The Valerianic Persecution

The emperor Valerian’s two edicts of 257 and 258 targeted the clergy with a precision the Decian persecution had lacked: the first required sacrifice and banned Christian assembly; the second ordered the execution of bishops, priests, and deacons. For Cyprian of Carthage, these edicts produced a first exile to Curubis (August 257) — during which, the deacon Pontius records, he received a vision foretelling his death — and then a deliberate refusal to flee that brought him back to stand before a second proconsul and receive the sword.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Valerian and the Two Edicts

The persecution that would kill Cyprian was the work not of a general imperial anxiety but of a focused fiscal and religious policy. The emperor Publius Licinius Valerianus had initially been regarded by some Christians as well-disposed; the church historian Eusebius would later note that his court had been “full of pious persons” (Historia Ecclesiastica 7.10.3). The shift came suddenly. In the summer of 257 Valerian issued his first edict against the Christians. Its provisions, as reconstructed from Cyprian’s own account to his clergy and from the Acta Proconsularia Cypriani, required that the clergy perform sacrifice to the Roman gods and forbidden the Christians from holding assemblies or entering their burial grounds (Acta Cypriani 1.1; Cyprian, Epistula 80.1 [CSEL 3.2:839–840]; Clarke, ACW 47, Ep. 80).

The second edict, issued in 258 after the first had failed to break the churches, was harsher in design and more precisely targeted (Cyprian, Epistula 80.1–2 [CSEL 3.2:839–840]; Clarke, ACW 47). Where the first edict sought compliance, the second sought elimination: bishops, priests, and deacons were to be executed immediately. Senators and knights who were Christians were to lose their rank and property, and if they persisted were to be executed. Christian women of the senatorial and equestrian orders were to lose their property and be exiled. Imperial household staff (Caesariani) who had previously acknowledged Christianity were to be reduced to forced labor on imperial estates (Cyprian, Epistula 80.1–2 [CSEL 3.2:839–840]; Clarke, ACW 47; Sage, Cyprian, pp. 390–393). The twin instruments of ruin and death gave the edict its particular savagery.

The Wider Toll: Sixtus II and the Roman Martyrs

The edict of 258 struck rapidly across the whole Church. In Rome, Pope Sixtus II was seized while presiding at a gathering in the cemetery of Praetextatus in August 258 and beheaded along with four of his deacons (Depositio Martyrum, s.d. VI kal. Aug.; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 7.27.1). His deacon Lawrence — who, tradition reports, would follow his bishop within days — was put to death shortly after; Cyprian had been told of Sixtus’s death in a letter that reached him, and wrote at once to his presbyter Successus in Carthage to relay the news: “Know that Sixtus suffered on the sixth day before the Kalends of August, and with him four deacons” (Cyprian, Epistula 80.1 [CSEL 3.2:839]; Clarke, ACW 47, Ep. 80). The report electrified the African church and confirmed what Cyprian’s Curubis vision had already told him: the hour was near.

The First Trial: Aspasius Paternus and the Exile to Curubis

Cyprian’s encounter with the first edict was already dramatic before the second arrived. On 30 August 257, he was brought before the proconsul of Africa, Aspasius Paternus, in Carthage. The Acta Proconsularia preserve the dialogue. Paternus relayed the imperial rescript: the emperors commanded that those who did not practise the Roman religion should observe the Roman religious customs. Cyprian replied that he was a Christian and a bishop, and that he knew no other gods beside the one God who made heaven and earth, sea and all things in them; to this God alone, and to Christ Jesus his Son, the Christians offered prayer day and night (Acta Cypriani 1.1–3; trans. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, pp. 169–171). Paternus pressed: were the other bishops and presbyters of the province prepared to comply? Cyprian answered that he could speak for his own choice, not coerce others, but that good discipline would lead the rest to do what he did (Acta Cypriani 1.4). The proconsul then pronounced the sentence of exile: Cyprian was to go to Curubis, a small coastal town on the Bon promontory — far from Carthage but still in Africa Proconsularis — and was to remain there until further notice (Acta Cypriani 1.5–7). He was also forbidden to hold assemblies or to enter the cemeteries.

Cyprian described the exile to his congregation at Carthage in terms that combined pastoral reassurance with the full awareness that arrest under the second edict would be lethal. In the period at Curubis he continued to write, to correspond with the confessors in Rome, and to govern his church through letters — continuing the epistolary episcopate he had practised during the Decian hiding, though now in a context of formal exile rather than voluntary withdrawal (Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage, pp. 199–202; Clarke, ACW 47, Introduction).

