Ecumenical Commemoration
Martyrs at Lyons & Vienne
June 2 · d. 177
also known as Blandina, Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, The Lyonnaise Martyrs
A slave girl of Lyon martyred in 177 under Marcus Aurelius. Her endurance, recorded in the eyewitness Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne preserved by Eusebius, exhausted her torturers in shifts and drew from her the confession she repeated to every charge: "I am a Christian, and there is nothing vile done by us."
Blandina was a slave girl in Lugdunum, the Roman capital of Gaul, today the city of Lyon in southern France. Almost everything the church remembers of her comes from a letter the Christians of Lyon wrote soon after she died, and even that letter never tells us her age. It speaks of her bodily weakness, and most who have read her story have taken her for a teenager, perhaps a year or two older than the boy Ponticus, who was fifteen.
In those years the emperor was Marcus Aurelius, and the Christians of Lyon were a small and suspect people. They would not offer incense to the gods of Rome or to the emperor, and so their neighbors called them atheists. They met behind closed doors, called one another brother and sister, greeted one another with a holy kiss, and spoke of eating the body and drinking the blood of their Lord. Out of these things the city built its rumors: that when the lamps were put out the Christians feasted on murdered children and committed incest. In the summer of the year 177 the rumor turned to violence. The mob shut the Christians out of the baths and the markets, then fell upon them in the streets, and at last the governor had them seized and brought to trial. Blandina was taken with her Christian mistress and a great company of the brethren.
The Christians of her mistress's household feared for Blandina above all the others. Her body was weak. They thought she would break first. They thought she would deny her Lord and bring shame on them all.
She did not break. Day after day they brought her before the torturers. Day after day the torturers wore out one team after another in shifts. At last they themselves cried out that they had nothing left to inflict on her, and that they could not understand how she still breathed. Her whole body was torn open. And out of that body, every time they paused to ask her again, came the same answer she had given them at the first, as the brethren's letter records it in McGiffert's translation: I am a Christian, and there is nothing vile done by us.
Then they brought her into the amphitheatre to be devoured by the beasts. They hung her on a stake with her arms stretched out. They let the wild animals loose into the arena. The beasts would not touch her. She hung there in the shape of a cross, praying aloud. The other prisoners awaiting their turn looked up and saw, in the form of their sister, Him who was crucified for them. And they took heart for what was coming.
On the last day of the spectacle they brought her out together with Ponticus, the boy of fifteen who was the youngest of all the martyrs. The crowd was made to watch each torture inflicted on him in turn. Blandina, the brethren wrote afterwards, was like a noble mother. She encouraged him through every blow until he gave up his soul. Then the soldiers turned to her. They scourged her. They set her in the red-hot iron chair. They wrapped her in a net and threw her to a wild bull, which tossed her again and again. At last, when she could no longer move, a soldier killed her with a single stroke of his sword. The pagan crowd is recorded as saying they had never seen a woman bear so much.
The bodies of all the martyrs were burned, and the ashes were thrown into the river Rhône, which runs through Lyon. The pagans wanted no Christian to pray over a grave. The brethren of Lyon wrote afterwards that the burning was done in defiance of the resurrection. The pagans had said over the bodies: "Now let us see if they will rise again, and if their God is able to help them, and to deliver them out of our hands."
The brethren who wrote that down had staked their lives on the answer. They believed what Paul had written to the Corinthians, that the body is sown perishable and raised imperishable, sown in weakness and raised in power. Blandina's body had been broken in every way a body can be broken, then burned, then poured into the Rhône; and the church that had no bones to bury still confessed that God would raise her on the last day, whole and unconquered, beyond the reach of any fire. That hope was the one thing the empire could not drown in the river.
How we know. Almost everything we know of Blandina comes from a single document. It is the Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne to the Brethren in Asia and Phrygia, written within months of the persecution by the surviving Christians of those two churches. The letter does not survive on its own. It survives because Eusebius, writing the first history of the church a century and a half later, judged it important enough to preserve almost entire in Book Five of his Ecclesiastical History. It is the longest single quotation in that work, and the only continuous narrative we have of a Gallic persecution.
The letter is among the most discussed documents of the second century. Internal evidence persuades most modern historians that it was written either by an eyewitness or by a survivor drawing on eyewitness testimony: the precision of detail, the named participants, the references to the specific topography of Lyon's amphitheatre. T. D. Barnes argued for a date within a year of the events. The Greek text is reconstructed from Eusebius and printed with facing English translation by Herbert Musurillo in his 1972 Oxford edition of the early martyr acts.
The Letter's most quoted passages all concern Blandina. The brethren wrote that her torturers wore themselves out on her by turns from morning till evening, and at last confessed themselves conquered; that they were astonished at her endurance, since her entire body was mangled and broken; and that they testified that any one of the tortures she had endured was sufficient to destroy life (EH 5.1.18, McGiffert tr., NPNF² 1). Her confession is recorded plainly: "I am a Christian, and there is nothing vile done by us" (5.1.19). And of the moment she hung on the stake in the arena, the brethren wrote that the other prisoners "beheld with their outward eyes, in the form of their sister, him who was crucified for them" (5.1.41).
The Letter closes its narrative of her death in a sentence that has been read as a deliberate echo of the Maccabean mother and her seven sons. The brethren wrote of "the blessed Blandina, last of all, having, as a noble mother, encouraged her children and sent them before her victorious to the King," and recorded that she "hastened after them, glad and rejoicing in her departure as if called to a marriage supper" (5.1.55).
