuals could choose to forge and hold ideas about themselves and their bodies independently of the set repertoire presented to them” (“Body/Power/Identity,” 311).
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 269.
12. Moss has most recently reminded us that prosecution of Christians was not widespread (Myth of Persecution). While such reminders are important, I agree with Caroline Walker Bynum who argues that “neither research that minimizes the numbers of martyrs nor interpretation that draws parallels between pagan and Christian behaviors should be used to suggest that fear of martyrdom was an insignificant motive in shaping Christian mentality” (The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200–1336 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], 44).
13. Morris, Culture of Pain, 42.
14. Stoicism and Christian apocalyptic expectation may be related. See J. Albert Harrill, “Stoic Physics, the Universal Conflagration, and the Eschatological Destruction of the ‘Ignorant and Unstable’ in 2 Peter,” in Stoicism in Early Christianity, ed. Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2010), 115–40.
15. Lincoln, Discourse, 38.
16. Streete, Redeemed Bodies, 121.
17. Lincoln, Discourse, 38.
18. David Frankfurter makes this point when he argues that communities like the one that produced the Passion of Perpetua devoted themselves to “actualizing an other-worldly status” (“The Legacy of Jewish Apocalypses in Early Christianity: Regional Trajectories,” in The Jewish Apocalyptic Heritage in Early Christianity, ed. James C. VanderKam and William Adler [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996], 168).
19. As David Frankfurter has argued, “apocalyptic literature . . . provided a principal instrument of martyrological propaganda” (“Early Christian Apocalypticism: Literature and the Social World,” in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity, ed. Bernard McGinn and John J. Collins [New York: Continuum, 1998], 436).
20. See, for instance, Cecil M. Robeck, Prophecy in Carthage: Perpetua, Tertullian, and Cyprian (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1992), 25; Salisbury, Perpetua’s Passion, 102; Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 398, 400–401; and Jean Daniélou, The Origins of Latin Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), 60. On apocalypticism in the Passion, see Amat, Passion de Perpétue, 45; Moss, Other Christs, 129–30, 136–37; Daniélou, Origins of Latin Christianity, 59–62; Donald W. Riddle, “From Apocalypse to Martyrology,” Anglican Theological Review 9 (1927): 271–72; Rowland, Open Heaven, 396–402; Shewring, Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicity, xxii; and Robin Darling Young, In Procession before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 2001), 11. The apocalypticism of the Passion is so pervasive that Frankfurter has argued it is an attempt “to reformulate Jewish apocalyptic literature” (“Legacy of Jewish Apocalypses,” 137).
21. Streete writes that the persecutors “are even now defeated by the cumulative actions of the martyrs, as they will be in some hoped-for and eternally soon-to-be-achieved future” (Redeemed Bodies, 121).
22. This interpretation of Jesus’ miracles—particularly exorcisms—is widespread. See, for instance, Eric Sorensen, Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 129.
23. The list is reminiscent of the plagues of Egypt and those of Revelation.
24. The whiteness of the horse in Revelation signals victory (cf. Rev. 2:17, 3:5). Here then the symbolism is victory through martyrdom. See discussion in Wilfrid J. Harrington, Revelation. Sacra Pagina Series, 16 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1993), 89–90.
25. As Moss has argued, “ideologies of martyrdom shaped not only community self-definition and Christian identity, but also the construction of the body itself” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 166).
26. See discussion in Bynum, Resurrection; and Claudia Setzer, Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition (Boston: Brill, 2004).
27. Setzer, Resurrection, 81.
28. See Robert M. Grant, “Resurrection of the Body,” Journal of Religion 28 (1948): 120–30; and Setzer, Resurrection, 99–108.
29. The martyr texts do not, as Moss rightly points out, portray one Christian view of resurrection but rather preserve the variety of early Christian positions (Other Christs, 123–24).
30. Eliezer Gonzalez argues—primarily on the basis of Saturus’s vision—that the Passion of Perpetua contains “a discourse that does not involve the physical body and its resurrection” (“Anthropologies of Continuity,” 491). Thus, according to Gonzalez, the Passion posits a corporeal spirit akin to Stoic philosophical thought, but displays no interest in the continuity of the flesh. But even if one were persuaded by Gonzalez’s arguments regarding the corporality of the soul in Saturus’s vision, we need not assume all of the strands of tradition contained in the Passion are identical. It seems most likely that the text records varying positions on material continuity.
31. Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 233.
