[Previous: lines 1-30]
The Romans are hastening the deaths of those crucified men not yet dead.
Dixerat: ille gradus montis contendit in altos;------------
cuisese comitem iungit Nicodemus, et ipse
multùm animo cari concussus funere amici.
Iamque propinquabant paribus vestigia curis
figentes, unde infaustus de colle videri [35]
iam poterat locus: ecce autem fulgentia circùm
arma vident, cinctumque armato milite clivum.
Nam, ne luce sacra pendentia corpora truncis
solennem funestarent laetae urbis honorem.
Primorum missu armati venere ministri, [40]
semineces qui stipitibus de more refixos
hoc ipso injectâ tumularent vertice arenâ.
Stabant, supplicium meritum qui hinc inde luebant
semianimes, et adhuc spirantes funere in ipso
optabant duros leto finire labores; [45]
et montem implebant lacrymosis vocibus omnem.
Protinus hinc atque hinc longis hastilibus instant
armati, franguntque viris tabentia crura,
et miseris mortem properant, trabibusque refigunt;
deinde cavâ infodiunt projecta cadavera terrâ. [50]
At simul exanimem, qui nostra ob crimina pœnas
pendebat, videre, manum abstinuere, nec ultrà
sunt passi saevire in cassum lumine corpus,
mirati properos obitus, collapsaque membra
tam citò, et ora modis jam tum pallentia miris. [55]
Quidam etiam vidisse ferunt pendere per auras
cœlivagos juvenes feralia robora circum
plaudentes alis, niveaque in veste coruscos
divinum multo stillantem è vulnere rorem
suscipere, et superas pateris perferre sub oras. [60]
Hic ausus solus, lato cui lancea ferro,
longinus sanctos violare ignobilis artus:
irruit, et longa transverberat abjete costas.
Intepuit ferrum, sanctum ebibit hasta cruorem:
vulnere quo perhibent bicoloris fluminis instar [65]
et purum laticem, et rorem exiliisse rubentem:
diluta est humus, erubuerunt gramina circùm.
He spoke, and hastened up to the high ground,------------
accompanied by Nicodemus, also
badly shaken by the death of his dearest friend.
Equally worried, they struggled upward
to that ill-omened place where he was pinioned. [35]
And there it was, thronged with gleaming weapons
of soldiers who surrounded that eminence.
It was a holy day and the hanging bodies
had to be removed to not stain the city.
Armed guards had come to take men off their [40]
beams, some half-dead, never to recover,
and bury them there, covering them with sand.
The two who had paid the just price for their crimes
still lived, barely, gasping out their final breath
praying for death to end their labour, and [45]
filling the hill with the sound of their lamentation.
With their staffs the soldiers dealt with first one
then the other, breaking their weakened legs
hastening their death—pulled them from the beams
and buried their bodies in the hollowed earth. [50]
But when they saw Him who died for our sins
hanging there, spared a lingering death and its
suffering, they did no further violence
but only marvelled he’d departed his life
so fast, admired the wisdom in his pale face. [55]
Some even said they glimpsed beings hovering in the air
a skybright entourage of youths around him
in glittering white robes, hovering above
catching the blood that dripped from his wounds
in chalices and carrying it back to heaven. [60]
Only one dared to wield a spear of iron—
bad Longinus—to violate his holy body
deeply piercing his ribs with his long spear
The iron tip heated as it drained holy blood
and a two-coloured flood gushed from the wound [65]
formed of clear water and showering scarlet
washing the ground and reddening the grass.
The two mentioned in line 45 are, of course, the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus. The soldiers in line 47 finish off the not-quite-dead crucified with hastilia, that is, with the long spears or javelins carried by a more senior military officer. A hastile was not a throwing-spear (that was a pilum) but a longer staff carried by higher ranks of officer and symbolic of those ranks, although it could also be used as a weapon if need be. Breaking the legs of the crucified was a usual Roman practice to hasten death: they even had a word for it—crurifragium.
Then Vida gives us the celebrated ‘Spear of Destiny’: mentioned in the Gospel of John (19:31–37), though not the Synoptic Gospels. To make sure that he was dead, a Roman soldier (not named in John, although later tradition identified him as Longinus) stabbed Jesus in the side:
One of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance (λόγχη), and immediately there came out blood and water. [John 19:34]This double-stream is of the greatest importance to Catholic doctrine:
The phenomenon of blood and water was considered a miracle by Origen. Catholics, while accepting the biological reality of blood and water as emanating from the pierced heart and body cavity of Christ, also acknowledge the allegorical interpretation: it represents one of the main key teachings/mysteries of the Church, and one of the main themes of the Gospel of Matthew, which is the homoousian interpretation adopted by the First Council of Nicaea, that ‘Jesus Christ was both true God and true man.’ The blood symbolizes his humanity, the water his divinity. A ceremonial evocation of this is found in a Catholic Mass: The priest pours a small amount of water into the wine before the consecration, an act which acknowledges Christ's humanity and divinity and recalls the issuance of blood and water from Christ's side on the cross.Longinus gets his name from the Gospel of Nicodemus (the name is probably Latinized from the Greek λόγχη, the word used for the lance mentioned in John). According to later Christian tradition the miraclulous blood-and-water stream prompted him to reform his wicked (ignobilis, line 62) ways and become not only a Christian but, eventually, a saint. There's a splendidly outré statue of Saint Longinus, by Bernini, in Saint Peter's Basilica: you can see him holding his hastile:
The Spear of Destiny (my sensibility has been so shaped by 1980s pop music as to prefer this appellation to the more standard ‘Holy Lance’) was a notable medieval relic. It's in the Vatican today. Which is to say one of it is. In 1357 Sir John Mandeville reported having seen the blade of the Holy Lance both at Paris and at Constantinople, and that the latter was a much larger relic than the former. Other lances are held at Nuremberg, in Armenia, in Instanbul and elsewhere.
At the head of this post: a fresco by Fra Angelico (c 1440), in the Dominican monastery at San Marco, Florence, showing the lance piercing the side of Jesus on the cross.
[Next: lines 68-98]
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