martyrdom · 177 · Lyon
It began with exclusion from the baths and the markets and ended in the amphitheatre at the August games. Pothinus, bishop of Lyons and more than ninety years old, was dragged before the tribunal, beaten along the way, and thrown into prison, where he died after two days. Blandina was a slave, and her mistress — herself arrested — feared she would not hold out because her body was weak; the letter says those who tortured her in relays from morning to evening gave up exhausted and admitted they had nothing left to do to her. She was hung on a stake for the beasts and they did not touch her, and she was kept back to the last day and made to watch the others die first, and killed after the scourging, the beasts and the roasting seat. The rescript that settled it came from Caesar: those who held Roman citizenship were beheaded, and the rest were sent to the beasts. Eusebius gives no total, only a multitude; the figure of forty-eight, with a list of names, comes from Ado of Vienne six centuries later and his editor calls the list largely imaginary — so no number is written into this dataset. The bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into the Rhone so that there would be nothing to bury. Sanctus the deacon, Maturus, Attalus, Ponticus who was fifteen, Biblias and Vettius Epagathus are named in the letter and have no rows here.
To break the churches of the two Rhone cities by making their leaders and their slaves deny in public.
A letter written by the survivors that Eusebius copied out entire, and which is the earliest first-person account of a persecution anyone has.