Here one thing follows so close on another, and in this house I feel so battered and storm-tossed, that I hardly know myself.

But old Phabis tells me that steps are being seriously taken to procure the title of Martyr for our father Apelles." "My mother is quite convinced that he died for the faith, and she loved him devotedly..." "Then it is so!" cried Demetrius, grinding his teeth and thumping his fist down on the table.

"The lies sown by one single man have produced a deadly weed that is smothering this miserable house! You--to be sure, what can you know of our father?
I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred.
Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was his companion wherever he went." "He admired the heathen poets, but he was a Christian all the same," replied Marcus.
"Neither more nor less than Porphyrius, our uncle, or myself," retorted his brother.

"Since the day when our grandfather Philippus was baptized, wealth and happiness have deserted this house.

He gave up the old gods solely that he might not lose the right of supplying the city and the Emperor with corn, and became a Christian and made his sons Christians.
But he had us educated by his heathen friends, and though we passed for Christians we were not so in fact.