As the attempt had failed, the Prefect sent an executioner to kill her with the sword. Her beauty, youth, and grace, so affected the man that, although he smote thrice at her throat, he did not kill her. It was against the law to strike more than thrice, so he left her prostrate on the mosaic floor bathed in her blood. No sooner was the executioner gone than from all sides poured in her relatives, the slaves, and the faithful to see her, and to receive the last sigh of the Martyr. They found her lying on the marble pavement, half conscious only, and they dipped their kerchiefs in her blood, and endeavoured to staunch the wounds in her throat. She lingered two days and nights in the same condition, and without moving, hanging between life and death; and then—so say the Acts—Pope Urban arrived, braving the risk, from his hiding-place, to say farewell to his dear daughter in the Faith. Thereupon she turned to him, commended to him the care of the poor, entreated her father to surrender his house to the Church, and expired. In the Acts she addresses the Pope as “Your Beatitude,” an expression used in the fifth century, and certainly not in the third. She died, as she had lain, her face to the ground, her hands and arms declining on the right, as she rested on that side. The same night her body was enclosed in a cypress chest, and was conveyed to the cemetery of S. Callixtus, where Urban laid it in a chamber “near that in which reposed his brother prelates and martyrs.” So far the legend. Now let us see whether it is possible to reconcile it with history. In the first place, it is to be observed that the whole of the difficulty lies with Urban being Pope. If we suppose that in the original Acts the name was simply “Urban the Bishop,” and that the remodeller of the Acts took the liberty of transforming him into Pope Urban, the difficulty vanishes at once. He may have been some regionary bishop in hiding. He may not have been a bishop at all, but a priest; and the writer, ignorant of history, and knowing only of the Urbans as Popes, may have given rise to all this difficulty by transforming him into a Pope. Now, in the Acts, the Prefect does not speak of the Emperor, but of “Domini nostri invictissimi principes” (our Lords the unconquered Princes). The Emperor, therefore, cannot have been Alexander. Now, Ado the martyrologist, in or about 850, must have referred to other Acts than those we possess, for he enters S. Cæcilia as having suffered under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus—that is to say, in 177. This explains the Prefect referring to the orders of the Princes. If we take this as the date, and Urban as being a priest or bishop of the time, the anachronisms are at an end. That the Acts should have been in Greek is no proof that they were not drawn up in Rome, for Greek was the language of the Church there, and indeed the majority of the most ancient inscriptions in the Catacombs are in that language.