32. There is an imperial critique implied here as well: Roman aqueducts made life possible in many parts of North Africa. Without Roman engineering, there could not be civilization in many areas. But this vision promises eternally available water, divine water, living water.
33. Bremmer, “Passion of Perpetua,” 102.
34. Gonzalez, “Anthropologies of Continuity,” 491.
35. Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 274, emphasis added; cf. 276.
36. On the centrality of caro (as opposed to soma or corpus), see Bynum, Resurrection, 26.
37. On authorship issues related to Saturus’s vision, see Bremmer, “Passion of Perpetua,” 100; Jacqueline Amat, “L’Authenticité de songes de la Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité,” Augustinianum 29 (1989): 177–91; Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 61.
38. See discussion in Bynum, Resurrection, 29. Moss notes that not all discussions of martyrdom posit the healing of wounds. Augustine, for instance, “appears torn” between wanting the martyrs’ marks to be reminders of their witnessing and desiring no wounds in heaven (“Heavenly Healing: Eschatological Cleansing and the Resurrection of the Dead in the Early Church,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79 [2011]: 1010).
39. See discussion in Setzer, Resurrection, 79; and Moss, “Heavenly Healing,” 1004–6.
40. See discussion in Robert M. Grant, “Theophilus of Antioch to Autolycus,” Harvard Theological Review 40 (1947): 238.
41. See discussion in Moss, “Heavenly Healing,” 1006–8.
42. Bynum, Resurrection, 43. See also Setzer, Resurrection, 123, 145–46.
43. Bynum, Resurrection, 44.
44. Bynum rightly notes that recent scholarship on the rarity of persecution of Christians is unrelated to the fear of persecution that drives the production of Christian literature (Resurrection, 44).
45. Bynum writes, “the persecuted want to claim that those who die for their faith will be rewarded in another life with the good fortune they have clearly in some sense been denied in this one” (Resurrection, 47).
46. Bynum notes, for instance, that Mart. Pol. collapses resurrection and martyrdom imagery. In the description of Polycarp’s body that remains unharmed by the fire, “the images are exactly those we find in theological treatises about resurrection, but here the martyr becomes while still on earth the hard and beautiful minerals or undigested bread all our bodies will finally become at the end of time” (Resurrection, 50). The martyr texts, then, may translate rewards that are typically otherworldly and future to the here and now.
47. Perkins argues that “Christians, as the Acts of the Martyrs have shown, offered their bodies as texts for their neighbors to read as proof for the reality of another world” (Suffering Self, 172).
48. Luke 21:19. Didascalia Apostolorum 19 specifically relates this Lukan passage to the resurrection promise.
49. Or relatedly, how is a liquid received into the hands? See the discussion in Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua, 182–83; and Amat, Passion, 206–7.
50. In this case scholars have argued that Montanists used cheese in celebrations of Eucharist. See for example Rex Butler, The New Prophecy and ‘New Visions’: Evidence of Montanism in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2006), 95; and discussion in William Tabbernee, “Initiation/Baptism in the Montanist Movement,” in Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity, ed. David Hellholm, Tor Vegge, Øyvind Norderval, and Christer Hellholm (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 933.
51. This vision exhibits Jewish influences. See A.P. Orbán, “The Afterlife in Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis,” in Fructus centesimus: Melanges offerts a G.J.M. Bartelink à l’occasion de son soixante-cinquième anniversaire, ed. A.A.R. Bastiaensen, Anthony Hilhorst, and Corneille H. Kneepkens, Instrumenta Patristica, 19 (Steenbrugis: Abbatia S. Petri, 1989), 271–72. Amat suggests that the sweetness serves as a marker of the veracity of the dream (Passion, 207).
52. Bynum, Resurrection, 45. Bynum suggests that Christian apologists both “cultivated and proselytized for the expressionism of suffering” and that they “held out to potential martyrs the promise of an ‘anesthesia of glory’ against pain” (45n94).
53. Ibid., 46.
54. Michel Foucault argues that the “torture of the execution anticipates the punishments of the beyond; it shows what they are; it is the theatre of hell; the cries of the condemned man, his struggles, his blasphemies, already signify his irremediable destiny” (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1979], 46).
55. So reads the Vulgate; where Vetus Latina includes this phrase, the manuscripts employ dolor; see Roger Gryson, ed., Vetus Latina: Die Reste der Altlateinischen Bibel 26/2: Apocalypsis Johannis (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 2003).
