Ptolemy and Lucius

Before his own contest, the same man mentions in his first Apology others who were martyred before him, and records the following events, which serve our subject well. He writes as follows: [a]

“A certain woman was living with a husband who had no self-control, and she herself had once lived the same way. But when she came to know the teachings of Christ, she learned self-control, and tried to persuade her husband to live with self-control as well. She kept bringing the teachings before him and telling him of the punishment in eternal fire that awaits those who do not live with self-control and in line with right reason. But he kept on in the same debauchery, and by his conduct made his wife a stranger to him. For in the end she thought it ungodly to go on sharing a bed with a man who tried every means of finding pleasure, against the law of nature and against what is right, and she wanted to be separated from the marriage. Her own people pleaded with her and advised her to stay on with him, in the hope that her husband would one day change. So she forced herself and remained. But when her husband went off to Alexandria and was reported to be behaving even worse, she did not want to become a partner in his wrongs and his impieties by staying in the marriage and sharing his table and his bed. So she gave him what among you is called a repudium, and left him. [b] This fine and upstanding husband of hers ought to have been glad. The things she had once done so freely with the servants and the hired men, when she took her pleasure in drunkenness and in every vice, she had given up, and she wanted him to give them up too. Instead, since she had left him against his will, he brought a charge against her, saying that she was a Christian. She presented a petition to you, the emperor, asking to be allowed first to put her affairs in order, and to answer the charge after her affairs were settled; and you granted it. [c]

Her former husband, no longer able to proceed against her, turned on a certain Ptolemy, whom Urbicus punished, and who had been her teacher in the Christian lessons. He went about it this way. [d] He persuaded a centurion who was a friend of his to throw Ptolemy into chains, to take hold of him and to ask him this one thing only: whether he was a Christian. Ptolemy loved the truth and had no deceitful or lying mind, and he admitted that he was a Christian. So the centurion had him put in chains and punished him for a long time in the prison. When at last the man was brought before Urbicus, he was likewise examined on this one point only, whether he was a Christian. And again, conscious of the good he owed to the teaching of Christ, he confessed his schooling in divine virtue. For whoever denies anything either denies it because he has condemned the thing itself, or avoids confessing it because he knows that he is unworthy of it and a stranger to it; and neither of these is true of a real Christian. [e]

When Urbicus ordered him to be led away to punishment, a certain Lucius, himself also a Christian, seeing a judgment given so unreasonably, said to Urbicus, ‘What is the reason? You have punished this man, who has not been convicted of being an adulterer, or sexually immoral, or a murderer, or a thief, or a robber, or of doing any wrong at all, but has only confessed that he bears the name of Christian. Your judgment, Urbicus, does not befit the Emperor Pius, nor the philosopher, Caesar’s son, nor the sacred senate.’ [f] He gave no other answer, but said to Lucius as well, ‘You too seem to me to be one of them.’ When Lucius said, ‘Most certainly,’ he ordered him too to be led away. Lucius declared that he was grateful, for he was being set free, he said, from such wicked masters, and was going to the good Father and King, God. And a third man came forward as well and was sentenced to punishment.” [g]

To this Justin fittingly and consistently adds the words we quoted earlier, saying, “So I too expect to be plotted against by one of those I have named,” and the rest. [h]