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the heathen supposed to rule the different heavenly bodies, such as Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, to move as if they were endued with life. Now this monarch, whose name was Khosru, was as ambitious as he was wicked. He sent a great army to overrun the Holy Land, massacre the monks at Mar-Saba, and then take Jerusalem. They slew every human being in the city, and having destroyed all the churches and carried off everything of value, including the true Cross which had been enclosed in a strong chest and sealed up by the Patriarch of Jerusalem some time before the arrival of the invaders, they returned to their own country. The skulls of the recluses martyred at Mar-Saba, are shown there to this day. The Persians were obliged to leave Jerusalem, where they had slain 60,000 persons, because of the stench arising from the vast number of unburied corpses. As there was no one to inter the fallen, God inspired a lion with pity for the remains of His servants slain by the pagans; and the wild beast not only drove off all others which would have devoured the dead, but actually conveyed their corpses, one by one, to this cavern which was originally very deep, and had a hundred steps leading down into it, and laid them there reverently, side by side.[1] Several hundred years later St Mamilla erected a church on the spot, and there prayers used to be said daily for the repose of the souls of the martyrs buried in the cave. In connection with this story, it may be worthy of notice that in several legends of Palestinian saints, lions figure in a remarkable manner. Thus St Jerome (died a.d. 410) is, in medieval art, very frequently represented in the company of a lion whose wounded paw the saint had healed in the desert of Chalcis, and who, in gratitude, became Jerome’s faithful servant and protector.[2] In like manner, visitors to the convent of Mar-Saba are shown the cave where the founder of that monastery took up his abode with a lion, the former tenant, and are gravely told that when the saint ex-

  1. ↑ According to Williams’ “Holy City,” vol. i. p. 303, this legend is first mentioned by Eugesippus about a.p. 1120, and is introduced in order to account for the name by which the cavern was then known, namely “Caverna” or “Spelunca Leonis,” as William of Tyre writes when mentioning the adjacent pool. In a tract by an earlier writer, supposed by Williams to have been Modestus, there is a statement to the effect that the pious care of “a Nicodemus and a Magdalen” provided for the decent sepulture of those slain by the Persians. The name of the man is said to have been Thomas; whilst a third version of the legend makes out that the corpses were buried by an aged woman and her female dog. Quite a different story is that the bodies buried in this cave were those of the Holy Innocents.
  2. ↑ See Prothero’s “The Psalms in Human Life,” p. 27.
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