An Empire Conquered

Hosted by Joseph Campanella, this anthology of stories about martyrs uses dramatic recreations and on-location visits to historic places to tell its story. The program gets off to a bad start with a cheesy skit based on an anecdotal legend about Octavian Augustus (the Roman emperor who reigned from 27 B.C. to 14 A.D.) visiting a sorceress who has a vision concerning the imminent birth of a powerful king in the Middle East. Both the discussion booklet and the video box say that Augustus is one of the five early Christian martyrs profiled in the program, but it would take a prodigious leap of imagination, at the very least, to call a noted Roman social reformer who died when Christ was but 14, an "early Christian martyr." The four others, St. Clement, St. Cecelia, Apollonius (the Roman senator, not the Greek poet), and St. Agnes, all of whom were either banished or killed, are much more convincing candidates. Campanella visits the churches associated with the saints and takes viewers into underground levels uncovered by archaeologists where he often asserts, rather unconvincingly, that various rooms were the original houses of some of the saints. While the bridging narrative which addresses the succession of Roman emperors and their notable intolerance toward Christians is pretty much a matter of record, the skits and stories about the martyrs are speculative at best. Not a necessary purchase. The far superior The Trial and Testimony of the Early Church (reviewed in our March 1992 issue) is a much better choice. (Available from: Vision Video, P.O. Box 540, Worcester, PA 19490; (215) 584-1893.)