Virgin Saints and MartyrsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Virgin Saints and Martyrs
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Christian women saints; Martyrs
That night Lysimachus could not eat or speak at supper, and Selenus
forced himself to riotous mirth and drunk hard.
We cannot quite trust what follows. It was too tempting to a copyist to
allow the governor to go away unchastised. Perhaps it is true that in a
drunken and angry fit Selenus, pacing the room storming, slipped on the
polished pavement, and in falling hit his head against a pillar—with the
result that he never spoke again, having congestion of the brain, and
died next day. It is quite possible that this may be true. If it were an
interpolation by a copyist, he would have killed him by fire falling
from heaven and consuming him—that was the approved way with the
re-writers of the Acts of Martyrs.
When Constantine became Emperor both the young men were baptised,
retired into solitude and embraced the monastic life.
The name of Febronia is in the Greek, Coptic and Abyssinian Kalendars.
The simple and apparently quite trustworthy account of her death was by
Thomais, the nun who saw her die, and had known her all her short life.
[Illustration: THE DAUGHTER OF CONSTANTINE.]
V
_THE DAUGHTER OF CONSTANTINE_
Constantia, whose name does not appear in the Roman Kalendar, but which
has found its way into several unauthorised lists of the Saints, is
chiefly known through the Acts of S. Agnes. Little or nothing reliable
is recorded concerning her, and her story would not have been included
in this collection, were it not for two circumstances—one, that two of
the most interesting monuments of Old Rome are associated with her name,
one directly, the other indirectly; and next, that a caution, very
desirable of being exercised, may be learned from a consideration of her
story—not to cast over as utterly fabulous and worthless the legends
that come down to us of the Saints of early times, because they are
stuffed with unhistorical and ridiculous incidents and marvels. Let us
now see very briefly what the _legend_ is concerning Constantia.
She was the daughter of Constantine the Great, and was afflicted with a
distressing disease, supposed at the time to be leprosy, but which was
in all probability scrofula.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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