DISCOVERY 



299 



from the building of a memorial chapel to the two 

 bishops is that Severus had been put to death. This 

 conclusion is, however, not absolutely certain, as the 

 title of " martyr " was given to those who remained 

 steadfast under torture, even if. like Eugenius, they 

 survived. 



Martyrs' Epitaphs very Rare 



While the names of martyrs and details of memorial 

 martyria abound in Christian inscriptions of the Byzan- 

 tine period, it is well known that contemporary 

 inscriptional records of martyrdom are e.xceedingly 

 scarce. So far, apart from Laodicea Combusta, only 

 three such inscriptions have been found in Asia Minor. 

 Two of these are epitaphs, to be carefully distinguished 

 from memorial dedications on marfyria in which the 

 relics of mart\TS were deposited some time after their 

 death. The first, which has long been known, but 

 whose meaning was first pointed out by Ramsay, is 

 the dedication by a bishop or presbyter in the Phrygian 

 Pentapolis of a tomb to his " five children," of whom 

 it is said that they " won the portion of life in one day." 

 The language of this inscription suggests that these 

 were spiritual " children," and most (but not all) good 

 authorities agree in regarding them as martyrs. Their 

 names, given in the epitaph, are unknown to the 

 martyrologies. The second is the epitaph — from its 

 expression it can be nothing but an epitaph — of a 

 martyr Paul found at Derbe, which runs as follows : 

 " Nounnos and Valerius built the tomb of Paul the 

 Martyr in remembrance." Miss A. M. Ramsay, who 

 published a drawing of the monument, has been fol- 

 lowed by M. Gregoire in distinguishing this inscription 

 from the later class of memorial dedications, and 

 regarding it as the inscription of a tombstone set up 

 over the grave of a martyr. This conclusion appears 

 to me inevitable ; I regard this Paul as a martyr who 

 suffered in the Great Persecution, and had a gravestone 

 erected to him immediately after the act of Constantine 

 legalising Christianity. The open use of the term 

 " martyr " on a tombstone could hardly have been 

 tolerated by the officials of the Roman government 

 during the persecution itself ; the stone dates after the 

 Act of Toleration {.\.t>. 312) or even after the final 

 defeat of Licinius in a.d. 323. 



The Romans and Kitchener of Khartoum 



In the Martyrdom of Polvcarp, the letter sent by 

 the Church of Smyrna to the Church of Philomel ium 

 in or soon after a.d. 155 describing the passion of their 

 bishop, we have evidence that, as early as the middle 

 of the second century, the Roman government had 

 adopted the policy of withholding the remains of 

 martyrs (at any rate in Asia Minor) from their fellow 



Christians. St. Augustine, at a later date, was at pains 

 to explain that the cult of the martyrs had nothing in 

 common with pagan worship of the dead. But in 

 Asia Minor the worship of the dead was a central 

 feature of the popular pagan religion, and the Romans, 

 in the second and third centuries, had as clear a motive 

 for objecting to the erection of Christian martyria as 

 Lord Kitchener had for destroying the tomb of a 

 Sudanese Mahdi. This Roman policy no doubt 

 explains the scarcity of identifiable martyrs' tombs ; it 

 also throws light on the circumstances under which 

 relics of the martyr Trophimus of Pisidian Antioch, 

 who suffered under the Emperor Probus (a.d. 276- 

 282) were deposited in a reliquary coffer dug up near 

 Synnada in 1907, and now in the Museum at Brussa. 

 On the lid of this little marble box, shaped like a 

 sarcophagus, is carved the legend : " Within are bones 

 of Trophimus the Martyr. And whosoever shall ever 

 cast out these bones, he shall have to reckon with 

 God." It is obvious that this coffer was not intended 

 for open exhibition ; but it is inscribed with the very 

 formula by which the early Christians of Phrygia, 

 throughout the later third century, warned wrongdoers 

 against interference with the graves of their dead. 

 This formula, " he shall have to reckon with God " — 

 or, as pagans read it, " with the god " — is exclusively 

 Christian, and was in use by the Christians of Central 

 Phrygia during the third century. The lettering of 

 the inscription points to the same date, and the coffer, 

 as Mendel (the first editor), Gregoire, and Ramsay have 

 maintained against the late M. Duchesne, certainly 

 belongs to the period of persecution, and is contem- 

 porary, or nearly contemporary, with the death of 

 Trophimus. Trophimus is mentioned in the martyro- 

 logies, where the place of his martyrdom is given as 

 Synnada. The dedication of a public tomb to a martyr 

 was precarious ; probably the fortunate discovery at 

 Synnada illustrates a practice common during the 

 persecutions, in spite of Roman vigilance. 



A Third Laodicean Martyr 



These considerations explain the curiously non- 

 committal character of the following dedication of a 

 martyr's tomb from the neighbourhood of Laodicea. 

 It belongs to Suverek, which occupies the site of an 

 ancient village (probably on the territory of Laodicea) 

 which was raised to the rank of a bishopric (Psibela) 

 at a later period. It was copied by Callander in 1904 

 and by Ramsay in 1906, in both cases without a com- 

 plete version of the important third line. In 1910 

 I succeeded in reading this line completely ; my 

 copy was confirmed by Ramsay, and rests on our joint 

 evidence. 



The syntax of the inscription is irregular, and some 



