quarters, were brought to the arena.  The beasts mutilated without killing them.  They were then seated in iron chairs heated red by fire.  Blandina, a young slave, who survived all these torments was bound with cords and exposed to the fury of a bull.  The Christians joyfully suffered these persecutions which gave them entrance to heaven.  The occasion presented an opportunity for rendering public testimony to Christ.  And so they did not call themselves victims, but martyrs (witnesses); their torture was a testimony.  They compared it to the combat of the Olympian games; like the victor in the athletic contests, they spoke of the palm or the crown.  Even now the festal day of a martyr is the day of his death.

Frequently a Christian who was present at the persecution would draft a written account of the martyrdom—­he related the arrest, the examination, the tortures, and the death.  These brief accounts, filled with edifying details, were called The Acts of the Martyrs.  They were circulated in the remotest communities; from one end of the empire to the other they published the glory of the martyrs and excited a desire to imitate them.  Thousands of the faithful, seized by a thirst for martyrdom, pressed forward to incriminate themselves and to demand condemnation.  One day a governor of Asia had decreed persecutions against some Christians:  all the Christians of the city presented themselves in his tribunal and demanded to be persecuted.  The governor, exasperated, had some of them executed and sent away the others.  “Begone, you wretches!  If you are so bent on death, you have precipices and ropes.”  Some of the faithful, to be surer of torture, entered the temples and threw down the idols of the gods.  It was several times necessary for even the church to prohibit the solicitation of martyrdom.

=The Catacombs.=—­The ancient custom of burning the dead was repugnant to the Christians.  Like the Jews, they interred their dead wrapped with a shroud in a sarcophagus.  Cemeteries[166] were therefore required.  At Rome where land was very high in price the Christians went below ground, and in the brittle tufa on which Rome was built may be seen long galleries and subterranean chambers.  There, in niches excavated along the passages, they laid the bodies of their dead.  As each generation excavated new galleries, there was formed at length a subterranean city, called the Catacombs ("to the tombs").  There were similar catacombs in several cities—­Naples, Milan, Alexandria, but the most celebrated were those in Rome.  These have been investigated in our day and thousands of Christian tombs and inscriptions recovered.  The discovery of this subterranean world gave birth to a new department of historical science—­Christian Epigraphy and Archaeology.