56. Augustine, City of God, 20.17.
57. Robert W. Wall argues that for John, the new Jerusalem is a metaphor for “the eschatological people of God” and, thus, “hope is centered in the prospect not of a heavenly place but of transformed human existence” (Revelation, New International Bible Commentary [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991], 243).
58. As Bynum notes, “preachers and teachers sometimes suggested that the ability of the martyrs to withstand pain or corruption was owing to an assimilation of their bodies on earth to the glorified bodies of heaven” (Fragmentation and Redemption, 267).
59. Bynum, Resurrection, 50.
60. Setzer, Resurrection 77, 153.
61. On Tertullian’s argument about the unity of soul and body, particularly as it affects views of resurrection, see Setzer, Resurrection, 141. According to Gonzalez, in De Anima Tertullian follows Stoic philosophy in positing some real, though limited corporeality to the soul such that it is able to suffer in some limited ways without the body. But in Apology, Tertullian contradicts his earlier statements on the susceptibility of the soul to suffering (“Anthropologies of Continuity,” 485–87).
62. Brent Shaw, “The Divine Economy: Stoicism as Ideology,” Latomus 44 (1985): 18.
63. Shaw, “Divine Economy,” 21.
64. Scholarship on Stoicism and Christianity is vast. See, for instance, the essays in Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg, Stoicism in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2010). For a discussion of ways Christian use of Stoicism’s categories fundamentally changed their meaning, see Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 368–69.
65. On ways Christians denounced Stoicism as a philosophy but claimed its virtues and ideals, see the insightful discussion by Nicola Denzey, “Facing the Beast: Justin, Christian Martyrdom, and Freedom of the Will,” in Stoicism in Early Christianity, ed. Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2010), 176–99.
66. See, for instance, Aune, “Mastery”; Denzey, “Facing the Beast”; Carole Straw, “A Very Special Death: Christian Martyrdom in Its Classical Context,” in Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives in Martyrdom and Religion, ed. Margaret Cormack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39–57; and Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 65, 88, 95–96.
67. Denzey, “Facing the Beast,” 183.
68. The name of the genre is taken from Pliny’s characterization of a collection of death accounts collected by Titinius Capito (Ep. 8.12.4).
69. Alessandro Ronconi’s famous definition of these texts is: “antimonarchial literary works with a Stoic imprint that seek to glorify the victims of the Caesars’ tyranny” (“Exitus Illustrium Virorum,” Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum 6 [1966]: 1258). Mark Morford argues, “Such a body of writing would be an appropriate source for an historian wishing to record the deaths of viri illustres, victims of a regime that had perverted the concept of the res publica” (“The Neronian Books of the ‘Annals,’” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 33.2 [1990]: 1593). For discussions of exitus literature, see Ronconi, “Exitus illustrium virorum,” Studi italiani di filologia classica n.s. 17 (1940): 3–32; F.A. Marx, “Tacitus und die Literatur der exitus illustrium virorum,” Philologus 92 (1937): 83–103; H. Bardon, La Littérature latine inconnue, vol. 2 (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1956), 207–9; Miriam Griffin, “Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide: II,” Greece and Rome 33 (1986): 197–98; T.D. Hill, Ambitiosa mors: Suicide and the Self in Roman Thought and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 187; Catharine Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 132; Morford, “Neronian Books of the ‘Annals,’” 1592–93; and Ulrich Eigler, “Exitus illustrium virorum,” Der Neue Pauly 4 (1998): 344–45.
70. As Gregory Sterling has argued, Tacitus “combined the traditions about Socrates with the exitus illustrium virorum tradition in order to note Stoic opposition to the Caesars” (“Mors philosophi: The Death of Jesus in Luke,” Harvard Theological Review 94 [2001], 389). These types of stories are related to the earlier genre τελευταί.
71. Arthur J. Droge and James D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 34. Catherine Edwards observes that “Cato’s protracted and laborious end offered a perfect example of specifically Stoic endurance of suffering” (Death in Ancient Rome, 3).
72. Adela Yarbro Collins observes the similarities between the Jewish martyr stories in 2 Maccabees and Stoic noble deaths: “The deaths of Eleazar, the seven brothers, and their mother in second Maccabees are clearly modeled on the death of Socrates and are thus Jewish adaptations of the Greek tradition of the noble death” (“Finding Meaning in the Death of Jesus,” Journal of Religion 78 [1998]: 181). See also Jonathan Goldstein, II Maccabees, Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 285. Gospel literature has also been linked to noble death traditions, as have Christian martyr texts. See, for example, Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Genre of the Passion Narrative,” Studia Theologica 47 (1993): 3–28; Adela Yarbro Collins, “From Noble Death to Crucified Messiah,” New Testament Studies 40 (1994): 481–503; Collins, “Finding Meaning,” 175–96; Sterling, “Mors philosophi,” 383–402; and John S. Kloppenborg, “Exitus clari viri: The Death of Jesus in Luke,” Toronto Journal of Theology 8 (1992): 106–20.
