patristic · letter · 177 · Greek
The survivors' own account of the persecution of 177, written to the churches of the province they had come from, and preserved because Eusebius copied it into the fifth book of his history almost entire. It is the earliest first-person narrative of a persecution that exists, and it is written from inside: the torturers giving up exhausted, the confessors refusing the title of martyr while they were still alive, the ashes thrown into the Rhone so nothing could be buried. It is also the document that names Irenaeus, then a presbyter, as the man who carried it.
To: the brethren throughout Asia and Phrygia