[136] The church of St. Marcello, in the Corso, commemorates the scene of his indignities. There is reason to believe that each church or _titulus_ within the city had its own cemetery without the walls, over which the presbyter of the title had jurisdiction. Marcellinus, as bishop, had charge of the ecclesiastical Cemetery of Callixtus, as appears from a contemporary inscription. [137] Gruter, _Inscrip._, p. 1172, No. 3. [138] _Rom. Sott._, p. 172. [139] There is a pleasing tradition recorded of Sylvester, the successor of Melchiades, to the effect that, having fled, on account of the persecution, to the caverns of Mount Soracte, the Emperor Constantine sent for him to receive religious instruction. Seeing the soldiers approach, as he thought to lead him to martyrdom, Sylvester exclaimed, “Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation,” but was in a few days installed as bishop of Rome in the imperial palace of the Lateran. Soracte, once sacred to Apollo and the Muses, but now to Christ and the saints, is known, in commemoration of this event, as _Monte San Silvestro_. [140] Gruter, p. 1171, No. 8. [141] Their names and piety are commemorated by two churches in Rome. Eusebius also records with approbation the story of the Christian matron Sophronia, wife of the Prefect of Rome, who committed suicide to escape the polluting embraces of the tyrant Maxentius. _Hist. Eccles._, viii, 14. [142] _Bullettino_, January, 1869. [143] The following satirical remarks of De Brosses, a Romanist writer, concerning the supply of relics from the Catacomb of St. Agnes, will indicate how unauthentic are these objects of veneration: “Vous pourriez voir ici la capitale des Catacombes de toute la chrétienté. Les martyrs, les confesseurs, et les vierges, y fourmillent de tous côtés. Quand on se fait besoin de quelques reliques en pays étranger, le Pape n’a qu’à descendre ici et crier, _Qui de vous autres veut aller être saint en Pologne?_ Alors s’il se trouve quelque mort de bonne volonté il se lève et s’en va.” [144] From the Catacomb of St. Agnes. The ancient Martyrology records the conversion of a Roman nobleman of this name in the time of Julian, together with that of his wife and fifty-three members of his household, and his subsequent martyrdom and burial in the Catacombs. It is probable that Theophila had learned in Gaul to write Latin, though only in those singular Greek characters which, as Julius Cæsar informs us, were used in that country, and that, after the death of the whole family, she employed some equally unlettered stone-mason to engrave this remarkable inscription.