14. At the racking and roasting of each one of them, the observant mother was prevented by religion from changing.
15. She saw her children’s flesh dissolving around the fire; and their extremities quivering on the ground, and the flesh of their heads dropped forwards down to their beards, like masks.
16. O you mother, who was tried at this time with bitterer pangs than those of parturition!
17. O you only woman who have brought forth perfect holiness!
18. Your firstborn, expiring, turned you not; nor the second, looking miserable in his torments; nor the third, breathing out his soul.
19. Nor when you did behold the eyes of each of them looking sternly upon their tortures, and their nostrils foreboding death, did you weep!
20. When you did see children’s flesh heaped upon children’s flesh that had been torn off, heads decapitated upon heads, dead falling upon the dead, and a choir of children turned through torture into a burying ground, you lamented not.
21. Not so do siren melodies, or songs of swans, attract the hearers to listening, O voices of children calling upon your mother in the midst of torments!
22. With what and what manner of torments was the mother herself tortured, as her sons were undergoing the wheel and the fires!
23. But religious reasoning, having strengthened her courage in the midst of sufferings, enabled her to forego, for the time, parental love.
24. Although beholding the destruction of seven children, the noble mother, after one embrace, stripped off her feelings through faith in God.
25. For just as in a council-room, beholding in her own soul vehement counselors, nature and parentage and love of her children, and the racking of her children,
26. she holding two votes, one for the death, the other for the preservation of her children,