Voltaire: Treatise on Tolerance. Вольтер
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imputed to the innocent Christians, had occasioned the government to take cognizance of them, and that the judge might have been mistaken, as it often happens.
St. Simeon, for example, was accused before King Sapor of being a spy to the Romans. The history of his martyrdom tells us that Sapor proposed to him to worship the sun, whereas every one knows that the Persians paid no divine honors to that planet, but only considered it as an emblem of the good principle, the Orasmades, or Sovereign Creator, whom they all adored.
Any one of the least tolerating spirit cannot help his indignation from rising against those writers who accused Diocletian of persecuting the Christians after his accession to the empire. Here we need only refer to Eusebius of Cæsarea, whose testimony certainly cannot be rejected. The favorite, the panegyrist of Constantine, and the declared enemy of the emperors his predecessors, is certainly entitled to our credit when he justifies those very emperors. The following are his own words:27
“The emperors had for a long time given the Christians great marks of their favor and benevolence; they had entrusted them with the care of whole provinces; many of them lived within the imperial palace; and some of the emperors even married Christian women; Diocletian, in particular, espoused Prisca, whose daughter was wife to Maximianus Galerius,” etc.
Let this authentic testimony make us cautious how we fall too readily into calumny; and from this let any impartial person judge, if the persecution raised by Galerius, after nineteen years of continued clemency and favor to the Christians, must not have been occasioned by some intrigues with which we are at present unacquainted.
From this also we may perceive the absurdity of that fabulous story of the Theban legion, said to have been all massacred for their religion. Can anything be more ridiculous than to make this legion be brought from Asia by the great St. Bernard? It is altogether impossible that this legion should have been sent for from Asia to quiet a tumult in Gaul, a year after that tumult was suppressed, and not less so that six thousand foot and seven hundred horse should have suffered themselves to be all murdered in a place where two hundred men only might have kept off a whole army. The account of this pretended butchery is introduced with all the marks of imposture: “When the earth groaned under the tyranny of Diocletian, heaven was peopled with martyrs.” Now, this event, such as it is related, is supposed to have happened in 286, the very time in which Diocletian most favored the Christians, and that the Roman Empire was in a state of the greatest tranquillity. But to cut short this matter at once, no such legion as the Theban ever existed; the Romans were too haughty and too wise to form a corps of those Egyptians, who served only as slaves in Rome, Vernæ Canopi; we may as well suppose them to have had a Jewish legion. We have the names of two and thirty legions that formed the principal military force of the Roman Empire, and it is very certain the Theban legion is not to be found among them. In a word, we may rank this story with the acrostic verses of the Sibyls, which are said to have foretold the miracles wrought by Jesus Christ, and with many other like spurious productions, which false zeal has trumped up to impose upon credulity.
Chapter X.
The Danger Of False Legends And Persecution.
Mankind has been too long imposed upon by falsehood; it is therefore time that we should come to the knowledge of the few truths that can be distinguished from amidst the clouds of fiction which cover Roman history from the times of Tacitus and Suetonius, and with which the annals of the other nations of antiquity have almost always been obscured.
Can any one, for example, believe that the Romans, a grave and modest people, could have condemned Christian virgins, the children of persons of the first quality, to common prostitution? This is assuredly very inconsistent with the noble austerity of that nation from whom we received our laws, and who punished so rigorously the least transgression of chastity in their vestals. These shameful stories may indeed be found in the Actes Sincères of Ruinart. But should we believe those acts before the “Acts of the Apostles”? The Actes Sincères tell us from Bollandus that there were in the city of Ancira seven Christian virgins, each of them upwards of seventy, whom the governor, Theodectes, ordered to be deflowered by the young men of the place; but these poor maidens having escaped this disaster—as indeed there was great reason they should—he compelled them to assist stark naked at the mysteries of Diana, at which, by the way, no one ever assisted but in a veil. St. Theodotus, who, though indeed nothing more than an innkeeper, was not the less pious for that, besought God devoutly that he would be pleased to take away the lives of these holy maidens lest they should yield to temptation. God heard his prayer. The governor ordered them all to be thrown into a lake with stones about their necks; immediately after which they appeared to Theodotus, and begged of him, “that he would not suffer their bodies to be devoured by the fishes.” These, it seems, were their own words.
Hereupon the innkeeper saint and some of his companions went in the night-time to the side of the lake, which was guarded by a party of soldiers, a heavenly torch going all the way before, to light them. When they came to the place where the guards were posted, they saw a heavenly horseman armed cap-a-pie, with a lance in his hand, who fell upon the soldiers and dispersed them, while St. Theodotus drew the dead bodies of the virgins out of the water. He was afterwards carried before the governor, who ordered his head to be struck off, without the heavenly horseman interfering to prevent it. However disposed we may be to pay all due reverence to the true martyrs of our holy religion, we must confess it is very hard to believe the story of Bollandus and Ruinart.
Need I add to this the legend of young St. Romanus? Eusebius tells us, that having been condemned to be burnt, he was accordingly thrown into the fire, when some Jews, who were present, made a mock of Jesus Christ, who suffered his followers to be burnt when God had delivered Shadrac, Meshach, and Abednego out of the fiery furnace. No sooner had the Jews uttered this blasphemy than they beheld St. Romanus walking triumphant and unhurt forth from the flaming pile; this being reported to the emperor, he gave orders for his being pardoned, telling the judge that he would not have an affair upon his hands with God—a strange expression for Diocletian! The judge, however, notwithstanding the emperor’s clemency, ordered St. Romanus to have his tongue cut out; and, though he had executioners at hand, commanded the operation to be performed by a surgeon. Young Romanus, who had from his birth labored under an impediment of speech, no sooner lost his tongue than he spoke distinctly, and with great volubility. Upon this, the surgeon received a severe reprimand; when, in order to show that he had performed his operation, secundum artem, he laid hold of a man who was going by, from whom he cut just the same portion of tongue as he had done from St. Romanus, on which the patient instantly died, for, adds our author very learnedly, “Anatomy teaches us that a man cannot live without his tongue.” If Eusebius did really write such stuff, and it has not been added by some other hand, what degree of credit can we give to his history?
We have the relation of the martyrdom of St. Felicitas and her seven children, who are said to have been condemned to death by the wise and pious Antoninus, but without giving us the author’s name, who, most probably, possessed of more zeal than veracity, had a mind to imitate the history of the Maccabees. He begins his relation in the following manner: “St. Felicitas was by birth a Roman, and lived in the reign of Antoninus.” It is clear by these words that the author did not live at the same time with St. Felicitas. He says that they were judged before the prætor in the Campus Martius, whereas the Roman prefect’s tribunal was not in the Campus Martius, but in the Capitol, for, although the Comitia had been held there formerly, yet at this time it was used only as a place for reviewing the soldiers, for chariot races, and for military games. This alone is sufficient to detect the fiction.
The author adds furthermore, that after sentence was passed, the emperor committed the care of seeing it executed to different judges, a circumstance which is entirely repugnant to the usual forms in those times, and in every other.
We also read of St. Hippolytus, who is said to have been drawn in pieces by horses, as was Hippolytus, the son of Theseus. But a punishment of this kind was not known among the ancient Romans; and this fabulous story took its