Agapius

Agapius was a Christian of Gaza in Roman Palestine whose death in 306 is recorded by the contemporary historian Eusebius of Caesarea in The Martyrs of Palestine. Almost nothing is independently attested about his family, occupation, or early life; the surviving portrait depends on Eusebius, who lived in Caesarea and wrote as a local witness to the later stages of the Great Persecution. That persecution, begun under Diocletian in 303, continued in the East under Galerius and Maximinus Daia. Agapius was arrested for refusing to abandon the Christian faith and was held for about two years in the prisons of Caesarea Maritima, the provincial capital.

In the fourth year of the persecution he was brought from confinement into the city’s amphitheatre during a public festival. A slave condemned for murdering his master was presented at the same time to be executed by wild beasts. The crowd successfully petitioned the governor to spare the murderer, but no comparable plea was made for the Christian prisoner. Officials then offered Agapius his freedom if he would sacrifice to the pagan gods. He refused.

He was thereupon exposed to a bear. The animal attacked and wounded him severely, yet he survived. Half-dead, he was taken back to prison. On the following day stones or other weights were fastened to his body and he was thrown into the sea, where he drowned. Eusebius presents this drowning as the completion of the martyrdom after the earlier imprisonment, public interrogation, and failed exposure to the beasts.

The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 20 November, summarizing the long imprisonment, the repeated ordeal, preservation from the animals, and death by drowning. No formal papal canonization in the later medieval sense is recorded; veneration as a martyr arose in the fourth-century Palestinian church on the basis of Eusebius’s narrative. Later calendars sometimes associate other Palestinian martyrs named Agapius with different dates, but the 306 drowning at Caesarea is the episode tied to this figure.