Willy Rordorf thinks the precision of the description of the date does not indicate a day of the week, but instead indicates the feast of Terminalia, celebrated in the Roman world in honor of the god Terminus as the last day of the year precisely on 23 February. "This explains the presence of "Greeks, Hebrews, and women" and corresponds with a report by Lactantius, according to which Diocletian, at the instigation of Galerius, put in hand the Great Persecution precisely in the Terminalia." This theory has been contested by R. Cacitti who says the terminology of Grand Shabbat in church literature arose theologically and not chronologically. "Strobel opts for Saturday, 22 February 167 AD (an astronomical full moon)." Authorship and style The Martyrdom of Pionius makes two claims for itself: that it was written by Pionius, and that Pionius "left us this writing for our instruction" (Pionius 1). As to the first claim, Bart Ehrman says Pionius is written almost entirely in the third person, does not move into the first person till near the end, and then "it is clearly not Pionius speaking as the author claims to have witnessed the miracle that transpired at the martyr's death." Ehrman says the entire account bears evidence of literary license in its parallels to the "Martyrdom of Polycarp" which it may have used as a model for its style. But there is no doubt such martyrologies served as instruction. D.R. Woolf says the martyrologies "disseminated particular messages and instructions to their readers through commentary and the examples provided by the martyrs. Within the narrative accounts and the literary reconstruction of the martyrs words and experiences, lay the virtues, doctrine and values held by the oppressed group." L. Arik Greenberg says "there is an underlying thematic unity between the Hellenistic Noble Death tradition...and Christian martyrological texts by drawing upon the Philosopher's Death paradigm." L. Stephanie Cobb says that "in a number of ways, the martyrologies such as Pionius, appropriate both actual and spatial elements of the amphitheater" in that they claim power for the powerless at the moment when they are most victimized; they ascribe power onto the body of the martyr/gladiator; and they insist martyrs chose martyrdom and did so with masculine honor and bravery. Sociology Sociologist and feminist scholar Elizabeth Castelli says it was in the writing of stories such as "The Martyrdom of Pionius" that early Christian culture first