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The Martyr of the Catacombs was originally published in 1865 with the author listed as “An Anonymous Christian.” Later, this was revised to show James De Mille, a Canadian author and professor of English at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia (which means New Scotland because of all the settlers from Scotland), who lived from 1833 to 1880.
The Martyr of the Catacombs is a short novel, not much more than a novella, about 40,000 words in length (reading level middle to high school). The advantage of a shorter novel is that it can focus on a short span of time or space and only a few characters. This novel is focused on Marcellus, a captain in the Praetorian Guard, which was an elite military unit charged with the safety of Rome and the Emperor. He has been searching for truth all his adult life but is dissatisfied with Roman and Greek philosophy and pagan gods. The time span is only a month or two in the reign of the Roman Emperor Decius.
In his short reign (249 to 251 AD), the Emperor Decius tried to strengthen Roman religion, which had been the underpinning of the Empire for centuries, by requiring everyone to offer a small sacrifice to the “safety of the Empire.” At that time, there was complete merger of Roman pagan religion and state, with devotion to one demanding devotion to the other. Christians refused to offer such a sacrifice, rightly so, since Jesus is Lord, and suffered for it under an intense persecution pushed by Decius. Many thousands took refuge in the Catacombs, a series of tunnels under Rome where sand had been excavated for concrete construction and where many burials had taken place over the years.
Marcellus is drawn to the Christians through seeing how they died in the arena. He has been personally charged by the Emperor to hunt down the Christians in the Catacombs and destroy them if they won’t sacrifice to the Empire. He undertakes a trip into the Catacombs, not as a Roman officer but as a seeker, to investigate what the Christians really believed, since he doesn’t think the evil nonsense said about their religion could be true. That trip changes his life completely.
Like the best historical fiction, one is drawn into feeling what life was like for Marcellus and for these often-poor Roman Christians in 250 AD. We in the United States, due to our heritage, have made a haven for believers free of persecution for over 200 years. I hope that never changes for our country – but it could, unless we continue to exert ourselves, stay alert, and pray to God unceasingly to keep our religious freedom. Another book that has some similarities to this one, but is much longer, is Quo Vadis, which also has as its leading character a noble young Roman who encounters Christians in Emperor Nero’s Rome in about 60 AD. If The Martyr of the Catacombs moves you, then Quo Vadis will as well.