Persecution in Lyon

• 1. Introduction

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  The persecution at Lyon in AD 177 is known to us because someone wrote it down. A letter from the Christians of Lyon and Vienne, addressed to the churches of Asia Minor, described what had happened to their community. Eusebius copied it into his Ecclesiastical History, book 5, chapter 1, about 150 years later in Palestine. The charges formally brought against those Christians were "Thyestean banquets and Oedipean intercourse": cannibalism and incest. Forty-eight people in the Roman city of Lugdunum died during the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius. Who they were, how the violence built, and who among them chose to step forward: those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A City on the Rhone

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  Lucius Munatius Plancus founded Lugdunum in 43 BC on the Rhone river. The city grew to become the capital of Gallia Lugdunensis, one of the major Roman provinces in Gaul. Emperor Claudius was born there. Few provincial cities in the western Roman world combined that kind of geography with that kind of imperial connection.

  Lugdunum's first documented Christian congregation appeared sometime in the 2nd century. Its leader was Pothinus, a bishop who had traveled from Asia Minor. By the time of the persecution, much of the Christian population in the area of Vienne and Lyon was Greek, with roots in Asia.

  Across the first two centuries after Christ, it was local Roman officials who bore the main responsibility for persecutions. The emperors were content to treat Christianity as a regional matter, leaving it to their subordinates. Until the reign of Decius, which ran from 249 to 251, persecution remained scattered and local. For Roman governors, a Christian's refusal to sacrifice to the gods of Rome, including the deified emperor, was itself a subversive act.

• 3. Before the Violence

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  Before a single Christian in Lugdunum was formally arrested, the community had already been expelled from public life. Christians were forbidden from the marketplace, the forum, and the public baths. Any who appeared in public were mocked, beaten, and robbed by mobs. Their homes were vandalized.

  Eusebius's account does not specify how long this social exclusion lasted. Eventually, the authorities moved. Christians were seized and questioned in the forum, in front of the general populace. They were then held in prison to await the arrival of the governor.

  While certain members of the Lugdunum church awaited martyrdom in prison, they sent a letter to Eleutherus, bishop of Rome. The man who carried that letter was Irenaeus, then serving as a presbyter, or elder, in the community. Torture of the captives continued as the authorities brought more of the community into custody.

• 4. The Governor's Tribunal

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  When the governor arrived at Lugdunum, he conducted a new round of interrogations, mistreating the captives before an assembled crowd. Among those watching was Vettius Epagathus, a Christian of considerable standing in the city. When the governor refused to let him testify for the accused, Epagathus confessed to his own faith. He was arrested immediately.

  As the arrests widened, two pagan servants belonging to Christians already in custody were also seized. Afraid of the torture that awaited them, those servants invented an accusation against the people they had served. The claim they made compounded the danger for everyone already in prison.

  Of those who eventually died, half were of Greek origin and half were Gallo-Roman, a detail the letter-writers thought worth preserving.

• 5. The Forty-Eight

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  Pothinus, serving as the first Bishop of Lugdunum, was already elderly when the violence reached its peak. He was scourged and beaten by his captors, then died in prison not long after.

  A slave named Blandina was first hung on a stake and exposed to wild beasts. Not one of the animals came near her at that time. She was returned to prison before a final ordeal: enclosed in a net and set before a bull.

  Others named in the account include Attalus, Maturus, Sanctus, and the pair Epipodius and Alexander. Sanctus was a deacon from Vienne. Saint Ponticus was a fifteen-year-old boy. All of those taken were killed; some had initially recanted their faith but returned to it before dying.

  In the 6th century, Gregory of Tours described the same events in his De Gloria martyrum. His account shows that Blandina and the others were still being named and remembered centuries after the killings in Lugdunum.