Ronchey, S. “Gli atti dei martiri tra politica e letteratura.” Storia di Roma, 3/II. Eds. A. Momigliano and A. Schiavone. Turin: Einaudi, 1993. 781-825.

After a survey of earlier Pagan and Jewish trials of similar kind, this contribution focuses on the Christian Acta martyrum, which, despite the variety of textual forms, share with the former certain topoi (the subversive implications of “witnessing,” the martyr’s “eagerness to die,” underestimation of the prosecutor, idealisation of the martys as sage). The doctrine of martyrdom elaborated in later centuries  by the Catholic Church is then analysed, and the dispute concerning the “sincerity” of the Acta, which led to an increasingly rigorous critical selection of martyrs between the 17th and 20th centuries, is discussed.  This dispute found its origins in the diverse ideological values attributed to martyrological literature by Catholics and Protestants and by the revision of the Roman Martyrology by Cardinal Cesare Baronio. Of major importance in his census was the Martyrium Polycarpi (Martyrdom of Polycarp), a work rich in possibilities for modern historical and cultural analysis of Christian martyrdom, which offers, in addition, an example of the philological ratio of research on martyrological texts in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Ample attention, therefore, is given to the study of the language of the martyrs in the majority of early Christian acta.  The author highlights a “rhetoric of incommunicability”, where amphibology, ambiguity, paradox, oxymoron, reciprocals accusations of insanity between accuser and accused are the cornerstones of a language “of struggle,” characteristic of both the early martyrological texts and those of the period of Diocletian persecution. The contempt for earthly authority and the aggressive language of the martyr represented as a dialectical hero recurs in the Christian panegyric literature and in the “epic passions” of the 4th century. Yet, certain Acta (not only of Polycarp, but also of Ciprian, Apollonius, Fructuosus) set themselves apart from the anti-State nucleus of texts by important affinities: shared pro-State attitudes and less use of a “rhetoric of incomprehension.”  Eventually, with the ascendance of Arianism as state religion, the martyrological literature remerges as an instrument of ecclesiastical political propaganda. In the mid-4th century, the anti-Arian martyr becomes the champion of orthodoxy and resistance to the State, in addition to an icon to follow as the figure of the monk emerges.  Onto this figure, which will supplant the martyr, Christianity will transfer all the values of the latter: the proto-Christian radicalism thus transforms into zealous monasticism.

 

REVIEWS

L. Perelli in Bollettino di studi latini 24 (1994), pp. 288-91.

 

EXTERNAL LINKS

Complete text of the Tractatio de Martyrologio Romano