The Christians of the first two centuries, however, seldom employed any material image of the Cross, and never the Crucifix. This is only what, under the circumstances, was to be expected. To erect crosses in their houses, or to wear them on their persons, was impossible in the times of heathen ascendancy, without risking insult to the holy sign, and danger to themselves. Moreover, in days when crucifixion was still in use as the most degrading of all forms of punishment, and the cross to the world at large a more infamous figure than the gallows is now to us, it must have been difficult even for the followers of the Crucified to rise entirely above the common sentiment of their age. The absolute horror with which the "accursed tree" was regarded before hallowing associations ennobled it, is well illustrated by the exclamation of Cicero in one of his orations: "Let the very name of the cross be banished, not from the bodies only, but from the eyes, the ears, the thoughts of Roman citizens!" The earliest known attempt to depict the Crucifixion of the Saviour illustrates the fact that it was the worship of a Crucified Man which struck the contemporary heathen as especially incomprehensible. In the year 1857, a wall in the Palatine Palace at Rome, which had been hidden from sight for centuries, was laid bare, and displayed a rude sketch, which has been named the "graffito blasfemo." Stretched on a cross is a human figure with an ass's head, before which stands a man in a short tunic with his arms upraised, while beneath, in very roughly-formed Greek characters, runs the inscription: "Alexamenos adores his God." The work, scratched on the wall, doubtless by some palace slave in ridicule of a comrade, is assigned to the end of the second century, and obviously alludes with blasphemous scorn to the manner of the Saviour's death, and to the strange calumny, first flung by the Gnostics at the Jews, and then by the heathen at Jews and Christians alike, that they paid divine honours to an ass.