Ignatius was led Romeward. His journey lay along a route which in part had been traversed by Xerxes. The procession of the Persian, foremost among his myriads of men for beauty and stature, halting near Sardis to decorate a beautiful plane-tree with golden ornaments, and commit it to the custody of an 'immortal'[67] is in vivid contrast to the procession of 'criminals,' the Christian leader 'bound amidst ten leopards (or soldiers) who wax worse when kindly treated,' halting also at Sardis, his own decoration the 'bonds' which are to him 'spiritual pearls,' and at Smyrna, writing letters which shall make him immortal.[68] At Troas, like another St. Paul, he looked upon the shores of the Europe which was in later ages to rise up and call them blessed; and from thence he wrote how prepared, how eager he was to meet the 'fire, the sword, the wild beasts,' how to be 'near to the sword was to be near to God; to be encircled by wild beasts was to be encircled by God.' And then Rome at last!--among those who thirsted for his blood, among those whose very love he dreaded lest it should do him the injury of keeping him from martyrdom. Touching is the appeal he had sent before him to the Church 'filled with the grace of God without wavering and filtered clear from every foreign stain':-- 'Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them I can attain unto God. I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ. Entice the wild beasts that they may become my sepulchre and may leave no part of my body behind, so that I may not, when I am fallen asleep, be burdensome to any one.' Into the colossal pile, erected for the display of the bloodiest of inhuman crimes, he was led; and his own impassioned appeal was answered: 'Come fire and cross, and grapplings with wild beasts! Come cuttings and manglings, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body! Come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me! Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ!' Men, with tear-stained faces, looked away from his death to 'form themselves'--as he had bidden them-- 'into a chorus in love and sing to the Father in Jesus Christ. God had vouchsafed that the Bishop from Syria should be found in the West, having summoned him from the East. Good was it to set from this world unto God, that he might rise unto Him.' Love is perhaps wrong in asserting that his remains were brought back to Antioch: it is unerringly right in having raised the Epistle to the Romans--'his paean prophetic of his coming victory'--to be the martyr's manual of a grateful posterity.