Martyrium Polycarpi

The Martyrdom of Polycarp is a letter from the church at Smyrna to the church at Philomelium, written shortly after Polycarp's execution (around AD 155–167). It is the earliest surviving account of a Christian martyrdom outside the New Testament, and it established many of the conventions of the martyr-act genre: the hero's calm in the face of death, the failure of the flames to consume the body, the sweet smell that rises from the pyre, the hostile crowd, the sympathetic narrator.

The account is vivid and emotionally powerful. Whether it is historically reliable in all its details is debated, but its influence on the Christian imagination was enormous.