73. Ramsay MacMullen, for instance, characterizes both Stoics and Christians as groups “who sought to tear [the Roman Establishment] down” (Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966], 93).
74. Shaw writes, “there was always a core of senatorial, or better, upper class resistance to emperors and their power—feelings of friction and resentment that were hardly limited to adherents of Stoicism” (“Divine Economy,” 47).
75. Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome, 122. In Ann. 16.22.4–5, Tacitus reports Cossutianus Capito’s accusation against Thrasea Paeta, which centers on his adherence to Stoicism. Shaw is sensitive to the deep-seated nature of philosophical adherence, however, and resists the outright rejection of Stoic influence on political resistance (“Divine Economy,” 48–49). His point appears to be that Stoicism is not necessarily or primarily an anti-imperial philosophy.
76. Shaw argues forcefully against earlier scholarly arguments that posited an inevitable clash between Stoicism and authority (“Divine Economy,” 45–48). But the collections of stories valued by Stoics nonetheless characteristically contain such antiauthoritarian tendencies. Collins, for instance, notes that “a number of these have as their main feature the tension between the protagonist and a tyrant” (“Genre of the Passion Narrative,” 10).
77. On the relationship of martyr literature and exitus traditions, see Cobb, “Polycarp’s Cup”; Jan Willem van Henten and Friedrich Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2002), 5, 12–14; Christel Butterweck, “Martyriumssucht” in der alten Kirche? Studien zur Darstellung und Deutung frühchristlicher Martyrien (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1995); G. Roskam, “The Figure of Socrates in Early Christian Acta Martyrum,” in Martyrdom and Persecution in Late Ancient Christianity: Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter, ed. J. Leemans (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 241–56; Collins, “From Noble Death,” 483; Klaus Döring, Exemplum Socratis: Studien zur Sokratesnachwirkung in der kynisch-stoischen Popularphilosophie der frühen Kaiserzeit und im frühen Christentum, Hermes Einzelschriften, 42 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1979), 143–61; David J. Ladouceur, “The Death of Herod the Great,” Classical Philology 76 (1981): 25; and Musurillo, Acts of the Pagan Martyrs, 236.
78. Perkins, Suffering Self, 77.
79. Ibid., 142.
80. Ibid., 142; cf. 173.
81. Ibid., 173.
82. Ibid., 77.
83. Ibid.
84. Importantly, γενναῖος is one of the most common adjectives applied to the Christian martyrs. See, for example, Mart. Pol. 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2.
85. Epictetus allows for groaning when one feels pain (in this case a headache), though this groaning must not be “from within” (ἔσωθεν μὴ στενάξης; Disc. 1.18.19).
86. Cf. Cicero, who writes, “I do not deny pain to be pain—for were that the case, in what would courage consist?” (Tusc. 2.14). Cicero was not a Stoic but an adherent of Academic skepticism. He was sympathetic to many Stoic positions, however, and often summarizes their positions. For discussions of Cicero and Stoicism, see Shaw, “Divine Economy,” 17–18; and A.E. Douglas, “Cicero the Philosopher,” in Cicero, ed. T.A. Dorey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 135–70.
87. See discussion in John M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 37–53.
88. In LCL, Oldfather translates λύπη and its cognates as “pain” rather than “grief,” which distorts the philosopher’s point. On the problem of translation and interpretation, see Jan Edward Garrett, “Is the Sage Free from Pain?” Volga Journal of Philosophy and Social Sciences 6 (1999), http://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/painst.htm.
89. Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 38.
90. Ibid., 52.
91. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 12.5.10. See discussion in Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 52.
92. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.4.
93. That there were misunderstandings of such a complex topic should not be surprising in a popular and widespread philosophy, one that Brent Shaw describes as “ill-defined,” “flexible,” “eclectic,” and lacking “an absolute orthodoxy” (“Divine Economy,” 19).
94. On the Stoicism of 4 Maccabees, see Robert Renehan, “The Greek Philosophical Background of Fourth Maccabees,” Reinisches Museum für Philologie 115 (1972): 223–38; and Stanley K. Stowers, “4 Maccabees,” in Harper’s Bible Commentary, ed. James L. Mays (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988): 923–34.
