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Biography

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Anicetus was Bishop of Rome in the mid-second century, conventionally dated from about the mid-150s until around 168. Later papal catalogues, including the fourth-century Liberian Catalogue and the Liber Pontificalis, present him as a Syrian, born at Emesa (modern Homs). No contemporary source records his birth year or early life, and the precise years of his episcopate remain approximate. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing toward the end of the second century, lists Anicetus among the bishops of Rome in unbroken succession from the apostles, after Pius and before Soter, thereby attesting that a bishop of that name held the Roman see in this period.

The best-documented event of his pontificate is the visit of Polycarp of Smyrna. According to Irenaeus, whose account is preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, the aged Asian bishop came to Rome to confer with Anicetus about the date of Easter. Churches of Asia Minor observed the Pascha on the fourteenth day of Nisan, while the Roman church celebrated it on Sunday. Neither prelate converted the other to his custom; they nonetheless maintained eucharistic communion, and Anicetus yielded his own liturgical presidency to Polycarp as a mark of honor. Irenaeus later invoked this peaceful disagreement when he appealed to Pope Victor I not to break communion with the Quartodeciman churches of Asia.

Anicetus’s time in office also saw the presence in Rome of teachers associated with Marcionism and Valentinian Gnosticism. The Palestinian Christian Hegesippus visited the city while Anicetus was bishop and, according to Eusebius, found the Roman church holding the apostolic faith. The much later Liber Pontificalis ascribes to Anicetus a decree forbidding clergy to wear long hair; whether this reflects a genuine second-century discipline or a later interpolation cannot be confirmed from earlier evidence.

No contemporary text describes Anicetus’s death. Subsequent martyrologies and the Liber Pontificalis treat him as a martyr, but historians generally note that evidence for the martyrdom of mid-second-century bishops of Rome is lacking. Tradition places his death about 168, with a Western feast on 20 April. The Liber Pontificalis locates his burial in the cemetery of Callistus, a statement that is chronologically doubtful because that cemetery was organized in the following century; a Vatican-area burial is often judged more likely. Relics attributed to him were placed in the seventeenth century in a chapel of the Palazzo Altemps in Rome. He is venerated as a saint in both East and West (the East often commemorating him on 17 April). His cult is of pre-congregation origin; he remains in the Roman Martyrology on 20 April, though he was omitted from the General Roman Calendar in 1969.

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