Blandina's feast falls on June 2 in the Roman Martyrology and is kept on the same day in the Anglican Church in North America's calendar as a commemoration of "Blandina and Her Companions, Martyrs at Lyons, 177." She shares the day with the other forty-seven martyrs of Lyon and Vienne, often called collectively the Lyonnaise Martyrs or the Martyrs of Gaul. The Letter names several of her companions, including Sanctus the deacon of Vienne, Maturus the recent convert, Attalus of Pergamum, the physician Alexander the Phrygian, the elderly bishop Pothinus, and the boy Ponticus. The day's memory has long since gathered to her name.
Lyon has never let her go. The remains of the amphitheatre in which she suffered still stand on the Croix-Rousse hillside, the Amphithéâtre des Trois Gaules, and a modern wooden stake set in the arena floor marks the place of her witness and carries her name. The cathedral of Saint-Jean carries her among its commemorations. A marche spirituelle en hommage à Sainte Blandine is kept by Lyon parishes on a Saturday near her feast, gathering the faithful for a walk in her honor through the city in which she died.
She is invoked as the patroness of the city of Lyon, of servants and slaves, of young girls, of the falsely accused, and of those tortured for their faith. In iconography she is shown bound to the stake in the arena, often in the cruciform pose recorded in the Letter, sometimes with a bull at her feet and the boy Ponticus standing at her side.
Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne to the Brethren in Asia and Phrygia(Greek, c. 177)
The primary witness, written within months of the persecution by the surviving Christians of Lyon and Vienne and addressed to the churches of Asia and Phrygia. Survives only because Eusebius preserved it almost entire in Book 5 of his Ecclesiastical History.
Public domain: New Advent — Eusebius EH 5.1 (McGiffert tr., NPNF² 1), CCEL — NPNF² Vol. 1 (full volume, McGiffert tr.)
Ecclesiastical History (Book 5)(Greek, c. 313–325)
Eusebius is the transmitter, not the author, of the Lyon narrative. But the Letter survives because he judged it the longest single quotation worth preserving in his history of the church.
Public domain: New Advent — Book 5, ch. 1, CCEL — NPNF² Vol. 1 (full volume)
The Acts of the Christian Martyrs(Greek with English translation, 1972)
The modern critical edition of the pre-Constantinian martyr acts. The Lyon Letter appears as Acta V with Greek text reconstructed from Eusebius and facing English translation; introduction sets the date, authorship, and transmission questions.
Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church(English, 1965)
The standard sympathetic study of second- and third-century persecutions. Reads the Lyon Letter as a document of the church it came from, not a piece of evidence for skeptical cross-examination.
Pagans and Christians(English, 1987)
Chapter 9 reconstructs the persecution at Lyon in its civic setting, including the food shortage, the festival of the Three Gauls, and the legal procedure under Marcus Aurelius. It gives the best social-historical picture of the world the Letter came out of.
Primary witness. The Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne to the Brethren in Asia and Phrygia (177) is preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Book 5, chapter 1, with chapters 2 and 3 carrying its postscript and the church of Lyon's letter to Eleutherus of Rome. Read it in full at New Advent in the McGiffert translation (NPNF Series 2, Volume 1), or in the same translation in the CCEL volume.
Modern critical edition. The standard Greek-and-English edition of the Letter, set in the wider corpus of pre-Constantinian martyr acts, is Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). The Letter appears there as Acta V. Musurillo's introduction discusses the date, the authorship question, and the relation of the surviving Greek to Eusebius's transmission.
Recommended modern study. W. H. C. Frend's Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Blackwell, 1965; reissued by Wipf and Stock) remains the standard sympathetic study of the second and third century persecutions, with substantial treatment of the Lyon events. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Knopf, 1987), chapter 9, gives the vivid social-historical reconstruction of the persecution in its civic setting, including the food shortage, the festival of the Three Gauls, and the legal procedure under Marcus Aurelius that informs much current reading of the Letter.
Further reading. John Foxe treats Blandina at length in Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs), Book One, under "The Persecution Under Marcus Aurelius Antoninus." The full text is at CCEL. T. D. Barnes's essay in Les martyrs de Lyon (177) (Paris: CNRS, 1978) is the standard scholarly defense of an early eyewitness date. Gregory of Tours, In Gloria Martyrum §48 (Migne PL 71:748), is the earliest external mention of Blandina by name.
After her death the bodies of all the martyrs were burned and the ashes thrown into the river Rhône. The Letter records the pagans' own words: "that,' as they said, 'they may have no hope of a resurrection, through trust in which they bring to us this foreign and new religion, and despise terrible things, and are ready even to go to death with joy. Now let us see if they will rise again, and if their God is able to help them, and to deliver them out of our hands" (5.1.63).
What can be said. Beyond the Letter we have nothing independent. No tomb. No relics, since the ashes were thrown into the Rhône. No second-century inscription. The earliest external mentions of Blandina by name are Gregory of Tours's In Gloria Martyrum §48 in the sixth century and the Hieronymian Martyrology, both of which depend on the Letter as preserved in Eusebius. Her name Blandina, the gentle one, is a Latin slave-name, not a family name, and tells us nothing about her origins. What we know is what the brethren of Lyon, within a year of her death, decided that the churches of Asia and Phrygia needed to hear about her: that the weakest of them did not break, and that the bystanders in the arena saw Christ in her.
Almighty God, you gave your servants Blandina and Her Companions boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Pergamum /ˈpɜːrɡəməm/; Trois /ˈtrwɑː/; In Gloria Martyrum /ɪn ˈɡlɔːriə ˈmɑːrtɪrəm/; Martyrum /ˈmɑːrtɪrəm/; Ponticus /ˈpɒntɪkəs/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12