What the Pagans Did to the Christians under Julian

When Julian had made his ungodliness openly known, the cities were filled with strife. Men held captive by the deceits of idolatry took heart. They opened the idols’ shrines and began to perform those foul rites that ought to have faded from human memory. Once more they lit the fire on the altars, fouled the ground with the blood of victims, and polluted the air with the smoke of their burnt sacrifices. Driven mad by the demons they served, they ran through the streets in a frenzy like the Corybantes, and attacked the saints with low stage jokes and with all the outrage and coarseness of their unclean processions. [a] On the other side, the members of the fellowship of true religion could not bear their blasphemies. They returned insult for insult and tried to refute the error their opponents honored. The workers of wickedness in their turn resented it. The freedom the ruler allowed them encouraged their insolence, and they dealt deadly blows among the Christians. [b] It was indeed the emperor’s duty to look after the peace of his subjects. But he, in the depth of his wickedness, himself drove his peoples mad with rage against one another. He overlooked what the brutal dared against the peaceable, and he entrusted important civil and military offices to savage and ungodly men. These men, though they hesitated to force the lovers of true religion to sacrifice in public, still treated them with every kind of indignity. Julian also took away all the honors that the great Constantine had given to the sacred ministry.

To tell everything the slaves of idolatrous deceit dared to do at that time would need a history of those crimes alone. But out of their vast number I will pick out a few examples. At Ashkelon and at Gaza, cities of Palestine, men of the priesthood, and women who had lived their whole lives as virgins, were cut open, stuffed with barley, and thrown to pigs as food. At Sebaste, which belongs to the same people, the coffin of John the Baptist was opened, his bones were burned, and the ashes were scattered. [c] And who could tell without tears of the vile deed done in Phoenicia? At Heliopolis near Lebanon there lived a deacon named Cyril. In the reign of Constantine, fired with divine zeal, he had smashed many of the idols worshiped there. Now men of evil reputation, remembering this deed, not only killed him but cut open his belly and ate his liver. Their crime, however, was not hidden from the all-seeing eye, and they suffered the just reward of their deeds. All who had taken part in this abominable wickedness lost their teeth, which all fell out at once; they lost their tongues too, which rotted away and dropped off; and they were also struck blind. By their sufferings they proclaimed the power of holiness. [d]

In the neighboring city of Emesa they dedicated the newly built church to Dionysus, the god in woman’s form, and set up in it his ridiculous image, half man and half woman. At Dorystolum, a famous city of Thrace, the victorious athlete Aemilianus was thrown onto a blazing pyre by Capitolinus, governor of all Thrace. But to tell the tragic fate of Marcus, bishop of Arethusa, with the dignity of true drama would need the eloquence of an Aeschylus or a Sophocles. In the days of Constantius he had destroyed a certain idol shrine and built a church in its place. As soon as the people of Arethusa learned Julian’s mind, they showed their hostility openly. At first, following the command of the Gospel, Marcus tried to escape. But when he learned that some of his own people had been arrested in his place, he came back and gave himself up to the men of blood. Once they had seized him, they neither pitied his old age nor respected his deep devotion to virtue. Though he was outstanding for the beauty of both his teaching and his life, they first stripped him and beat him, laying blows on every limb. Then they threw him into filthy sewers, and when they had dragged him out again, they handed him over to a crowd of boys and told them to prick him without mercy with their writing styluses. After this they put him in a basket, smeared him with fish sauce and honey, and hung him up in the open air at the height of summer, inviting wasps and bees to a feast. Their aim in all this was to force him either to rebuild the shrine he had destroyed or to pay the cost of putting it up. But Marcus endured all these terrible sufferings and declared that he would agree to none of their demands. His enemies, thinking that he was too poor to pay, let him off half of what they asked and told him to pay the rest. But Marcus, hanging on high, pierced by the styluses and devoured by wasps and bees, not only showed no sign of pain but mocked his ungodly tormentors again and again: “You are low creatures of the earth; I am lifted high and exalted.” At last they asked for only a small part of the money. But he said, “It is as ungodly to give a single obol as to give it all.” So, defeated, they let him go, and they could not help admiring his steadfastness, for his words had taught them a new lesson in holiness. [e]