As regards the materials in our possession for any detailed account of the last persecution, our contemporary and most valuable pieces are: (1) The writings of Eusebius the historian, the Bishop of Caesarea (2) the writings of Lactantins, afterwards tutor to Constantine's son, Crispus (3) a certain number of "Acts and Passion of Martyrs" (4) the testimony of part of the Catacombs.
1. The writings of Eusebius. A very considerable portion of these have come down to us, and in the eighth and ninth books of his "Ecclesiastical History," and in the short monograph on the "Martyrs of Palestine," we have a detailed account of many of the sufferings endured at this time by the Christians; an account compiled by a trained scholar and historian, not merely a contemporary, but an eye-witness of many of the terrible scenes he depicts.
But Eusebius' narrative only embraces what took place in one portion of the Roman Empire; he confines his story to a relation of the operation of the edicts in the East, dwelling especially on Palestine. On what happened in the Western Provinces of Rome he is almost wholly silent. The reason of this silence has been happily suggested by an eminent modern scholar. "The Bishop of Caesarea (Eusebius), conscious of the grandeur of this supreme contest between Christianity and Paganism, a contest in which he was playing a not undistinguished part, would only speak of what he himself had witnessed, or of what he had absolutely heard from eye-witnesses, and he feared to weaken the strength of his testimony by dwelling on what had taken place in distant lands far from the scenes of his own personal observation. Thus his story of the Diocletian' persecution, comparatively limited as it is in its area of observation, differs in its plan from the earlier portions of his ecclesiastical history, which more or less embraces the whole scene of the Christian struggle with Paganism. By forsaking for this memorable period the universal character of its earlier books the historian gives place to the eye-witness.
A more competent chronicler of those scenes of the great persecution which he describes so graphically and so touchingly can scarcely be conceived. An unwearied scholar and trained writer, Eusebius saw his co-religionists hunted down and tortured; of these many were his own dearest friends and fellow-students. He was present, for instance, in the amphitheatre of Tyre when his friends and fellow-Christians were exposed to the fury of the wild beasts. He visited and encouraged the confessors in the unhealthy mines of Phaenos. He shared the prison life of his dear master Pamphilus at Caesarea—Pamphilus the eminent scholar and famous expositor of the Scriptures, the defender of the great Origen. He was in Egypt when the persecution was at its height, and when the proscribed Christians endured unspeakable tortures and sufferings.
2. The writings of Lactantius. Here, too, we have the testimony of a contemporary and of a learned scholar; Eusebius even characterizes him as the most erudite man of his time. He had exceptional opportunities of observation and of obtaining accurate information respecting the public events which happened in the early years of the fourth century. He was invited by Diocletian to take up his residence in Nicomedia about A. D. 301, and later he entered into the household of Constantine the Great as instructor of his son Crispus. In his treatise on "The Deaths of Persecutors," the greater part of which treats of the events of the Diocletian persecution, we possess a vast number of details of the sufferings endured by the Christian subjects of the Empire. Scattered but important notices, too, of these sufferings are found in his "Divine Institutions," from which work we have quoted the remarkable passage given above.
3. A certain number of "Acts and Passions of Martyrs" of the period, which have been pronounced genuine in their main features, although in many cases they have been evidently amplified or supplemented by revisers a century or two later than their assumed date, can fairly be referred to. Considering the terrible nature of this last persecution, its operations not being confined to the clergy or to special persons, or to any class and order, but extending to the whole Christian community, it is at first sight somewhat surprising that many more of these "Acts and Passions" relating to so widely extended an onslaught have not come down to us. But the paucity of such "Acts and Passions" is fairly explained when the circumstances of the persecution are taken into consideration. Among the articles of the edicts, it will be remembered, were most stringent provisions for the seizure and destruction of the sacred writings of the Christians, including many MSS. besides the Holy Scriptures; and amongst others no doubt the memoranda which bore upon the heroic constancy and endurance of the Christian victims; such histories and recitals the leading spirits in the State who guided this systematic and carefully-planned onslaught of Paganism would justly view with peculiar abhorrence and dread, as eminently calculated to inspire the sufferers with a noble desire to emulate the bravery and constancy of those who had already in pain and agony won their martyr crowns. These "Acts and Passions," wherever they existed, would doubtless be most carefully sought for and destroyed, while on the other hand the sweeping nature of the arrests of the clergy as Christian leaders would largely tend to diminish the numbers of such "official memoranda," the very persons whose duty it was to compile or redact these records having been mostly deprived of their liberty, and either thrown into prison or driven to some distant place of exile. Prudentius, the Spanish poet, who was born only some forty years later, dwells on this in graphic and pathetic words, when he deplores how the stern spirit of the persecutor has silenced those memories of a glorious past.
The public archives, the Acta proconsularia, and the Acta municipalia, from which we might have expected much detailed information respecting the events which accompanied this general Imperial persecution, have for the most part disappeared in the course of the overwhelming disasters which overtook the Empire in the fifth and following centuries.
Among the "Acts and Passions" connected with the Diocletian persecution, Allard quotes at considerable length pieces treating of martyr suffering in Macedonia, Pannonia, Cilicia, Thrace, Galatia, and Cappadocia, the ample notices of Eusebius being confined to events which took place in Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Pontus, and especially in Palestine.
Comparatively few Roman "Acts of Martyrs" belonging to this time have come down to us. Among these rare "Acts," mostly genuine in the main features of the story, but mutilated and added to by later revisers, we would instance the "Acts" of the famous S. Agnes and of her foster-sister S. Emerentiana, the main features of which narratives late archaeological discoveries have largely substantiated.
4. As regards Rome, we possess in the Catacombs the most enduring memory of this last and most terrible of the persecutions. The cemeteries were generally confiscated, and the Christians forbidden to use them or even to enter them. To preserve intact the hallowed graves of their fathers, and especially the resting-places of the more venerated among their dead, the Roman Christian communities blocked or earthed-up many of the galleries where these dead had been tenderly and reverently deposited. After the peace of the Church, one of the Bishops of Rome, Pope Damasus, who presided over the Church of the great city from A. D. 366 to A. D. 384—a name held deservedly in the highest honor among the many illustrious men who filled that high office—devoted himself especially to re-discover many of these tombs, earthed-up in various persecutions. One most important work undertaken by Damasus was the composition of numberless inscriptions in honor of the martyrs whose hidden tombs he uncovered, which inscriptions he caused to be engraved on slabs of marble and stone in peculiarly beautiful and legible characters. Some of the inscribed tablets refer to martyrs and famous men of an earlier period, to heroes of the older persecutions; but not a few refer to the victims of the last period of which we are now speaking. The historic value is, of course, very great; for he wrote, in the case of the victims of the Diocletian persecution, of sufferers whose story was told him by men who were their contemporaries; indeed, on one tablet we read how, as a boy, he learned the martyrs' history from the lips of the executioner himself! His are no legendary or apocryphal narrations, they are simply the bare recapitulation of facts of public notoriety. Damasus was born A. D. 305.
Some of these inscriptions are preserved in the ancient Roman churches, whither they were removed in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, when the catacombs were in process of being rifled by foreign invaders. Many of them have been discovered, often broken and mutilated, in the original crypts where Damasus himself placed them, and as the excavations slowly proceed more are being found. The Spanish poet Prudentius, who was a contemporary of Pope Damasus, specially dwelt on the number and reputation of these tombs of the martyrs, which were among the glories of the Rome of his day, when in one of his famous martyr hymns or poems he wrote that men little guessed how full Rome was of buried saints, how rich was her soil with holy graves.