OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
91
and, in the presence of the whole province, deprived the guilty of their right hands and their tongues. But the holy confessors continued to speak without tongues; and this miracle is attested by Victor, an African bishop, who published an history of the persecution [A.D. 486-7] within two years after the event.[1] "If any one," says Victor, "should doubt of the truth, let him repair to Constantinople, and listen to the clear and perfect language of Restitutus, the subdeacon, one of these glorious sufferers, who is now lodged in the palace of the emperor Zeno, and is respected by the devout empress." At Constantinople we are astonished to find a cool, a learned, an unexceptionable witness, without interest, and without passion, Æneas of Gaza, a Platonic philosopher, has accurately described his own observations on these African sufferers. [A.D. 487] "I saw them myself: I heard them speak: I diligently enquired by what means such an articulate voice could be formed without any organ of speech: I used my eyes to examine the report of my ears: I opened their mouth, and saw that the whole tongue had been completely torn away by the roots, an operation which the physicians generally suppose to be mortal."[2] The testimony of Æneas of Gaza might be confirmed by the superfluous evidence of the emperor Justinian, in a perpetual edict; of count Marcellinus, in his Chronicle of the times; and of Pope Gregory I., who had resided at Constantinople, as the minister of the Roman pontiff.[3] They all lived within the compass of a century; and they all appeal to their personal knowledge, or the public notoriety, for the truth of a miracle which was repeated in several instances, displayed on the greatest theatre of the world, and submitted, during a series of years, to the calm examination of the senses. This
- ↑ Victor Vitensis, v. 6, p. 76. Ruinart, p. 483-487.
- ↑ Æneas Gazæus in Theophrasto, in Biblioth. Patrum. tom. viii. p. 664, 665. He was a Christian, and composed this Dialogue (the Theophrastus) on the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body; besides twenty-five Epistles, still extant. See Cave (Hist. Litteraria, p. 297) and Fabricius (Bibl. Græc. tom. i. p. 422). [The date of the composition of the Theophrastus was A.D. 487.]
- ↑ Justinian, Codex, l. i. tit. xxvii. [1]. Marcellin. in Chron. p. 45, in Thesaur. Temporum Scaliger [ad. ann. 484; ed. Mommsen, p. 93]. Procopius, de Bell. Vandal. l. i. c. 7, p. 196. Gregor. Magnus. Dialog. iii. 32. None of these witnesses have specified the number of the confessors, which is fixed at sixty in an old menology (apud Ruinart, p. 486). Two of them lost their speech by fornication; but the miracle is enhanced by the singular instance of a boy who had never spoken before his tongue was cut out. [The miracle of Tipasa has been recently defended by the Jesuit Count Paul von Hoensbroech (1889), but the evidence has been criticised and rejected by Görres in the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, 36, p. 494 sqq., 1894. It is amusing to observe that Görres imagines that Gibbon, for once credulous, accepts the miracle of Tipasa!]
