The life of St Agnes of Rome
Brought before the city prefect and pressed to deny her faith, Agnes would not, and she was condemned to public humiliation and then to death.
Later tradition tells that attempts to burn her at the stake failed and that she was finally killed by the sword, still only twelve or thirteen years old. She was buried by her own family in a field outside the city, over which a church was later built in her honor. Agnes was already venerated as a saint within a generation of her death, and fourth-century bishops wrote of her steadfastness as a model for the whole Church, though the more vivid and miraculous details that later grew up around her story, various signs and wonders during her ordeal, are the work of later devotional writers rather than eyewitness history. Her memory as one of the Church's youngest and most beloved martyrs has endured for over a thousand years.
