Content sponsored by Homo Legens.
The night was cold and it was raining over the Roman Forum. Next to the magistrate’s chair, nailed to a board that held up a pillar, hung a parchment written in large letters: the edict of Diocletian and Maximian against the Christians, which the city was to discover at dawn. It was guarded by a gigantic Dacian sentinel, ordered to run through with his spear anyone who approached without giving the watchword. Two men approached. One was a centurion of enormous strength; the other, a tall, slender youth. A quarter of an hour later they were back in a house in the Suburra, laughing, with the edict crumpled in their hands. They threw it into the fire.
The scene belongs to Fabiola, the novel that Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman published in 1854 and that for more than a century was found in almost every Catholic family library. Homo Legens brought it back in 2021, in a translation with a foreword by Ignacio Peyró. It deserves to be read with adult eyes: behind the catacomb serial there is much real history and some well-calculated liberties.
The youth is Pancratius, a Christian teenager, the son of a martyr; the centurion is Quadratus, an officer of the cohort commanded by the tribune Sebastian. Before leaving, Wiseman recounts, they stop at the house of the old gravedigger Diogenes, order a dinner that will serve as their alibi, and Pancratius asks the old man to tell him how Saint Lawrence died, whom he claims to have seen on the grill. The boy declares himself weak, with nothing to offer but his good will. That same night he proves the opposite.
The man responsible for the edict is Corvinus, the novel’s villain, who has taken extreme precautions because disturbing news has arrived from the East: in Nicomedia, Diocletian’s capital, a Christian soldier has torn down and broken the imperial edict. Corvinus has it nailed up at dawn, surrounds the Forum with Pannonian soldiers, and chooses a watchword that, he believes, no Christian would dare to pronounce: “the divinity of the emperors.” In Latin, Numen Imperatorum.
That is the charm of the episode. At dawn, Corvinus finds the board bare and the Dacian impassive. The sentinel’s spear lies broken in two and his sword glints on a neighboring roof. The giant, who never went to school, swears that they did ask him for the watchword and that he was given it clearly: Nomen Imperatorum, the name of the emperors. A single letter separates the idolatrous formula from the innocent one, and the barbarian does not care. Quadratus did not have to lie or worship anyone: it was enough for him to change a vowel. Wiseman, who in another chapter stresses that the Christians of that Rome kept their secret without ever resorting to lies, resolves the dilemma with a smile.
The following morning is a small treatise on how a rumor is born. In the baths, some claim they found the sentinel dead from twenty-seven stab wounds; others, that two witches made him fly with magic powders to the roof of the Basilica Aemilia. A pedantic philosopher explains the recipe, based on lentils gathered when the sun is in Libra, and concludes that Christians are capable of anything.
The prank has a price. Next to the pillar, Corvinus has found a small knife he recognizes: it belonged to an old schoolmate. That discovery sets in motion the personal persecution against Pancratius, which will end in the amphitheater, before Emperor Maximian, in some of the book’s most memorable pages.
How much truth is there in all this? More than it seems. The Nicomedia incident is historical: on February 23, 303, the great church of the city was torn down and the next day the first edict of persecution was published. Eusebius of Caesarea recounts that a Christian of high rank tore it down and broke it into pieces; Lactantius, who also records it, disapproves of the gesture. Neither gives his name: the ancient martyrologies call him John, and a later tradition wanted to see in him Saint George, which is the one the novelist follows. Pancratius also existed. According to tradition, he was a fourteen-year-old Roman martyr, killed in the persecution of Diocletian around the year 304 and buried on the Via Aurelia, where the basilica that bears his name still stands. What no source attributes to the saint is the night in the Forum: Wiseman transfers the audacity of Nicomedia to Rome and gives it to the teenager. Nor does he stick to tradition in the martyrdom, which speaks of beheading: the novel brings him before the beasts.
The author knew what he was talking about. Born in Seville in 1802 and educated in Rome, in 1850 he became the first Archbishop of Westminster after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England, and conceived Fabiola in part as a response to Hypatia, Charles Kingsley’s anti-Catholic novel. Peyró recalls in the foreword that in Spain it was reviewed by Fernán Caballero and that Ana Ozores reads it in La Regenta.
The night of the edict is only one chapter of a novel that features Agnes, Tarsicius and Master Cassian, the conversion of a skeptical patrician woman and the secret of a slave that is not revealed until the end. It reads as what it was for several generations: an adventure with martyrs and, along the way, a way of learning who they were.
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Section sponsored by Homo Legens Fabiola Cardinal Wiseman · Bibliotheca Homo Legens · 9,90 € |
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