Laudator Temporis Acti

Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022), Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 92:

Here in Eusebius can be seen, sometimes obvious, sometimes a little more deftly hidden, almost the full range of perfectly alien motifs imported into martyrologies from pagan writings. The events described really took place, in some sequence now obscured by dramatic ornament; the date survives as witness to the original protocol; but, to begin with, the general atmosphere of a battle of wits, of παρρησία, in which both judge and persecuted engage and from which the one emerges triumphant, the other baffled even in ways that he does not realize, is quite false and quite in the style of Cynic debates. It is typical, too, that the judge should not only be called τύραννος, but should display the cruelty, dullness, and lack of culture regularly attributed to the tyrant. In the end, his very barbarity avails nothing against his victims, whose smiles in the midst of their agony defeat him—smiles and victories common in the martyr literature and suggestive of a debt to reports on the trials or deaths of Zeno, of Seneca, or the like.