(ABOUT A.D. 302.)
"One cannot but admire," says Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History
(lib. viii., c. 8, 9), "those who suffered in Egypt, their native land,
where thousands, both men, and women, and children, despising the
present life for the sake of our Saviour's doctrine, submitted to death
in various shapes. Some, after being tortured with scrapings and the
rack, and the most dreadful scourgings, and other innumerable agonies,
which one might shudder to hear, were finally committed to the flames;
some plunged and drowned in the sea, others voluntarily offering their
heads to the executioners; others dying in the midst of their torments,
some wasted away by famine, and others again fixed to the cross. Some,
indeed, were executed as malefactors usually were; others, more cruelly,
were nailed head downwards, and kept alive, until they were destroyed by
starving, on the cross itself. But it would exceed all power of detail
to give an idea of the sufferings and tortures which the martyrs of
Thebais endured. These, instead of hooks, had their bodies scraped with
potsherds, and were mangled in this way until they died. Women, tied by
one foot, and then raised on high in the air by certain machines, with
their naked bodies wholly uncovered, presented this most foul, cruel,
and inhuman spectacle to all beholders; others again perished, bound to
trees and branches. For, drawing the stoutest of the branches together
by machines for this purpose, and binding the limbs of the martyrs to
each of these, they then let loose the boughs to resume their natural
position, designing thus to produce a violent action, to tear asunder
the limbs of those whom they thus treated. But all these things were
doing not only for a few days, or for some time, but for a series of
whole years. At one time, ten or more; at another, more than twenty; at
another time, not less than thirty, and even sixty; and again, at
another time, a hundred men, with their wives and little children, were
slain in one day, whilst they were condemned to various and varied
punishments. We ourselves, when on the spot, saw many crowded together
in one day, some suffering decapitation, some the torments of flames; so
that the murderous weapon was completely blunted, and having lost its
edge, broke to pieces; and the executioners themselves, wearied with
slaughter, were obliged to relieve one another. Then, also, we were
witnesses to the most admirable ardour of mind, and the truly divine
energy and alacrity of those that believed in the Christ of God. For, as
soon as the sentence was pronounced against the first, others rushed
forward from other parts to the tribunal before the judge, confessing
they were Christians, most indifferent to the dreadful and many kinds of
tortures that awaited them, but declaring themselves fully, and in the
most undaunted manner, on the religion which acknowledges only one
Supreme God. They received, indeed, the final sentence of death with
gladness and exultation, so far as even to sing and send up hymns of
praise and thanksgiving, until they breathed their last."
The names of these blessed ones, whose bones are strewn over the deserts
of Egypt, are unknown to us; but they are written in the Book of Life.
At the day of the general Resurrection they will rise and stand, on
their feet, a great army.