Page:Plays of Roswitha (1923) St. John.djvu/25

Rh Sapientia in the manuscript, but as the last belongs by reason of its subject to the same group as Gallicanus and Dulcitius, it is more convenient to discuss it next. It is the best constructed of the "martyrdom" plays, and is singled out for special praise by most of the Roswitha commentators. The final scene in which Sapientia, having buried the bodies of her martyred children outside Rome, lifts up her soul in an ecstatic prayer for death is described by Magnin as "a ray of Sophocles shining through a Christian mind." Many, however, may find the repetition in the long-drawn-out "torture" scenes monotonous, and the impertinence of Sapientia's daughters to their imperial persecutor as trying as the real thing must have been. These slips of girls defy "law and order" in the person of the Emperor Hadrian much as in our own day youthful suffragettes used to defy British magistrates. Probably this is in accordance with truth. Roswitha was separated from the days of the first Christians by a shorter space of time than that which separates us from her, and she based her narrative poem about the martyrdom of Saint Pelagius on an account given her by an eye-witness. While modern authors (with the exception of Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose Christian martyrs in Androcles and the Lion bear a resemblance to Roswitha's) love to dwell on the dignity of the early converts to Christianity, Roswitha conveys the impression that the dignity was mingled with impudence.