martyrdom · 202 · Alexandria
Eusebius introduces him only as the man who was called the father of Origen, which is how the record has him. He was beheaded at Alexandria and his property was confiscated to the imperial treasury, leaving a widow and seven sons of whom Origen was the eldest, aged seventeen. Origen intended to give himself up and die with him, and his mother, having failed to argue him out of it, hid all his clothing — so he stayed at home and wrote to his father instead. The sentence Eusebius quotes from that letter is the whole of what survives of the boy: take heed not to change your mind on our account. The persecution row already on this page said he was beheaded; what it could not say was any of this.
To make an example of a convert under Severus edict against conversion, and to take his property while doing it.
Seven children and a widow left with nothing, and a seventeen-year-old who took the catechetical school the following year because there was nobody else.