Conon (an elderly man) and his unnamed son were seized during a persecution of Christians under Emperor Aurelian. The particular form of torture meted out to them was uniquely gruesome–they were “ordered to be stretched upon a burning gridiron, and afterward to be hung up by the feet over a suffocating smoke.” All of this was very much akin to the way that animals were seared and smoked for eventual consumption.

Yet old man Conon actually reprimanded the torturers on their weak and ineffectual efforts! He told them that they were delaying his ultimate communion with Jesus and doing a piss-poor job with this hanging-us-upside-down-in-smoke business. He taunted them for their burn-and-suspend routine. He reproached them for their namby-pamby methods.

The soldiers carrying out the torture were, of course, following specific instructions, and had not been given leave to go further than they had. So these half-assed barbarians ran off to complain to their boss, Domitian, about the old man’s barbs. Domitian flew into a rage and instructed them to cut off the hands of the father and the son with a wooden saw. Long, slow, nasty business. Bloody. Painful. Senseless. Sadistic. And bizarre.

So Conon, while in the process of actually bleeding from the stumps at the end of his arms, threw his tormentors one last dart: “Are you not ashamed to see two poor weak persons triumph over all your power?” And with those words, Conon and his son died.

There is something striking about this old man. Though captured and tortured, he was nonetheless indomitable. They could harm him, they could hang him, they could cut off his hands–but they could not dominate his spirit or, for the longest time, his elderly body. His hands were bloody, but his head unbowed.