The life of St Mark of Anthusa
He was not, in his younger years, free from error himself, having gone along for a time with the Arian party in one of its milder forms and put his name to one of their creeds, a thing the Church did not forget of him even as it came to honor him.
When Julian turned the empire back toward paganism, some of the people of Mark's own city fell away with it, and those who hated him for the temple he had destroyed years before saw their chance. He hid from them at first, then came out and gave himself up when he heard how many others were being tortured in the search for him. What they did to him afterward was terrible and drawn out: his hair torn out, his body cut and dragged through the streets, thrown in a swamp, squeezed in a press, his ears cut through with cord, and at the end his body smeared with honey and hung out in a basket in the sun for the insects to find, all of which he seemed hardly to feel. The record does not say plainly that this killed him. What is remembered instead is that he did not break, and that in his last years he was spoken of as a man restored to the fullness of the faith he had once let slip.
