Carmena
Carmena or Carma lives in either Phrygia or Pisidia. Here he was employed on the irrigation canals of an imperial estate. The details of the story seem puzzling: the prefect’s arrival in Magydos only to find an empty city; the search in the surrounding areas, and the seizure of the elderly laborer to ‘answer for all the Christians’.
The Roman Martyrology makes Conon a martyr under Decius, and this may be close to the truth; but with the undoubted fictional elements in the martyrdom, it would seem useless to attempt any closer approximation. The prominence in the story of the unnamed temple verger, and the insistence on the imperial edict to sacrifice (without any further specification) would incline one to assign the date, if any to Decius rather than Valerian and Gallienus. But the account, on the whole, however moving, does not commend itself from the historical point of view, and it would seem very likely to be a composition of the post‑Constantinian period.
The Martyrdom of Marian and James present us with similar problems. Composed about the same time, both affect the florid, rhetorical style that recalls the African elocutio novella of an earlier day; this serves to sharpen the interest of what might have been an otherwise dull record. What is more serious is the deliberate intention in each of the acta to emulate the qualities of the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, with the result that some scholars have had serious doubts about the authenticity of both the later documents. In any case, though the style of each martyrdom is different, it may be that a single hand (or, rather, a single community) was at work in the final publication of both.
The details of the acta of Marian and James are complicated in the extreme. While travelling through Numidia, James, a deacon, Marian, a lector, and the anonymous author (either a layman or a cleric in minor orders) stop at Muguae, a suburb of the city of Cirta in Numidia. At the same time, the governor of the province, the legatus (probably of the legio IIIAugusta)31 at Lambaesa, had sent a detachment under a centurion to arrest the bishops Agapius and Secundinus, who had just returned from exile under Valerian’s first decree. On their journey they stopped off at Muguae with the Christians there; two days later, Marian, James, and the author are also arrested and brought to trial under the local magistrate at Cirta. After their imprisonment, during which the martyrs see a series of prophetic visions reminiscent of the Maryrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas (5, 6, 7, 8), they are sent off to the legatus at Lambaesa. The author had presumably been freed, as not falling under the Valerian edicts.
In short, the early Christian martyr stories can be inspiring. So can the Christian classics, ranging from the Didache to the Practice of the Presence of God.
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