Prof. F. C. Conybeare of University College, Oxford, describes conditions of that age in his translation of the _Apology and Acts of Apollonius and Other Monuments of Christianity_, as follows:
“The obvious way of scotching a foul demon was to smash his idols; and we find that an enormous number of martyrs earned their crown in this manner, especially in the third century, when their rapidly increasing numbers rendered them bolder and more ready to make a display of their intolerance.
[Illustration: HEAD OF THE VENUS OF MILO.
Sometimes the good sense or the worldly prudence of the Church intervened to set limits to so favorite a way of courting martyrdom; and at the Synod of Elvira, c. A. D. 305, a canon was passed, declaring the practice to be one not met with in the Gospel nor recorded of any of the Apostles, and denying to those who in future resorted to it the honors of martyrdom. But in spite of this, the most popular of the saints were those who had resorted to such violence and earned their death by it; and as soon as Christianity fairly got the upper hand in the fourth century, the wrecking of temples and the smashing of the idols of the demons became a most popular amusement with which to grace a Christian festival. As we turn over the pages of the martyrologies, we wonder that any ancient statues at all escaped those senseless outbursts of zealotry.”
It must have been in one of these “outbursts of zealotry” that one of the temples of Aphrodite was attacked and the statue of the goddess brutally assaulted. The mutilated statue presumably lay prone upon the ground at the foot of its pedestal at the overturned altar, and had to suffer under the clubs of fanatical zealots. When night broke in and the rioters sought their homes, the few friends of paganism, perhaps the priests, perhaps some well-to-do philosophers and admirers of the ancient Greek civilization, came to the rescue. They met stealthily at the place of the tumult and with the assistance of
[Illustration: HEAD OF THE VENUS OF MILO.
their servants had the statue carried away down to a ship at anchor in the harbor. Before the riot could be renewed on the next morning the ship set sail for the island of Milo where the devotees of the goddess may have had friends, or where possibly one of their own number possessed a farm. There they hid the statue, and it is certain that the act of concealment was done in the greatest haste, for it was only lightly covered over, and a mark, discovered later on by careful investigation of the place of hiding, was scratched into the curbstone on the wayside to indicate the spot.