_S. AGNES_
About a mile from the Porta Pia, beside the Nomentine road that leads
from Rome to the bridge over the Arno and to Montana, are the basilica
and catacomb of S. Agnese. We are there on high ground, and here the
parents of the saint had a villa and vineyard.
They were Christians, and their garden had an entrance to a catacomb in
which the faithful were interred. We know this, because some of the
burials in the passages underground are of more ancient date than the
martyrdom of S. Agnes, which took place in 304.
A little lane, very dirty, leads down hence into the Salarian road, and
there is a mean dribble of a stream in a hollow below.
The rock is all of the volcanic tufa that is so easily cut, but which in
the roads resolves itself into mud of the dirtiest and most consistent
description.
New Rome is creeping along the road, its gaunt and eminently vulgar
houses are destroying the beauty of this road, which commanded exquisite
views of the Sabine and Alban mountains, and the lovely Torlonia gardens
have already been destroyed. Nor is this all, for the foundations of
these useless and hideous buildings are being driven down into more than
one old catacomb, which as soon as revealed is destroyed.
Where now stands the basilica of S. Agnese was the catacomb in which her
body was laid. The church is peculiar, in that it is half underground.
One has to descend into it by a staircase of forty-five ancient marble
steps, lined with inscriptions taken from the catacomb. The cause for
this peculiarity is not that the soil has risen about the basilica, but
that when it was proposed to build the church over the tomb of the saint
who was below in the catacomb, the whole of the crust of rock and earth
above was removed, so that the subterranean passages were exposed to
light; and then the foundations of the sacred edifice were laid on this
level, and were carried up above the surface of the ground.
But this is not the only church that bears the name of S. Agnes: there
is another in Rome itself, opposite the Torre Mellina, on the site of
her martyrdom, in the Piazza Navona, which occupies the place of the old
circus of Domitian. It is a very ugly building of 1642, but contains a
tolerable representation, in relief, of the martyrdom of the saint.
Unfortunately we have not got the Acts of the martyrdom of S. Agnes in
their original form. It was the custom of the Church to have scribes
present at the interrogation and death of a martyr, who took down in
shorthand the questions put and the answers made, and the sentence of
the judge. These records, which were of the highest value, were
preserved in the archives of the Roman Church. Unhappily, at a later
age, such very simple accounts, somewhat crude maybe in style, and
entirely deficient in the miraculous, did not suit the popular taste.
Meanwhile the stories of the martyrs had been passed from mouth to
mouth, and various additions had been made to give them a smack of
romance; the account of the deaths was embellished with marvels, and
made excruciating by the piling up of tortures; and then the popular
voice declared that the persecutors must have been punished at once; so
it was fabled that lightning fell and consumed them, or that the earth
opened and swallowed them.
Now, when the Acts of Martyrs were found to contain nothing of all this,
then writers set to work—not with the intention of deceiving, but with
the idea that the genuine Acts were defective—to recompose the stories,
by grafting into the original narrative all the rubbish that had passed
current in popular legend. Thus it has come to pass that so few of the
Acts of the Martyrs, as we have them, are in their primitive form. They
have been more or less stuffed out with fabulous matter.
The Acts of S. Agnes are in this condition, although not so grossly
meddled with as some others have been. That she was a real martyr, and
that the broad outlines of her story are true, there can be no doubt.
The martyrdom took place during the reign of Diocletian.
In 304 he was in Italy. He had come to Rome the preceding year to
celebrate the twentieth year of the reign of his colleague, Maximian,
and at the same time the triumph over the Persians. He left Rome in ill
humour at the independence of the citizens, after having been accustomed
to the servility of the Easterns; the day was December 20th, and he went
to Ravenna. The weather was cold and wet, and he was chilled, so that he
suffered all the rest of the winter, and became irritable as his health
failed. However, he went back to Rome; and at this time several
martyrdoms ensued, as that of S. Soteris, a virgin of the noble family
from which sprang S. Ambrose, also the boy Pancras, and S. Sebastian.
But the most notable was Agnes.
She was aged only thirteen, and was the daughter of noble and wealthy
parents, who were, as already said, Christians.
Her riches and beauty induced the son of a former prefect to seek her
hand in marriage. Agnes, however, refused. She had no desire to become a
wife; at all events, at so early an age; and, moreover, she would on no
account be united to a pagan. “I am already engaged to One,” she said:
“to Him I shall ever keep my troth.”
Not understanding what she meant, he inquired further; and she is
reported to have replied in an allegorical strain: “He has already bound
me to Him by His betrothal ring, and has adorned me with precious
jewels. He has placed a sign upon my brow that I should love none as I
love Him. He has revealed unto me treasures incomparable, which He has
promised to give me if I persevere. Honey and milk has He bestowed on me
by His words. I have partaken of His body, and with His blood has He
adorned my cheeks.”
It must not, however, be supposed that this was actually what she said.
There was then no scribe present to take the sentences down; they are
words put into her mouth at a later period by a romance writer.
