as) in company
with Polycarp in Asia Minor.... I can tell the very place in
which the blessed Polycarp used to sit when he discoursed,
his goings out and comings in, his manner of life and his
personal appearance, his discourses which he gave to the
people, and his description of his intercourse with John,
and the rest of those who had seen the Lord.'[92]

Those were reminiscences and lessons never forgotten by the future
Bishop of Lyons. To him, as to 'all the churches of Asia and to the
successors of Polycarp' himself, the pupil of St. John was 'a much more
trustworthy and safe witness of the truth than Valentinus and Marcion,
and all such wrong-minded men.'[93]

The end came at last. A persecution was raging; how or why we know not.
All that can be known is told in the 'Letter of the Smyrnaeans.'[94] The
simplicity and pathos of the story, as told by this ancient document, so
moved the great Scaliger, that he felt hardly master of himself. We
cannot tell the tale of triumph in better words than in those of that
exquisite piece of ecclesiastical antiquity. The great annual festival
was being held at Smyrna, presided over by the Asiarch and 'high
priest'[95] Philip, a wealthy citizen of the wealthy Tralles, and graced
by the presence of the Proconsul Statius Quadratus. The persecutor had
asked for blood, and blood had been granted him. Already several
victims, Philadelphians, 'so torn by lashes that the mechanism of their
flesh was visible even as far as the inward veins and arteries,' had
'endured patiently;' showing to the weeping bystanders such bravery that
the explanation became current--'(these) martyrs of Christ being
tortured, were absent from the flesh, or rather the Lord was standing by
and conversing with them.' Others 'condemned to the wild beasts, endured
fearful punishments, being made to lie on sharp shells and buffeted with
other forms of manifold tortures, that the devil might, if possible, by
the persistence of the punishment bring them to a denial; for he tried
many wiles against them.' Men remembered afterwards how 'the right noble
Germanicus,' scorning the pity the Proconsul would have extended to his
youth, 'used violence, and dragged the wild beast towards him.' Such
bravery, 'the bravery of the God-fearing and God-beloved people of the
Christians,' only whetted the pagan thirst for blood. There rang out the
shout, 'Away with the atheists![96] Let search be made for