The abject Senate, when they learned that the whole matter was thus concluded, decreed that offerings should be made at the temples, as a thanksgiving for the deliverance of the emperor from the dangers which had threatened him through the conspiracy of his wife. Tacitus declares that he records this circumstance "in order that all those who shall read the calamities of those times, as they are delivered by me or any other authors, may conclude, by anticipation, that as often as a banishment or a murder was perpetrated by the prince's orders, so often thanks were offered to the gods; and those acts which in former times were resorted to in order that prosperous occurrences might be distinguished, were now made the tokens of public disasters."
These were the days of the martyrs. During this reign, the burning bodies of Christians lighted the gardens of the malevolent tyrant, innocent women and tender girls were exposed to fierce beasts in the arena, and by their sufferings were made to contribute interest to a Roman holiday. These died for their faith. They died gladly, in the belief that their pains and faithfulness were to be rewarded with an unfading crown in a land beyond the skies. They cheered each other in the face of death, and they were comforted by those friends who were still at liberty with the promise of a meeting where no tyrant's hand could harm them. Octavia was not of this faith. It is probable that she knew nothing of the strange doctrines which were making converts among the Roman slaves. Yet there was no martyr more innocent than herself, none more worthy of canonization. There was none whose purity and whose fidelity to the principles which were cherished by high souls could present a better claim for the victor's palm and the martyr's crown than her own. Octavia knew nothing of the Christian hope of immortality; her religious faith at the best could teach her no more than the vague surmise that possibly in some dreary under world the shades of mortals retained a melancholy consciousness. Yet a consistent justice at the present day cannot do other than place side by side the persecuted girl from the imperial palace and the Christian slave maiden whose blood dripped from the jaws of the beasts of the arena, and believe that whatever consolation eternal fate provided for the one was equally shared in by the other.