examples of which have been found in the Catacombs;[165] molten metal and plates of red-hot brass were applied to the naked body till it became one indistinguishable wound; and mingled salt and vinegar or unslaked lime were rubbed upon the quivering flesh, torn and bleeding from the rack or scourge--tortures more inhuman than savage Indian ever wreaked upon his mortal foe. Men were condemned by the score and hundred to labour in the mines, with the sinews of one leg severed, with one eye scooped out and the socket seared with red-hot iron. Chaste matrons and tender virgins were given over--worse fate a thousand-fold than death--to dens of shame and the gladiators’ lust, and subjected to nameless indignities, too horrible for words to utter.[166] And all these intense sufferings were endured often with joy and exultation, for the love of a divine Master, when a single word, a grain of incense cast upon the heathen altar, would have released the victims from their agonies. No lapse of time, and no 110 recoil from the idolatrous homage paid in after ages to the martyr’s relics, should impair in our hearts the profound and rational reverence with which we bend before his tomb. We are left, however, for the most part, without authentic record of the tragic scenes of Christian martyrdom. The primitive church, indeed, treasured up these memories of moral heroism as her most precious legacy to after times. Clement of Rome, it is said, appointed notaries to search out the acts of the martyrs;[167] and, as we have seen, Fabian suffered death for his zeal in preserving these records.[168] But these precious documents for the most part perished in the Diocletian persecution, although fragments were probably incorporated with the later martyrologies. The earlier Acts are the more authentic, and the more simple in character. Those of later date become more and more florid in style, and are overladen with the incredible and impossible, till their historic value is entirely destroyed, except when they are corroborated by collateral testimony, or by the monumental evidence of the Catacombs. Prudentius, attracted to Rome by the fame of these repositories of the martyrs’ ashes, wrote a treatise[169] on their sufferings, in which his fervid imagination and rhetorical style found amplest indulgence. Later writers still further embellished and exaggerated the original Acts, till the wildest stories of ancient mythology, or mediæval legend, were surpassed by the monkish martyrologists.