95. Cf. 4 Macc 6:35, 13:5, 14.1, 14.11.
96. As Aune has noted, “By repeatedly emphasizing that these courageous martyrs experience no human suffering, the author demonstrates his thesis that ‘pious reason’ overcomes the passions” (“Mastery of the Passions,” 137).
97. David Seeley, The Noble Death: Graeco-Roman Martyrology and Paul’s Concept of Salvation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 96.
98. For discussion of Christian use of 4 Maccabees, see W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 19–20, 198–99; Glen W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 77–81; Boudewijn Dehandschutter, “The Martyrium Polycarpi: A Century of Research,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.27.1 (1993): 507–8; Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 & 4 Maccabees (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 77, 302; William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 53, 64; Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 80; Aune, “Mastery of the Passions,” 139; O. Perler, “Das Vierte Makkabaeerbuch, Ignatius von Antiochien und die aeltesten Martyrerberichte,” Rivista di archeologia cristiana 25 (1949): 47–72; and Samuel Sandmel, Judaism and Christian Beginnings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 277–79.
99. Perkins, Suffering Self, 77.
100. See Cobb, Dying to Be Men, 10. Moss makes a similar argument when she suggests that “the narrative’s denial of pain gesture[s] to ancient constructions of masculinity” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 110).
101. Endurance as a masculine virtue, however, has been called into question. For example, in a discussion of 4 Maccabees, Brent Shaw argues that in juxtaposing ὑπομονή—which he translates “passive endurance”—with ἀνδρεία—“manliness,” the author instigated a “moral revolution of sorts” because passivity is womanish (“Body/Power/Identity,” 279). Shaw suggests that the equation of nobility with passive endurance “would have struck the classic male ideologue of the city state as contradictory, a moral oxymoron” (279). He is even more explicit later: in his discussion of the Testament of Job, Shaw states that the use of hypomone reflects “a manifest ‘feminization’ of the text” (281). In comparing 2 and 4 Maccabees, Shaw writes, “The degree of shift, paralleling the increased emphasis on the mother of the seven sons in Fourth Maccabees as compared to Second Maccabees, must be deliberate and must reflect the desire of the author to develop the problem of patience by deploying a more ‘feminized’ rhetoric” (284). Similarly, Elizabeth Castelli observes that there is something “a bit startling about ἀνδρεία keeping easy company with ὑπομονή, active courage finding a peer in passive perseverance” (Martyrdom and Memory, 64). Stephen D. Moore and Janice Capel Anderson, however, argue against the assumption that endurance was a feminine quality in the Roman Empire (“Taking It Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees,” Journal of Biblical Literature 117 [1998]: 257). See also Grig, Making Martyrs, 65.
102. Aristotle, Nic. 3.10; see also Homer, Il. 5.498, 15.312; Herodotus, The Persian Wars 6.96.1; Plato, Gorg. 507b; Theaet. 177b; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.42.4; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 11.9.4.
103. See, for example, discussion in Nigel Martin Kennell, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 112; and Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
104. Epictetus, Ench. 10.5.
105. Epictetus, Disc. 2.2.13. Panaetius taught that endurance was a subset of the primary virtues, which he lists as prudence, courage, justice, and temperance (Diogenes Laertius 7.92). See discussion in Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1988), 137.
106. Cicero, Fin. 5.31.94.
107. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 9.26.
108. Seneca, Ep. 67.4.
109. In identifying the virtues of the Stoic wise man, A.A. Long discusses his “steadiness and orderliness,” referring to the consistency of the sage’s moral principles; his “timely behavior,” referring to the appropriateness of his actions in specific situations; and most tellingly, his freedom from all passion. These criteria, as Long notes, “set up a canon of excellence which could within limits be vouched for by any observer” (Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], 207). The martyrs’ consistency and the appropriateness of their actions are clear in the martyrologies. In discussing the passions in Stoic thought, Long notes that “the Stoics distinguished good men from others by reference to the consistency of their logos” (177). Long’s example of inconsistency is particularly apt:
if he is not a sage whose life is on a consistently even keel, he is liable to sudden changes and fluctuations of his governing-principle. At one moment he may assent to the true Stoic proposition that pain is not a bad thing; but if this judgment is insecurely based it will not be strong enough to reject a contrary judgment, that pain is something very bad, which comes to mind and is accompanied by a bodily reaction as the dentist starts drilling his tooth. (177)
We have seen that the martyrs are described as insensitive to pain; they do not react to external stimuli. Rather, their rational judgments—namely, that death is preferable to apostasy—consistently trump physical sensation. The martyr’s choice for death, moreover, is deemed “appropriate” in these cases because the alternative requires compromising his virtue.
