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Clement of Alexandria wrote from experience. In 202-203, during the persecution of Septimius Severus, he had been forced to flee to Asia Minor. In his Miscellanies (Stromata, 4.4), he discusses the perfection of martyrdom that had eluded him and compares martyrdom to the valiant death of classical heroes: "And the ancients laud the death of those among the Greeks who died in war, not that they advised people to die a violent death, but because he who ends his life in war is released without the dread of dying." Just like the heroes of epics and the arena, the Christian martyrs displayed a contempt of death that allowed them to face the end with unnerving self-control. "We conquer death and are not conquered by it," boasted the martyr Flavian. And Cyprian proclaimed that martyrs could be killed, but they could never be harmed.

Yet, while pagans might die invicti, unconquered by the fear of death, Christians did more--they conquered death itself. They had no need whatsoever to fear. Death was only of the body (and even that was temporary), never of the soul; for the martyr's heroic death recapitulated Christ's paradoxical victory on the Cross and anticipated the resurrection: "O, death, where is thy sting? O, grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Cor 15:56). "What is more glorious," Cyprian asks, than "by dying to have overcome death itself, which is feared by all?" Because of this supernatural conquest of death, the Christian martyr could become invincible in a way the classical hero could never be.

Defenders of Christianity such as Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine conceded that the classical heroes of redeemed honor, such as Mucius Scaevola, Curtius, Regulus, the Decii, had valiantly "despised death and all sorts of savage treatment"; but they were far outshone by the Christian martyrs. "These martyrs," Augustine writes, "far surpassed the Scaevolae, and the Curtii, and the Decii, both in virtue, because they possessed true piety, and also in the greatness of their number." With such indomitable witnesses, surely Christianity had surpassed paganism! This was the point Christian apologists belabored, and it was not to be forgotten.

Such "one-upmanship" arguments were the core of a rhetorical strategy by which early Christians hoped to crush their pagan opponents. Christian writers would utilize the language of honor and the heroic death, even as they modified the meanings and rejected the most fundamental pagan attitudes toward death and the supernatural. They labored to establish a rivalry between the pagan practices and their own in order to defeat the pagans on their own terms. Their arguments were straightforward: Christians were the better fighters; theirs was the true cause; theirs the crown of victory, the only real crown of glory. To some extent, their "one-upmanship" arguments reveal an identity with their adversaries' cultural values, as well as a transcending of them: by necessity, apologists had to accept the outline of the same classical values that they claimed only they could realize honor, courage, glory, etc. . . .

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