The young man was incensed, and complained to her father, who would in
no way force his daughter’s inclinations. The youth, unquestionably, did
not understand her, and supposed that she had already given her heart to
some earthly lover.
Presently it all came out. Agnes was a Christian, and, as a Christian,
would not listen to his suit.
Then, in a rage, the young man rushed off and denounced her to the
prefect, who sent immediately for her parents, and threatened them. They
were weak in the faith; and, returning home trembling, urged their
daughter to accept the youth. She, however, steadfastly refused.
There was now nothing for it but for her to appear before the Prefect of
Rome. She stood before his tribunal with calmness and confidence.
“Come,” said he, “be not headstrong: you are only a child, remember,
though forward for your age.”
“I may be a child,” replied Agnes; “but faith does not depend on years,
but on the heart.”
The prefect presently lost his temper, and declared roundly: “I will
tell you what shall be done with you; you shall be stripped and driven
naked forth to the jeers and insults of the rabble.”
Then the clothes were taken off the slender body of the girl. Thereupon
she loosened the band that confined her abundant golden hair, and it
fell in waves over her body and covered her to the knees.
“You may expose me to insult,” said she; “but I have the angel of God as
my defence. For the only-begotten Son of God, whom you know not, will be
to me an impenetrable wall and a guardian; never sleeping, and an
unflagging protector.”
“Let her be bound,” ordered the judge, sullenly.
Then the executioner turned over a quantity of manacles, and selected
the smallest pair he could find, and placed them round her wrists.
Agnes, with a smile, shook her hands, and they fell clanking at her
feet.
The prefect then ordered her to death by the sword.
The Roman tradition is that she suffered where is now her church, by the
Piazza Navona; but executions were never carried out within the walls of
Rome. She was taken to the place where she was to die. Here she knelt,
and with her own hands drew forward her hair, so as to expose her neck
to the blow. A pause ensued; the executioner was trembling with emotion,
and could not brandish his sword.
The interpolated Acts say that before this an angel had brought her a
white robe, which she put over her. What is probable is that the
magistrate, ashamed of what he had done, suffered one of those angels of
mercy, the deaconesses, to reclothe the girl.
As the child knelt in her white robe, with her head inclined, her arms
crossed on her breast, and her golden hair hanging to the ground, she
must have looked like a beautiful lily, stooping under its weight of
blossom.
“And thus, bathed in her rosy blood,” says the author of the Acts,
“Christ took to Himself His bride and martyr.”
Her parents received the body, and carried it to the cemetery they had
in their vineyard on the Nomentian Way, and there laid it in a
_loculus_, a recess cut in the side of one of the passages underground.
It was probably just under one of the _luminaria_, or openings to the
upper air, which allowed light to enter the Catacombs; for here, two
days later, Emerentiana, a catechumen, the foster-sister of Agnes, was
found kneeling by her grave; and the pagan rabble, peering in and seeing
her, pelted her with stones, stunned, and then buried her under the
earth and sand they threw in.
Constantine the Great built the church over the tomb, removing the upper
crust; but it was rebuilt by Honorius I., between 625 and 638. It was
altered in 1490 by Innocent VIII.; but retains more of the ancient
character than most of the Roman churches.
The day on which Agnes suffered was January 21st. The memory of her has
never faded from the Church. It is said that her parents dreamed, seven
days after her death, that they saw her in light, surrounded by a Virgin
band, and with a white lamb at her side. In commemoration of this
dream—which not improbably did take place—the Roman Church observes in
her honour the 28th of January as well as the actual day of her death.
So ancient is the cult of S. Agnes, that, next to the Evangelists and
Apostles, no saint’s effigy is older. It appears on the ancient glass
vessels used by the Christians in the early part of the century in which
she died, with her name inscribed, which leaves no doubt as to her
identity.
Mrs. Jameson says of the Church of S. Agnese, in Rome: “Often have I
seen the steps of this church, and the church itself, so crowded with
kneeling worshippers at Matins and Vespers, that I could not make my way
among them; principally the women of the lower orders, with their
distaffs and market baskets, who had come thither to pray, through the
intercession of the patron saint, for the gifts of meekness and
chastity.”
In the corrupted Acts, it is told that Agnes was set on a pyre to be
burned to death, but that the fire was miraculously extinguished. This
is purely apocryphal. It originates in a passage by S. Ambrose, in which
he speaks of her hands having been stretched over the fire on a pagan
altar, to force her to do sacrifice. This has been magnified into an
immense pyre.
“At this age,” said he, “a young girl trembles at an angry look from her
mother; the prick of a needle draws tears. Yet, fearless under the
bloody hands of her executioners, Agnes is immovable under the heavy
chains which weigh her down; ignorant of death, but ready to die, she
presents her body to the edge of the sword. Dragged against her will to
the altar, she holds forth her arms to Christ through the fires of the
sacrifice; and her hand forms, even in those flames, the sign which is
the trophy of a victorious Saviour. She presents her neck and her two
hands to the fetters which they produce for her; but it is impossible to
find any small enough to encircle her delicate limbs.”
[Illustration: FEBRONIA OF SIBAPTE.]