But this is not the only church that bears the name of S. Agnes: there is another in Rome itself, opposite the Torre Mellina, on the site of her martyrdom, in the Piazza Navona, which occupies the place of the old circus of Domitian. It is a very ugly building of 1642, but contains a tolerable representation, in relief, of the martyrdom of the saint. Unfortunately we have not got the Acts of the martyrdom of S. Agnes in their original form. It was the custom of the Church to have scribes present at the interrogation and death of a martyr, who took down in shorthand the questions put and the answers made, and the sentence of the judge. These records, which were of the highest value, were preserved in the archives of the Roman Church. Unhappily, at a later age, such very simple accounts, somewhat crude maybe in style, and entirely deficient in the miraculous, did not suit the popular taste. Meanwhile the stories of the martyrs had been passed from mouth to mouth, and various additions had been made to give them a smack of romance; the account of the deaths was embellished with marvels, and made excruciating by the piling up of tortures; and then the popular voice declared that the persecutors must have been punished at once; so it was fabled that lightning fell and consumed them, or that the earth opened and swallowed them. Now, when the Acts of Martyrs were found to contain nothing of all this, then writers set to work—not with the intention of deceiving, but with the idea that the genuine Acts were defective—to recompose the stories, by grafting into the original narrative all the rubbish that had passed current in popular legend. Thus it has come to pass that so few of the Acts of the Martyrs, as we have them, are in their primitive form. They have been more or less stuffed out with fabulous matter. The Acts of S. Agnes are in this condition, although not so grossly meddled with as some others have been. That she was a real martyr, and that the broad outlines of her story are true, there can be no doubt. The martyrdom took place during the reign of Diocletian. In 304 he was in Italy. He had come to Rome the preceding year to celebrate the twentieth year of the reign of his colleague, Maximian, and at the same time the triumph over the Persians. He left Rome in ill humour at the independence of the citizens, after having been accustomed to the servility of the Easterns; the day was December 20th, and he went to Ravenna. The weather was cold and wet, and he was chilled, so that he suffered all the rest of the winter, and became irritable as his health failed. However, he went back to Rome; and at this time several martyrdoms ensued, as that of S. Soteris, a virgin of the noble family from which sprang S. Ambrose, also the boy Pancras, and S. Sebastian. But the most notable was Agnes. She was aged only thirteen, and was the daughter of noble and wealthy parents, who were, as already said, Christians.