“Come, rouse ye Greeks; what, sleeping still! 
               Is courage dead, is shame unknown? 
               Start up, rush forth with zealous will,
               And smite the mocking Christians down!”

Everything that opposed their progress was overthrown.  Two maniples of foot-soldiers who held the high-road across the Bruchium attempted to turn them, but the advance of the inflamed young warriors was irresistible and they reached the street of the Caesareum and the square in front of the Prefect’s residence.  Here they paused to sing the last lines of their battlesong: 

“Fate seeks the coward out at home,
He dies unwept, unknown to fame,
While by the hero’s honored tomb
Our grandsons’ grandsons sliall proclaim: 
’In the great conflict’s fiercest hour
He stood unmoved, our shield and tower.’”

It was here, at the wide opening into the square, that the collision took place:  on one side the handsome youths, crowned with garlands, with their noble Greek type of heads, thoughtful brows, perfumed curls, and anointed limbs exercised in the gymnasium—­on the other the sinister fanatics in sheep-skin, ascetic visionaries grown grey in fasting, scourging, and self-denial.

The monks now prepared to meet the onset of the young enthusiasts who were fighting for freedom of thought and enquiry, for Art and Beauty.  Each side was defending what it felt to be the highest Good, each was equally in earnest as to its convictions, both fought for something dearer and more precious than this earthly span of existence.  But the philosophers’ party had swords; the monks’ sole weapon was the scourge, and they were accustomed to ply that, not on each other but on their own rebellious flesh.  A wild and disorderly struggle began with swingeing blows on both sides; prayers and psalms mingling with the battle-song of the heathen.  Here a monk fell wounded, there one lay dead, there again lay a fine and delicate-looking youth, felled by the heavy fist of a recluse.  A hermit wrestled hand to hand with a young philosopher who, only yesterday had delivered his first lecture on the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus to an interested audience.

And in the midst of this mad struggle stood Agne with her little brother, who clung closely to her skirts and was too terrified to shed a tear or utter a cry.  The girl was resolutely calm, but she was too utterly terror-stricken even to pray.  Fear, absorbing fear had stunned her thoughts; it overmastered her like some acute physical pain which began in her heart and penetrated every fibre of her frame.

Even while the Imperial message was being read she had been too frightened to take it all in; and now she simply shut her eyes tight and hardly understood what was going on around her, till a new and different noise sounded close in her ears:  the clatter of hoofs, blare of trumpets and shouts and screams.  At last the tumult died away and, when she ventured to open her eyes and look about her, the place all round her was as clear as though it had been swept by invisible hands; here and there lay a dead body and there still was a dense crowd in the street leading to the Caesareum, but even that was dispersing and retreating before the advance of a mounted force.