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Updated: May 14, 2025
It was conceived in the following terms: "That Thascius Cyprianus should be immediately beheaded, as the enemy of the gods of Rome, and as the chief and ringleader of a criminal association, which he had seduced into an impious resistance against the laws of the most holy emperors, Valerian and Gallienus."
At the first sound of the assault without and the first intimation of the treachery within, Vetranio, Thascius, and Marcus started from their couches; the remainder of the guests, incapable either of thought or action, lay, in stupid insensibility, awaiting their fate.
Stolid in their obstinate recklessness, stupefied by the spectacle of the startling perils menacing yet harmless, terrifying though transitory which surrounded them, neither of the senators moved a muscle or uttered a word, from the period when Thascius had fallen beneath the hunchback's attack, to the period when the last blow against the palace railings, and the last sound of voices from the street, had ceased in silence.
Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus, Bishop of Carthage from the year 248, though a pupil and an admirer of Tertullian, reverts in his own writings at once to orthodoxy and to an easy and copious diction.
Oh, admired friend, oh, rightly reasoning Thascius, say, is there anything in Rome which should delay thee on thy journey to the Elysian Fields?
'There, at my left, I discern the changed though still expressive countenance of the resolute Thascius, he who chastised a slave with a hundred lashes if his warm water was not brought immediately at his command; he whose serene contempt for every member of the human species by himself once ranked him among the greatest of human philosophers; even he now wanders through his palace unserved, and fawns upon the plebeian who will sell him a measure of wretched bran!
'No cannibals among the mob shall pollute the body of my poor boy! cried Vetranio, rousing himself from his short lethargy of grief. 'Ho! Thascius! Marcus! you who can yet stand! let us bear him to the funeral pile! He has died first his ashes shall be first consumed!
The hour has come; I go to fire the pile that involves in one common destruction our assassins and ourselves! 'Hold! exclaimed Thascius, snatching the torch from his hand; 'the entrance must first be defended, or, ere the flames are kindled, the slaves will be here! Whatever is movable couches, tables, corpses let us hurl them all against the door!
The tyrannic Thascius, regarding him with a scowl of drunken wrath, seized an empty vase, and poising it in his unsteady hand, prepared to hurl it at the hunchback's prostrate form, when again a single cry a woman's rising above the increasing uproar in the street, rang shrill and startling through the banqueting-hall.
Such, too, had been his friend Octavius; such Cæcilius, who even became one of the priests of the sect, and seduced others from the religion he had left. One of them had been the public talk for several years, and he too originally a rhetorician, Thascius Cyprianus of Carthage. It was the one thing which gave him some misgiving about that little Callista, that she was a Greek.
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