Blandina of Lyon

In the summer of 177 AD, in the Roman city of Lugdunum in Gaul — the place now called Lyon, in the south of France — a slave girl was arrested with the household she served. The city sat where the Rhône and the Saône meet, a hub of empire and commerce, full of soldiers and merchants and the great annual festivals of Rome. There had been a Christian community there for a generation, mostly Greeks and Asians who had come west with the trade routes, and for a time they had been left alone.

That summer the mood changed. Christians were shut out of the baths and the market. They were spat at in the street, stoned when they were caught alone, denounced by their neighbors. When the imperial legate was away, the local officials took matters into their own hands and began to arrest them. Bishop Pothinus, ninety years old and barely able to walk, was seized. So was a deacon named Sanctus, a physician named Alexander, a boy of fifteen named Ponticus. And so was a household slave named Blandina, together with the mistress whose house she had lived in.

Nobody expected Blandina to hold.

She was small, and by the account of the letter that survives, weak in body. She had no rank, no citizenship, no education anyone bothered to record. In the arithmetic of the Roman world she was the last person anyone would rely on to endure. The Christians around her feared it too. The letter says plainly that her mistress, arrested with her, trembled for her — sure that the tortures would break the girl before they broke anyone else, and that she would betray them all.

They took her first.

The torturers worked in shifts. They started in the morning and went on till evening, and when one shift grew tired another took its place, and when that shift grew tired a third came in. They used every instrument they had. The letter that the churches of Lyon and Vienne later wrote to the churches of Asia says her whole body was mangled and broken, and that the men doing it admitted at last that they had run out of things to do to her. One of the tortures, they said, was enough to kill a person. She had endured them all.

And through it, she said one sentence, and only that sentence, over and over.

That was her answer to every question they asked. Who else was in the church. Where they met. What they did at their meals — the pagans believed the Christians were cannibals and incestuous, and the whole point of the interrogation was to extract a confession of the crimes the mob already suspected. Blandina gave them nothing except that one line. She was a Christian. Nothing vile was done among them. She said it in the morning and she said it at evening and she said it when there was almost no breath in her left to say it.

The letter calls her a noble athlete, and says that saying that sentence was her rest.

She did not die that day. They put her back in the prison and turned to the others, and for days the tortures went on across the whole company — Sanctus, who would answer every question only with the words "I am a Christian" in the Roman tongue; Pothinus the old bishop, beaten by the crowd on the way to prison and dead within two days; the ones who wavered under fear, and the ones who came back. In the prison the strong strengthened the weak, and many who had denied Christ under first questioning stood up again and confessed him, and were arrested a second time.

Then the games began.

The provincial festival was on, and the amphitheater was full. The Christians who were Roman citizens were beheaded, because the law would not allow a citizen to be given to the beasts. Those who were not citizens were kept for the arena. Day after day the crowd was given a spectacle. Maturus and Sanctus were dragged through every torment the arena knew and killed at the end of it. Attalus was led round the amphitheater with a placard, then set on the iron chair.

Blandina was brought out and hung on a stake and left there for the beasts.

The letter says that as she hung, her arms stretched out, she appeared as though on a cross, and that her steady prayer as she waited gave the others in the arena courage. They saw, the writer says, with their outward eyes, through her, the one who had been crucified for them. It was as if her small body were showing them their Lord.

The beasts did not come near her.

They took her down and put her back in the prison. She was, the letter says, being kept for another contest, so that by winning through more of them she might make the accuser's condemnation final. Whatever was left in her, the church saw it as Christ himself putting on her weakness and winning through it.

On the last day of the games they brought her out again, and with her the boy Ponticus, fifteen years old. She had watched over him in the prison, encouraging him the way an older sister encourages a younger brother. They were made to watch the others suffer first, and the officials pressed them again to swear by the gods, and neither of them would. Ponticus died first, and Blandina, the letter says, rejoiced as she saw him go.

Then it was only her.

They scourged her. They set her on the hot iron chair. They put her in a net and tossed her before a bull, and she was gored and thrown, and the letter says she seemed by now to be past feeling any of it, caught up in what she was saying and in the one she was saying it to. At the end of the long day, when even the crowd had grown quiet, they finished her with a dagger.

That is how the letter closes her story — with the report that even the pagans in the amphitheater confessed that they had never seen a woman suffer so long, or so much.

They burned the bodies afterwards. For six days the remains of the martyrs were left exposed, guarded so no Christian could take them for burial, and then they were burned and the ashes were swept into the Rhône, because the persecutors were determined that nothing should be left for a resurrection. It was the last thing they thought to do to her.

The river carried what they had carried out of her.

The letter went east to the churches in Asia, telling them what had happened at Lyon that summer, and a hundred and fifty years later Eusebius copied long passages of it into his history of the church, which is why we know her name at all. She was fifteen, or thereabouts. She was owned by another human being. She had no voice the world was in the habit of hearing. And when the empire brought all its instruments to bear on her, she said one sentence, and would not be moved from it, and the men holding the instruments ran out of instruments before she ran out of the sentence.

A slave girl outlasted Rome for a day.