,) was distinguished in
those parts for his zeal in propagating the faith, and for the sanctity
of his life. His reputation reached the governor, who sent an Irenarch
to apprehend him. The martyr was conducted to Perge, and there
crucified, in imitation of the Redeemer of the world, whom he preached.
His triumph happened in 250. His Latin Acts, given by the Bollandists,
are to be corrected by those in Greek, found among the manuscript acts
of Saints, honored by the Greeks in the month of February in the king's
library at Paris, Cod. 1010, written in the tenth century.

{482}

ST. ALNOTH, ANCHORET, M.

WEDON, in Northamptonshire, was honored with a palace of Wulphere, king
of Mercia, in the middle of England, and was bestowed by that prince
upon his daughter St. Wereburge, who converted it into a monastery.
Alnoth was the bailiff of St. Wereburge in that country, and the perfect
imitator of her heroic virtues. After her retreat he led an anchoretical
life in that neighborhood, and was murdered by robbers in his solitude.
His relics were kept with veneration in the church of the village of
Stow, near Wedon. Wilson places his festival on the 27th of February, in
the first edition of his English Martyrology, and in the second on the
25th of November. See the life of St. Wereburge, which Camden sent to F.
Rosweide, written, as it seems, by Jocelin. See also Harpsfield, Saec. 7,
c. 23, and Bollandus, p. 684.

FEBRUARY XXVIII.

MARTYRS, WHO DIED IN THE GREAT PESTILENCE IN ALEXANDRIA.

From Eusebius, Hist. l. 7, c. 21, 22, p. 268.

A.D. 261, 262, 263.

A VIOLENT pestilence laid waste the greatest part of the Roman empire
during twelve years, from 249 to 263. Five thousand persons died of it
in one day in Rome, in 262. St. Dionysius of Alexandria relates, that a
cruel sedition and civil war had filled that city with murders and
tumults; so that it was safer to travel from the eastern to the western
parts of the then known world, than to go from one street of Alexandria
to another. The pestilence succeeded this first scourge, and with such
violence, that there was not a single house in that great city which
entirely escaped it, or which had not some dead to mourn for. All places
were filled with groans, and the living appeared almost dead with fear.
The noisome exhalations of carcasses, and the very winds, which should
have purified the air, loaded with infection and pestilential vapors
from the Nile, increased the ev