One form which this veneration took was that of festivals in honour of the martyrs. “By a noble metaphor,” says Milman,[210] “the day of their death was considered that of their birth to immortality.”[211] The church of Smyrna celebrated the anniversary of their martyred bishop’s passion “with joy and gladness as his natal day.”[212] Tertullian asserts that the practice has the authority of apostolic tradition.[213] These festivals were at first kept with religious solemnity, accompanied by the celebration of the eucharist, often in the rock-hewn chambers of the Catacombs, where a thin tile separated the dead in Christ from the devout worshippers who commemorated the passion of their common Lord. During the ages of persecution this was a rite of deep and touching significance. Frequently his partaking of that feast was the recipient’s own consecration to the martyr’s death. But after the peace of the church it often degenerated into a scene of excess and vulgar revelry, more like the pagan banquets for the dead than a Christian solemnity. Indeed, they were avowedly employed in 128 ignoble appeal to the baser appetites, as counter-attractions to the pagan feasts, to induce the poor to attend the festivals of the church.[214] This degradation of an originally praiseworthy practice, and the intensifying and abject superstition to which it led, provoked the taunts of the heathen and the censure of the more devout and thoughtful Christians. The philosophic Julian recoiled from the adoration of relics as from pollution. Another pagan writer contrasts the veneration of obscure martyrs’ names, hateful to the gods and to men,[215] with the refined and poetic _cultus_ of Minerva and Jupiter.[216] Vigilantius, the Spanish presbyter, strongly condemns the “ashes worshippers and idolaters;” while, on the other hand, Jerome magnifies the sanctity of these relics, “around which,” he says, “the souls of the martyrs are constantly hovering to hear the prayers of the supplicant.” After in vain trying to restrain their abuses and excesses, the ecclesiastical authorities were at length compelled to suppress these festivals. The reverence paid to the relics of the martyrs had two remarkable and contrary effects. Having led in the first place to the adornment of their sepulchres, it ultimately caused their destruction and spoliation. In consequence of this feeling it became an object of ambition to share the resting-place of those who had been so holy in life and so glorious in death. Hence new graves were often excavated in the back of the _arcosolia_, cutting through the beautiful 129 frescoes with which they were adorned, and mutilating or destroying the paintings.[217] The _cubicula_ were also defaced, their symmetry injured, and their construction endangered by similar imprudent excavations.