Page:The early Christians in Rome (1911).djvu/214

 *terious power often exercised by saintly men and women over furred and feathered untamed creatures is a well-known fact, and has been more than once the subject of discussion. Such an allusion, however, to the occasional conduct of the wild creatures in the arena occurring in the midst of the writer's arguments, plainly shows that the spectacle of terrible massacres of Christian folk in the arena, where they were exposed to wild beasts, was no uncommon feature in Roman life.

The grim catalogue of tortures which the heroic martyr enumerates in the same chapter of the Roman Epistle, completed the awful picture of the sufferings of brave Christian confessors, sufferings which the Roman citizens had no doubt for many past years often gazed at.