110. Denzey, “Facing the Beast,” 177.
111. Ibid., 190.
112. Ibid., 189.
113. As Perkins has argued, “it is safe to say that one thing contemporaries knew about Christianity (in fact, for some the only thing they give any evidence of knowing) is that Christians held death in contempt and were ready to suffer for their beliefs” (Suffering Self, 18). Similarly, William Turpin has suggested that “if there is one thing the Stoics were known for, it was their willingness, when appropriate, to die. Even more important, for our purposes, was their willingness to talk about the subject” (“Tacitus, Stoic exempla, and the praecipuum munus annalium,” Classical Antiquity 27 [2008]: 368).
114. Denzey, “Facing the Beast,” 194.
115. Ibid.; see also Cobb, Dying to Be Men.
116. Denzey, “Facing the Beast,” 194.
117. Ibid.
118. See discussion in Perkins, Suffering Self, 20.
119. Perkins, Suffering Self, 23. Here Perkins is drawing on Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).
120. On the charge of superstition in the ancient world, see Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
121. See discussion in Martin, Inventing Superstition, 127.
122. In her recent book Maia Kotrosits argues that Pliny’s use of the word “Christian” in his correspondence with Trajan may be an example of imperial identity-construction focused on producing subjects. She writes, “Are there truly ready-made Christians, understanding themselves as such, hiding out everywhere around the Mediterranean, negotiating survival as a new cult? It rather seems that the appearance of the term ‘Christian’ in this particular period represents a standard and imperializing tactic of grabbing onto rhetoric and applying identity categories where the messiness of belonging fails to produce any obvious delinquents” (Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015], 60).
123. Martin, Inventing Superstition, 135.
124. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 72.
125. Ibid. A similar claim is preserved in “On Hippocrates’ Anatomy,” a text that is extant only in an Arabic compendium. See Richard Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 87.
126. Galen, “On the Prime Mover,” another text extant only in Arabic. See Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians, 15.
127. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 73.
128. Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians, 91.
129. Ibid.
130. In his LCL translation C.R. Haines suggests that each of these passages invokes Christianity (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916], 382–83).
131. Some scholars have argued that the phrase ὡς οἱ Χριστιανοί is a later gloss. See, for instance, Gregory Hays, Meditations: A New Translation (New York: Modern Library, 2003); P.A. Brunt, “Marcus Aurelius and the Christians,” in Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History, vol. 1, ed. C. Deroux (Brussels: Latomus, 1979), 483–519; and Maxwell Staniforth, Meditations (London: Penguin Books, 1964). But Joseph J. Walsh argues the opposite position, that 11.3 is original (“On Christian Atheism,” Vigiliae Christianae 45 [1991]: 274). Even if this is not original to Meditations, it nonetheless represents an ancient characterization of Christianity that is relevant to the present discussion.
132. As Wilken observes, “To Marcus, the Christians appeared fanatical and foolish. . . . Their presumed lack of fear did not arise out of genuine self-control, or out of an understanding of the self, or out of free will, but from mere obstinacy based on irrational ideas” (Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 82). Lucian’s satirical account of Peregrinus echoes the sentiments of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus: Christians choose death without rational grounding (Passing of Peregrinus, 11–14).
133. Wilken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 82.
134. Perkins, Suffering Self, 23–24.
135. In this we may see resonances with the aims of Christian apologetics, which as Jennifer Wright Knust and others explain, were likely not read by pagans (Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, [2006], esp. 89–92). Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price argue that the apologies were texts intended for “internal consumption within the church” (Religions of Rome, vol. 1: A History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 310). See also Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price, eds., Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jörg Ulrich, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, and Maijastina Kahlos, Continuity and Discontinuity in Early Christian Apologetics (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009); and Robert L. Wilken, “Toward a Social Interpretation of Early Christian Apologetics,” Church History 39 (1970): 437–58.
136. Moss has called attention to the power of this rhetorical shift by reminding us of the difference between the two phenomena: “A persecutor targets representatives of a specific group for undeserved punishment merely because of their participation in that group. An individual is prosecuted because that person has broken a law” (Myth of Persecution, 14).
