Rome and the Great Persecution

The Passio Anastasiae makes its heroine a Roman noblewoman of high birth, raised secretly in the faith, who came of age in the years of the last and fiercest Roman persecution — that of Diocletian and his colleagues. This file sets out the legend’s account of her origins and, beside it, the historical world of the “Great Persecution” (303–313): its edicts, its targeting of clergy and the well-placed, and the prisons full of confessors that the legend has Anastasia serve.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

The Legend’s Account of Her Origins

The connected legend of Anastasia — the Passio Anastasiae, surviving in Latin and Greek recensions — opens with a portrait of high Roman birth. It makes her the daughter of a Roman of senatorial rank, named in the Latin tradition Praetextatus (or Pretextatus), a pagan, and of a Christian mother named in the tradition Fausta (or Flavia), who had her secretly baptized and reared in the faith (Passio Anastasiae; cf. Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). In this account the child’s Christian formation is entrusted to a holy and learned confessor, Chrysogonus, who becomes her teacher and director of conscience and to whom, in the legend, she writes letters of spiritual counsel from within an unhappy marriage — the correspondence with Chrysogonus being one of the Passio’s structural devices (treated in The Minister to Prisoners).

These details are the furniture of the hagiographical romance, and the careful reader takes them as such. The names of the parents, the senatorial rank, the secret baptism, and the tutelage of Chrysogonus are supplied by the Passio alone; they are not corroborated by any independent record, and the Passio itself is a developed legend that fused distinct figures (see The Historical Core and The Passio and the Conflation). What the legend offers is not a documented genealogy but a type — the noble Christian woman of the persecution era who turns her rank and wealth to the service of the suffering Church. That type is itself historically credible for the period, even where the specific biography is not, because the Diocletianic persecution did indeed fall heavily on Christians of standing, and wealthy Christian women did indeed minister to imprisoned confessors. The legend’s setting is true to its age even when its particulars cannot be verified.

[Disputed: the names of Anastasia’s parents (Praetextatus/Pretextatus and Fausta/Flavia), her senatorial birth, and her tutelage under Chrysogonus rest solely on the Passio Anastasiae and vary across its recensions; they are reported by the hagiographical tradition (so the Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1) but have no independent attestation and belong to the legend’s developed narrative, not to documented history (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936).]

The World of the Great Persecution

Whatever the status of the biography, the persecution itself is solid history, and it is the indispensable backdrop to the whole tradition. The persecution under Diocletian — remembered in the East as the era of the “Great Martyrs” and in the West as the persecutio magna — was the last, most systematic, and most violent of the Roman attempts to suppress Christianity. It is documented above all by a contemporary eyewitness, Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Ecclesiastical History and Martyrs of Palestine describe its course at first hand, and by Lactantius, whose De mortibus persecutorum records the politics behind the edicts (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors).

The persecution unfolded in a series of edicts beginning in 303. The first, issued at Nicomedia in February 303, ordered the churches demolished, the Scriptures surrendered and burned, and Christians of rank stripped of their status and legal protections; subsequent edicts that year ordered the clergy arrested and then, by a general edict, compelled all to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2, 8.6; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 13–15). The targeting was deliberate. The first edict’s express attack on Christians of high social standing — the honestiores — meant that the well-born were among the first to suffer loss of rank, property, and life; this is precisely the social world into which the legend places Anastasia, a noblewoman who can be threatened with the confiscation of a great fortune (a motif the Passio develops). The crowding of prisons with bishops, presbyters, deacons, and lay confessors awaiting trial or execution created exactly the situation the legend presupposes: a Church whose confessors languished in chains and depended on those still at liberty to bring them food, comfort, and the means of survival (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.6).

The chronology of the edicts matters for placing the legend, because the Passio presupposes a developed and prolonged persecution with prisons already full and clergy already condemned — the situation of the later edicts of 303–304 rather than the first weeks. Lactantius records that the first edict was posted at Nicomedia on 23 February 303, the feast of the Terminalia, and that a fire in the imperial palace shortly after was blamed on the Christians and used to justify intensifying the measures (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 13–14). A second and third edict that year ordered the arrest of the clergy and then offered them release on condition of sacrifice; a fourth edict, in the spring of 304, extended the demand to sacrifice to the whole population on pain of death (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2, 8.6; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 15). The traditional dating of Anastasia’s martyrdom to c. 304 places it at the height of this general persecution — precisely when, in the legend, the prisons of Illyricum were crowded with the condemned whom she is said to have served (the dating is examined in The Death by Fire).

