This addition to the legend, which in these signs of life, as in
other things, is developed almost exactly on the same lines with
the legend of the Niobe statue in the rock of Mount Sipylos and
with the legends of human beings transformed into boulders in
various mythologies, was for centuries regarded as an additional
confirmation of revealed truth.
In the third century the myth burst into still richer bloom in a
poem long ascribed to Tertullian. In this poem more miraculous
characteristics of the statue are revealed. It could not be washed
away by rains; it could not be overthrown by winds; any wound made
upon it was miraculously healed; and the earlier statements as to
its physical functions were amplified in sonorous Latin verse.
With this appeared a new legend regarding the Dead Sea; it became
universally believed, and we find it repeated throughout the whole
medieval period, that the bitumen could only he dissolved by such
fluids as in the processes of animated nature came from the statue.
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