137. The classic discussion of charges leveled against Christians is that between Sherwin-White—who argues Christians were prosecuted for contumacia—and Ste. Croix—who argues Christians were persecuted “for the name”: G.E.M. de Ste Croix, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” Past and Present 26 (1963): 6–38; A.N. Sherwin-White, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? An Amendment,” Past and Present 27 (1964): 23–27; G.E.M. de Ste Croix, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? A Rejoinder,” Past and Present 27 (1964): 28–33.
138. Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119.
139. Harries, Law and Empire, 119.
140. J.C. Edmondson, “Dynamic Arenas,” in Roman Theater and Society, ed. William J. Slater, E. Togo Salmon Papers, 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 83.
141. This was certainly the case for slaves, but “torture creep,” as Jill Harries has described it, led to the application of the philosophical principle—that torture was essential in the uncovering of truth—to lower classes as well (“Contextualising Torture: Rules and Conventions in the Roman Digest,” in War, Torture, and Terrorism: Rethinking the Rules of International Security, ed. Anthony F. Lang Jr. and Amanda Russell Beattie [New York: Routledge, 2009], 45).
142. Ulpian writes, “‘Quaestionem’ intellegere debemus tormenta et corporis dolorem ad eruendam veritatem” (Justinian, Dig. 47.10.15.41). See discussion in Grig, Making Martyrs, 67–69. The classic discussion of judicial torture and pain is that of Foucault, Discipline and Punish, esp. 3–69; though, as scholars have noted, ancient authors could—and did—argue the ineffectiveness of torture for the establishment of truth. See Harries, “Contextualising Torture,” 46–47; and Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 167–68.
143. Brown, Cult of the Saints, 109.
144. Harries, Law and Empire, 123.
145. As Moss, for example, observes regarding the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, “the account reproduces the notion of torture as truth as a means of guaranteeing Christian authenticity—the martyr’s inflexibility and stubbornness under torture serve as markers of truth for the Christian audience” (Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 108).
146. See discussion in Harries, Law and Empire, 126; and Grig, Making Martyrs, 69.
147. Following the traditional reading of martyr texts as valorizing pain, some scholars have argued that martyr texts use Roman expectation of torture and pain to narrate Christian victory. Karen King, for instance, argues, “Christians fully exploited the Roman rhetoric that pain produces truth. They sought to declare that the real truth displayed by their bodies under extreme and sustained pain was the piety of their beliefs and the reality of their God.” It was through their endurance of pain, King continues, that Christians “claimed moral righteousness, dignity, and honor while contesting Roman legitimacy and power” (“Christianity and Torture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 298). Thus in this reading the endurance of pain demonstrates Christian piety and the truthfulness of the martyrs’ beliefs.
148. Quintilian, Decl. 274. See also Plato, Gorg. 525b; Taurus made a similar claim (Aulus Gellius, Noct. att. 7.14.4). See discussion in K.M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 46–49.
149. Harries, Law and Empire, 130–31. As Harries argues, “the state’s justification for punishing its citizens publicly and painfully was that they deserved it and that the display of terror would act as a salutary deterrent for others” (144).
150. In Grig’s words, “the torture chamber functions as a theatre of social and ideological enforcement” (Making Martyrs, 68).
151. Judith Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 2009), 57.
152. Perkins, Roman Imperial Identities, 57.
153. Tertullian, Apol. 50. Similarly, Justin Martyr attributes his conversion to the martyrs’ influence (2 Apol. 12).
154. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49.
155. Ibid.
156. Ibid., 55.
157. It is worth noting in this regard that Pliny congratulates himself on a positive side effect of his prosecution of Christians: “It is certainly quite clear that the temples, which had been almost deserted, have begun to be frequented, that the established religious rites, long neglected, are being resumed, and that from everywhere sacrificial animals are coming, for which until now very few purchasers could be found. Hence it is easy to imagine what a multitude of people can be reformed if an opportunity for repentance is afforded” (Ep. 10.96). Pliny argues that the superstition can be halted, and he points to the resurgence in local religiosity as proof of his success.
158. Mary Douglas, “Social Preconditions of Enthusiasm and Heterodoxy,” in Forms of Symbolic Action, Proceedings of the 1969 Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. Robert F. Spencer (Seattle and London: American Ethnological Society, 1969), 71.
159. Smyth, “Challenger Jokes,” 254. Smyth here draws on Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 1982), vii–x. That the martyr symbolizes the larger social group of Christianity is clear, as Perkins argues: “The portrayal in Christian documents of the physical body scraped with claws, pierced with knives, roasted, whipped, strangled and mauled by beasts is a microcosm for a community assailed on every side according to Melito (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 4.26.2), Hermas (Pastor 3.2.1), and Justin (II Apologia 12)” (Suffering Self, 15).