The persecution fell with particular weight in the Balkan provinces — Pannonia, Moesia, Dalmatia — where the emperors kept their courts and where the Passio sets Anastasia’s wanderings and death. Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia), one of the great late-Roman imperial capitals on the Save, was a center of the Tetrarchic administration and, accordingly, a center of the persecution; it is the attested place of martyrdom of a whole group of saints of this era — among them the deacon-martyr Irenaeus of Sirmium and, in the oldest martyrologies, a martyr Anastasia (see The Historical Core; on Sirmium’s cult, The Passio and the Conflation). That a martyr named Anastasia died at Sirmium under Diocletian is the one fact about her that the documentary record will support; everything else is the legend’s filling-in of that fact.

Noblewomen and the Service of the Confessors

The legend’s central premise — that a Christian woman of rank used her freedom and wealth to serve imprisoned confessors — is not only credible for the period but well attested as a type. From the earliest persecutions, ministry to prisoners was a recognized work of the Church, and women of means were among its chief agents. The Acts of earlier martyrs already show Christians bribing jailers and visiting the imprisoned (a practice the Passio Anastasiae dramatizes at length); and the diaconal service of women — bringing food, tending wounds, securing burial for the executed — was a structural feature of the pre-Constantinian Church (on the place of women in the early Church, see Women in Orthodoxy).

The diaconal character of this work deserves emphasis, because it is the legend’s structural premise. In the pre-Constantinian Church the care of prisoners was not incidental charity but a recognized ministry, and the Roman authorities themselves were aware of it: when persecution intensified, jailers were sometimes ordered to deny Christians access to the imprisoned precisely because the support of the confessors by the wider community had become so effective and so visible (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.6; on the period generally, The Pre-Schism Church). Women of standing, who could move with relative freedom and command resources, were well placed for it; and the gathering and honorable burial of the martyrs’ bodies — a recurring motif in the Passio Anastasiae — was itself a perilous service, since the authorities at times deliberately denied burial to deter the cult of the executed. The legend’s portrait of Anastasia spending her fortune to feed, ransom, comfort, and bury the confessors is thus a portrait of a real and dangerous ministry of the persecuted Church, even where her individual performance of it cannot be documented (the ministry is treated in full in The Minister to Prisoners).

This is why the Anastasia of the legend, even as a literary construction, rings true to her age. The historical persecution produced exactly the conditions her story presupposes — the well-born stripped of status, the prisons full, the dependence of confessors on outside help — and the historical Church did honor women who gave themselves to this service. The legend takes a securely attested martyr of Sirmium and clothes her in a vita drawn from the recognizable realities of the Great Persecution. The task of the later sections is to distinguish the secure martyr from the legendary clothing; the task of this one is to establish that the clothing, however unverifiable in its particulars, is cut from the true cloth of the age.

The wider point — to be developed in the source-critical sections — is that the historical credibility of a setting does not transfer to the particulars of a narrative. That noblewomen ministered to confessors, that the well-born suffered confiscation, that the Balkan prisons were full under Diocletian: all of this is true of the age, and all of it makes the Passio’s world plausible. But plausibility is not attestation. The same persecution underlies the legends of Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara, Marina, and a host of other Great Martyrs whose connected lives are likewise developed compositions over thin historical cores (compare St. Barbara the Great Martyr and St. Thecla). The hagiographer who composed the Passio Anastasiae did not invent an impossible world; he furnished a real one with characters and incidents the calendar did not record. Recognizing the historical truth of the setting and the legendary character of the particulars at the same time — without collapsing either into the other — is the discipline the rest of this collection applies, and it begins with the honest statement of what the documents will and will not bear (see The Historical Core).

See Also

References

  • Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (esp. Book 8) and The Martyrs of Palestine. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. New York, 1890.
  • Lactantius. On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De mortibus persecutorum). Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7. Buffalo, 1886.
  • Passio Anastasiae (Latin) and the Greek Passio (BHG 76–81). The source of the noble-birth narrative and of Chrysogonus.
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936.
  • Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961.