Section 380
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THE BOOK OF MARTYRS. CHAPTER I. Procopius, Alpheus, and Zaccheus. THE first, therefore, of the martyrs of Palestine, was Procopius, who, before he was tried by imprisonment, was immediately at the beginning arraigned before the tribunal of the governor. When commanded to sacrifice to those called gods, he declared that he knew but one, to whom it was proper to sacrifice, as He himself had commanded ; but when he was ordered to make libations to the four emperors, he uttered a sentence which did not please them, and was immediately beheaded. The sentence was from the poet: "A plurality of sovereigns is not good, let there be but one prince and one sovereign Lord." This hap pened on the eighth of the month Desius, or as one would say with the Romans, the seventh before the Idesf of June, the fourth day of the week. This was the first signal that was given at Cesarea in Palestine. After him many bishops in the same city, of the provincial churches, cheerfully struggled with dreadful tor tures, and exhibited noble specimens of mighty conflicts. Some indeed, from excessive dread, broken down and overpowered by their terrors, sunk and gave way immediately at the first onset, but each of the rest experienced various kinds of torture. Some were scourged with innumerable strokes of the lash, others rack ed in their limbs and galled in their sides with torturing instru ments, some with intolerable fetters, by which the joints of their The words of Ulysses, in the Iliad, book ii. line 208. Ovx. xyxSov z-oxuxo.pai/.o. Sentences from Homer were among the proverbs of the day. The same passage was on a certain occasion repeated by Domitian. See his Life by Suetonius, ch. 1 3. j-The Romans had three divisions of the month, Calends, Nones, and Ides, and in marking the days they counted backwards. For the days given here, see any ta bular view of the Roman calendar. 349