160. As Maud W. Gleason has argued, “to mark the body of another in the ancient world was to signal that ownership and agency rested not with the one who bore the mark but with the person who imposed it” (“Mutilated Messengers: Body Language in Josephus,” in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire, ed. S. Goldhill [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 79). Gleason argues that “dramatizing one’s ability to control individual bodies . . . was a vital point in making a claim to political power” (74). Jennifer Glancy has also noted that wounded bodies in particular “instantiate relationships of power, of legal status . . . of domination and submission, of honor and shame, and of gender” (Corporal Knowledge: Early Christian Bodies [New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 26).
161. Elaine Scarry argues that part of the “unmaking” of the soldier is “the emptying of the nation from his body” (Body in Pain, 122). Applying Scarry’s work to the martyr texts, we might see in Roman torture not only an attempt to empty the Christian “from his body,” but also an attempt to “unmake” the Christian—via apostasy.
162. Kotrosits suggests that the term christianus may have imperial origins (Rethinking Early Christian Identity, 60, 90).
163. Grig, Making Martyrs, 69.
164. Glancy, Corporal Knowledge, 24.
165. Ibid., 27.
166. As Shaw has argued, “The spectacular trials and executions of the Christians are but an extreme instance of the use of force to elicit a certain public behavior from subject bodies, to inscribe one sort of ideology on the body” (“Body/Power/Identity,” 311).
167. Ibid.
1. Coleman has labeled such role play “fatal charades” (“Fatal Charades,” 44).
2. Prudentius’s project, as described by Fruchtman, was to teach Christians how to view the world around them—including Roman literary traditions—through the lens of “Christ-imitation and martyrdom” (“Modeling a Martyrial Worldview,” 131). Hippolytus’s martyrdom is a fitting example of just such a project. On the influence of Seneca on Prudentius, see Roberts, Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs, 155; Anne-Marie Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and G. Sixt, “De Prudentius’ Abhängigkeit von Seneca und Lucan,” Philologus 51 (1892): 501–6.
3. In Most’s words, “the severed pieces of Hippolytus’ body dominate Seneca’s Phaedra” (“disiecti membra poetae,” 394).
4. Bynum, Resurrection, 50, 58.
5. On Tertullian’s discussion of persecution and heterodoxy, see Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012), 44–45.
6. Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 46–47.
7. Cottrill writes: “images of exposed and violated bodies create anxiety, unease, and a heightened awareness of the physical vulnerability of the unprotected. The visceral affect of anxiety and the intensity of bodily violence position the reader emotionally and physically to feel the need for security and protection” (“Reading of Ehud and Jael,” 447).
8. Most, “disiecti membra poetae,” 400.
9. Edwards, “Suffering Body,” 253.
10. Ibid.
11. Esther Cohen makes a similar point when she writes: “exempla, sermons, stories about impassible martyrs, and tales of sufferers who were miraculously cured existed in constant contradiction with a harsh reality where there was no effective cure for pain. But such stories could work only for listeners who did know what pain was, so that they could appreciate how wonderful relief, or utter lack of pain, was” (Modulated Scream, 4). Regarding the painfulness of ancient life, Seneca ranks “hunger, thirst, ulcers of the stomach, and fevers that burn our innermost parts” alongside the torturer’s weapons as examples of pain (Ep. 14.6; quoted in Edwards, “Suffering Body,” 258). See also Seneca, Ep. 78.14; and Sextus Empiricus, Against Ethicists, 152–49.
12. According to Augustine, dolor does not exist in perfect states of being, such as in God and in paradise. Dolor is an effect of original sin. See discussion in Lössl, “Dolor, dolere,” esp. 586, 588.
13. As Edwards notes, Stoicism’s teachings on pain assert that “by thinking about it in the right way, they can make it more bearable, but they cannot hope to eliminate it altogether” (“Suffering Body,” 265).
14. Ibid., 264.
15. Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 216.
16. Ibid., 213.
17. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, xii.
18. Keen, “Theory of Narrative Empathy,” 222.
19. Ibid., 215.
20. Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 139.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 140.
24. Ibid.
25. Perkins, Suffering Self, 214.
26. During this time, as Perkins argues, “the suffering body became a focus of significant cultural concern and this gave rise to the creation of a new subjectivity—the self as sufferer” (Suffering Self, 7).