Anterus

Anterus (also rendered Anteros or Antherus) was Bishop of Rome in the mid-230s, during the reign of the emperor Maximinus Thrax. Almost nothing about his early life can be verified from sources close to his own time. The Liber Pontificalis, a later Roman compilation whose notices for the third-century popes mix usable tradition with legend, calls him a Greek and names his father Romulus. A subsequent Italian tradition places his birth at Petilia Policastro in Calabria, in the historically Greek-speaking south of the peninsula, but that localization is not confirmed by early evidence and remains uncertain. His year of birth is unknown. The name itself is Greek, which is consistent with the Liber Pontificalis notice of origin but does not by itself prove a birthplace in the eastern Mediterranean rather than in Magna Graecia.

He became bishop of Rome on 21 November 235, succeeding Pontian. Earlier that year Pontian had been arrested in the persecution directed by Maximinus against Christian leaders and had been deported to the mines of Sardinia together with the Roman presbyter Hippolytus. Pontian resigned the episcopal office in exile, which allowed the Roman church to elect a new bishop. Anterus thus took up the see at a moment of both external pressure and internal repair, after a long-running rift in the Roman community associated with Hippolytus. His pontificate lasted only about forty days, from late November 235 until early January 236, and is among the shortest in the history of the Roman bishopric. Contemporary narrative of what he did in office is lacking.

Later tradition, again chiefly the Liber Pontificalis, credits Anterus with collecting the acts of the martyrs and depositing them in the churches, and some medieval accounts present him as having died a martyr for that work. Earlier Roman lists do not support a confident claim of martyrdom: the mid-fourth-century Depositio martyrum and the Liberian Catalogue do not designate him a martyr. Modern historians therefore generally treat a martyr’s death as unproven. He died on 3 January 236, almost certainly in Rome, while Maximinus was still emperor. He was buried in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Appian Way. In the nineteenth century Giovanni Battista de Rossi identified in that crypt a fragmentary Greek epitaph of an ‘Anteros bishop,’ which corroborates the traditional place of burial.

Anterus was succeeded by Fabian. He has been venerated as a saint in the Roman church from an early period; his feast is kept on 3 January in the Roman Martyrology and the General Roman Calendar. Because the surviving record is so thin, little can be said with confidence about his personality, pastoral program, household, or any marriage or children. What remains is the outline of a very short episcopate at a turning point after Pontian’s exile, an archaeologically attested burial among the third-century bishops of Rome, and a later hagiographical portrait that made him a collector of martyr-acts and, in some tellings, a martyr himself.