The utter darkness, the heat, and the stench of this miserable place, in which the inmates were confined day and night, is often dwelt upon by the martyrs and their biographers. “After a few days,” says St. Perpetua, “we were taken to the prison, and I was frightened, for I never had known such darkness. O bitter day! the heat was excessive by reason of the crowd there.” In the Acts of St. Pionius, and others of Smyrna, we read that the jailers “shut them up in the inner part of the prison, so that, bereaved of all comfort and light, they were forced to sustain extreme torment, from the darkness and stench of the prison.” And, in like manner, other martyrs of Africa, about the time of St. Cyprian’s martyrdom, that is, eight or ten years later than the date of this story, say, “We were not frightened at the foul darkness of that place; for soon that murky prison was radiant with the brightness of the Spirit. What days, what nights we passed there no words can describe. The torments of that prison no statement can equal.”

Yet there was a place of confinement even worse than this. In the floor of this inner prison was a sort of trap-door, or hole, opening into the barathrum, or pit, and called, from the original prison at Rome, the Tullianum. Sometimes prisoners were confined here, sometimes despatched by being cast headlong into it through the opening. It was into this pit at Rome that St. Chrysanthus was cast; and there, and probably in other cities, it was nothing short of the public cesspool.

It may be noticed that the Prophet Jeremiah seems to have had personal acquaintance with Vestibule, Robur, and Barathrum. We read in one place of his being shut up in the “atrium,” that is, the vestibule, “of the prison, which was in the house of the king.” At another time he is in the “ergastulum,” which would seem to be the inner prison. Lastly his enemies let him down by ropes into the lacus or pit, in which “there was no water, but mud.”

As to Callista, then, after the first day’s examination, she was thrown for nearly twenty-four hours into the stifling Robur, or inner prison. After the sentence, on the second day, she was let down, as the commencement of her punishment, that is, of her martyrdom, into the loathsome Barathrum, lacus, or pit, called Tullianum, there to lie for another twenty hours before she was brought out to the equuleus or rack.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE MARTYRDOM.

Callista had sighed for the bright and clear atmosphere of Greece, and she was thrown into the Robur and plunged into the Barathrum of Sicca. But in reality, though she called it Greece, she was panting after a better country and a more lasting home, and this country and home she had found. She was now setting out for it.