The Vision at Curubis

During the year at Curubis, Pontius records, Cyprian received a vision or dream that he himself recounted and that Pontius clearly regarded as predictive of the martyrdom. In the vision, as Pontius gives it, Cyprian saw himself brought before a magistrate and condemned, and a young man — interpreted as an angelic messenger — signed with his fingers that the executioner should delay the stroke and then mouthed to Cyprian that he would be given one day’s grace (Vita Cypriani 12; Pontius, Vita Cypriani, ed. Hartel, CSEL 3.3:xcviii–xcix; trans. ANF 5). Pontius reports this as what Cyprian told his community, and presents it as one of the signs by which the Spirit prepared his bishop for the end; following METHODOLOGY §3.5, the vision is recorded here as what the Vita attests Cyprian said, not as a verified event. What the Acta and the letters confirm independently is that Cyprian, by the time of his recall, displayed no intention of flight: the posture Pontius describes — a man forewarned and at peace — coheres with the deliberate return to Carthage that the Acta document.

Contrast with 250: The Man Who Stays

The comparison with the Decian persecution demands to be made, because Cyprian’s enemies made it in his own lifetime. In 250, when the Decian edict struck, Cyprian had withdrawn from Carthage and governed his community by letter from hiding — a decision he defended as episcopal prudence but that his critics called flight and cowardice (Cyprian, Epistula 20.1 [CSEL 3.2:527–528]; Clarke, ACW 43; see The Flight of 250). The Valerianic exile was not flight: it was a sentence imposed by the proconsul, and Cyprian could not have remained in Carthage without defying the order of the court. But the more important contrast is in what followed: when the second edict made clear that the penalty was death, and when the new proconsul Galerius Maximus summoned him, Cyprian deliberately refused to leave Africa or to put himself out of the proconsul’s reach. Pontius emphasizes this: Cyprian would be martyred in his own city, before his own people, not in some remote place or hiding-house (Vita Cypriani 15; Sage, Cyprian, pp. 396–399). The man who had been accused of cowardice in 250 refused, in 258, every path that led away from the proconsul’s sword.

The Recall and Its Meaning

Sometime after August 258, when the news of Sixtus II’s death had reached Curubis, Cyprian was recalled from exile and placed under what amounted to house arrest at his villa near Carthage, awaiting the proconsul’s summons (Pontius, Vita Cypriani 15; Acta Cypriani 2.1). Brent notes that the mechanics of the recall — and the fact that Cyprian was not immediately executed but held at the villa — suggest that Galerius Maximus was following the letter of the second edict, which required formal judicial proceedings before execution of a bishop (Cyprian and Roman Carthage, pp. 205–207). Cyprian used the interval to prepare his community for his death and to distribute money to the poor. He withdrew briefly when he learned that Galerius Maximus had arrived in Carthage, apparently not to escape but to ensure that the trial, when it came, would happen in the right place — in Carthage, before his people — rather than at some remote magistrate’s convenience (Vita Cypriani 15; Acta Cypriani 2.1–2). On 13 September 258 he was arrested and held overnight at a house at Sexti. On 14 September he was brought before Galerius Maximus for the trial that the second file in this section records in full.

See Also

References

  • Acta Proconsularia Cypriani (Acta Cypriani). Ed. W. Hartel, CSEL 3.3, Vienna 1868; trans. Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford Early Christian Texts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 168–175. The contemporary court-record source for both trials.
  • Pontius of Carthage. Vita Cypriani (De Vita et Passione Cypriani). Ed. W. Hartel, CSEL 3.3, Vienna 1868; trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Buffalo 1886. The deacon Pontius’s account, including the Curubis vision (Vita 12) and the deliberate return (Vita 15).
  • Cyprian of Carthage. Epistula 80 (to Successus, on the death of Sixtus II). CSEL 3.2:839–840. Trans. G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian, Vol. 4, Ancient Christian Writers 47, New York: Newman Press, 1989.
  • Clarke, G. W. The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage. 4 vols. Ancient Christian Writers 43, 44, 46, 47. New York: Newman Press, 1984–1989. Standard annotated English edition and verification anchor for all letter citations.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Historia Ecclesiastica 7.10.3; 7.27.1. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, Buffalo 1890.
  • Sage, Michael M. Cyprian. Patristic Monograph Series 1. Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975. Pp. 380–399 on the Valerianic persecution and the exile.
  • Brent, Allen. Cyprian and Roman Carthage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 199–210 on the Valerianic edicts and the mechanics of the recall.
  • Musurillo, Herbert, ed. and trans. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Text and translation of both the Acta Cypriani and the Passio account.