• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 295 0

Saba was tortured on the spot. First driven through thorny thickets, then lashed to the axles of a wagon and flogged through the night, he defied his tormentors in the approved manner of one born to martyrdom. A friendly village servant freed him and fed him, but the tortures continued on the following day, when Sansalas and Saba were ordered by Atharidus’ men to consume meat that had been sacrificed. Saba naturally refused and was finally condemned to die, on 12 April 372. The soldiers chosen to drown him in the river Musaios, perhaps the Buzaǔ, seriously considered him setting him free: they thought him simple-minded for rejoicing at his coming martyrdom and reasoned that Atharidus would never find out if they just let him go. But Saba, insisting that he could see an army of saints waiting beyond the river to welcome him into heaven, urged them to their duty. So ‘they took him down to the water, threw him in and, pressing a beam against his neck, pushed him to the bottom and held him there’. It may have been Sansalas who set down in writing the account of Saba’s martyrdom.[122]

Other Gothic Martyrs and the Motives for Persecution

Saba was not the only martyr in this persecution. As St. Jerome put it in his chronicle entry for 369, ‘Aithanaric king of the Goths persecuted Christians, killed many and drove them from their own lands to the lands of the empire’.[123] Quite a few of these martyrs are recorded by name, in several different sources. Of particular significance is the list of martyrs remembered at Cyzicus in Asia Minor, where relics were deposited by Dulcilla, the daughter of an otherwise unknown Gothic queen named Gaatha. Among these martyrs we find the priests Bathouses and Wereka, their unnamed children, the monk Arpulas, eleven named Gothic men, and seven named Gothic women, all killed at the command of the Gothic leader Wiguric.[124] Other names are known from less reliable sources, but the drift of the evidence is clear: while some Gothic leaders favoured Christianity and tried to preserve the memory of their local martyrs, many also supported Athanaric’s persecution.

We have already seen why Athanaric might rationally have regarded Gothic Christianity as a threat that needed to be stamped out. Yet in the face of this essentially political explanation, it is worth pointing out that some of his followers will have supported him out of genuine conviction. The story of Saba makes that clear: in the first of his several confrontations with Gothic authorities, Saba was exhorted to eat the sacrificial meat in order to save his soul. Unless this is merely a Christian gloss put on the confrontation by an ecclesiastical author, it would seem that some Goths regarded Christianity not just as a threat to the Gothic state, but also to the spiritual health of converts. All the same, it would be hard to deny that political fears were the foremost motive for persecution. The enthusiasm of leaders like Rothesteus and Wiguric shows that well below the level of the iudex Athanaric, it was feared that Christians might form a fifth column more sympathetic to the empire than to pagan Gothic leaders.

That some members of the Gothic aristocracy had converted only made matters worse, for they were in a position to treat with the Roman empire where a man like Saba was not. Emperors were only too keen to encourage dissension among barbarian neighbours, and Athanaric’s defeat had damaged his authority, however much face he saved by the peaceful compromise that ended the war. As we have seen, the church historian Socrates reports that Valens used the peace to evangelize the Goths. Socrates also reports that the Tervingian chief Fritigern was one of those converted, that his Christianity caused him to go to war with Athanaric, and that some Roman soldiers were sent to aid Fritigern before the two Gothic leaders made peace. The conversion story is corroborated by Fritigern’s probable commemoration in a later Gothic liturgical calendar, though the Gothic civil war is known only from Socrates.[125] Yet it too is plausible. The