Глава VIII. О других исповедниках, также о мученичестве Валентины и Павла

When the continuous storm of persecution entered upon us in the sixth year, at that time a great multitude of confessors of piety were in the Fen quarry, which was called by this name because porphyry stone was obtained from it. Of these confessors, ninety-seven, together with their wives and newborn babies, were sent to the prefect of Palestine. Since they confessed the God of all and Christ; then Urban's successor, Prefect Firmilian, referring to the will of the king, ordered the folds and very veins of their left leg to be cauterized with a hot iron, and with a knife to first tear out the right eye along with the membranes and pupil, then, using a cautery, to destroy it at the very root - and then sent them to the mines of that region to suffer under the weight of labor and disease. However, we got to see with our own eyes that such suffering was suffered not only by these people, but also by the inhabitants of Palestine, sentenced, as we recently said, to single combat with fists; for they did not agree either to receive food from the royal supplies, or to begin the usual activities of fist fighters. For this, having been presented not to the procurators, but to Maximin himself, the mentioned martyrs showed noble firmness both in enduring hunger and in enduring scourging; in general, they suffered in the same way as the others mentioned above. They were joined by other confessors in the same Caesarea. And of those who were taken in the city of Gaza during a meeting aimed at reading the Divine Scriptures, some suffered tortures identical to those mentioned above, that is, they suffered disfigurement of their eyes and legs, while others, even more than that, were subjected to the most terrible torture of planing their sides. Among the latter, one, a wife in body, and a husband in mind, unable to bear the threats of fornication, began to reproach the tyrant for entrusting the power of judging to people so cruel, and for this she was first flogged, and then raised to a tree and experienced the torment of planing her sides. But while the officers, by order of the judge, carried out their tortures with intense jealousy, another, like the first, chose virginity as her goal, her body seemed very weak and invisible to the eye, but gifted with the strength of the soul and contained within herself a mind greater than the body - this other ascetic, who stood above those defenders of freedom glorified by the Hellenes, could not bear such ruthlessness, such cruel and inhuman actions, from the crowd of people shouted to the judge: how long will you torture my sister so cruelly? Greatly irritated by this, the judge immediately ordered the screaming woman to be seized. Drawn to the middle, she marked herself with the divine name of the Savior. They began to persuade her to sacrifice - first with words, and since she did not obey, they dragged her to the altar by force; but the sister, doing her job and maintaining the same readiness, fearlessly and boldly pushed the altar with her foot and overturned it along with the sacrificial fire that was on it. Then the judge, irritated with anger, like a wild beast, began to torment her sides with such claws as he had never tormented anyone, as if in a frenzy he wanted to be satisfied with her flesh. When his fury was satisfied, he tied them both together, that is, both this one and the other, whom she called her sister, and appointed them to die by fire. The first of them was born, they say, in the Gaza region, and the last, known to everyone but the name of Valentin, came from Caesarea. But how can I adequately describe the subsequent martyrdom of the blessed Paul? At the same time as these virgins and sentenced to death by the same definition, he turned to the executor, who had to immediately cut off his head, and asked him to give himself a little time. Having received this, he began to loudly send up prayers to God - first for the granting of peace to the entire Christian race, so that at the same time its freedom would be quickly restored - then for the conversion of the Jews to God through the preaching of Christ. Extending his word further, Paul asked the same to the Samaritans, he also prayed for the pagans, so that these people, who are on the path of error and ignorance of God, would come to the knowledge of Him and accept true worship of God - he did not ignore the mixed crowd that surrounded him, and after all this - how great and inexpressibly kindness! - he began to pray to God of all kinds about the judge who had appointed his death, about all the rulers, even about the one who in a minute was supposed to cut off his head - he began to pray to God in the hearing of both the latter and all those present, so that the sin of the tormentors in relation to the sufferer would not be imputed to them. Offering these prayers loudly, he, like a man being killed innocently, drew the souls of everyone to compassion and tears, and meanwhile he himself prepared, bowed his naked neck under the executioner’s sword and adorned himself with divine martyrdom. This happened on the twenty-fifth day of the month Panem, that is, eight days before the Kalends of August. Such was the end of all these martyrs. After some time, one hundred and thirty blessed ascetics of the confession of Christ were again taken from Egypt. By order of Maximin, having suffered on the spot the same disfigurement of the eyes and legs as the previous martyrs, they were exiled partly to the mentioned Palestinian and partly to the Cilician mines. You might be interested in: