Agricola of Bologna

Saint Agricola of Bologna is remembered as a Christian layman and martyr of the city of Bologna in northern Italy, put to death during the persecution associated with the emperor Diocletian, traditionally placed about the year 304. Almost everything that can be said of him with any historical caution derives from Saint Ambrose of Milan, who in 393 recovered the relics of Agricola and of Agricola’s slave Vitalis and preached on their passion. According to that Ambrosian account, Agricola was a man of standing in Bologna—a citizen or gentleman of the city—who had converted his slave Vitalis to Christianity. Master and slave were thus united not only by the legal bond of ownership, still ordinary in the late Roman household, but by a shared Christian confession. No reliable source records Agricola’s parentage, the place or year of his birth, whether he was married, or whether he had children. He is not described as a cleric or as a member of any religious order.

When the two men were arrested, Vitalis was examined and tortured first. He remained steadfast and was executed; later tradition localizes his suffering in or near the amphitheatre, a detail reflected in the later dedication of the Bolognese church “in Arena.” Agricola, strengthened by the constancy of the man he had himself brought to the faith, then underwent torment and, according to the tradition Ambrose transmits, was crucified. Nails associated with that crucifixion were among the objects Ambrose later treated as relics. The bodies were buried together in a cemetery outside Bologna that Ambrose identifies as a Jewish burial ground. That unusual detail has been read as evidence either of concealment of Christian dead in a time of danger or of the mixed, extra-mural character of cemeteries in the period; it cannot be pressed much further.

In 393, while at Bologna, Ambrose was shown the burial place, recovered the remains, and had them laid with honor under the altar of a church dedicated to the two martyrs. He took a portion of the relics—including nails and blood-soaked earth—to Milan and also to Florence, and thereby carried the cult beyond Emilia. The principal local shrine became the church of Santi Vitale e Agricola in Arena, on or near the site associated with their passion and burial. Their names entered the martyrologies; the Roman Martyrology commemorates them together on 4 November. They have been venerated as the proto-martyrs of Bologna, and are counted among the city’s patrons, though in later centuries Saint Petronius became Bologna’s principal patron.

Agricola was never the object of a medieval or modern process of beatification or canonization in the later canonical sense; his cult is of the immemorial, pre-congregational kind, already promoted by a major Latin Father within a century of the traditional date of the martyrdom. Beyond the Ambrosian narrative and the liturgical and topographical memory of Bologna, the historical record is silent. What remains is the picture of a late Roman Christian householder who evangelized his own slave and who, in the Diocletianic crisis, followed that slave to death, and of a cult fixed at Bologna by Ambrose at the end of the fourth century.