Apollinaris

Saint Apollinaris of Ravenna is venerated as the first bishop of that city and as a martyr of the early Church. A later Latin Passio, which most historians place between the fifth and seventh centuries, presents him as a native of Antioch in Syria and a disciple of the Apostle Peter, who is said to have ordained him and dispatched him to evangelize Ravenna, then a major Adriatic port in northern Italy. None of these biographical particulars can be confirmed from contemporary evidence. There is no first-century source for a Petrine mission to Ravenna, and the Antiochene origin belongs to the legend rather than to independently attested fact. Cautious modern scholarship therefore treats the Passio as a late antique composition designed to give Ravenna an apostolic founder, while still allowing that a historical bishop named Apollinaris may have headed the local church in the second or third century, a dating more consistent with the documented spread of Christianity in the Po valley.

The traditional narrative describes a long episcopate of preaching, conversions, miracles, and repeated violence. Apollinaris is said to have converted a Roman notable named Rufus and his household, to have healed the sick, and to have been beaten, imprisoned, and expelled from the city on several occasions. The legend also sends him to Dalmatia and the Danube before a final return to Ravenna, where he was again assaulted and died of his wounds at Classis (Classe), the harbour settlement south of the city. These episodes follow the conventional patterns of late martyr acts and cannot be verified. What is historically secure is the vigour of his cult by the sixth century. Under Ostrogothic and then Byzantine rule, Ravennate bishops and imperial patrons honoured him as the city’s founding bishop-martyr, and his name stands at the head of local episcopal tradition.

The monumental witness to that cult is unusually rich. Bishop Ursicinus began, and Archbishop Maximian completed, the basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, consecrated in 549, over a cemetery site associated with the saint’s tomb at the port. Its apse mosaic shows Apollinaris as a vested bishop in the orant posture amid a symbolic flock of sheep, one of the canonical images of early medieval Christian art. A second great church inside the walls, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, originally Theodoric’s palatine church, later received the relics when, in the mid-ninth century, they were moved from Classe for protection against Adriatic raids. Relics were afterward divided or partly returned; the principal remains are associated with the high altar of Sant'Apollinare in Classe. The two basilicas, the mosaics, and the Ravennate episcopal lists together show that by the age of Justinian Apollinaris was already the city’s pre-eminent local saint.

Liturgical commemoration is ancient. In the General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 20 July (it was observed on 23 July before the calendar reform of 1969). He is the principal patron of Ravenna and is also honoured as a patron of Düsseldorf and of Remagen on the Rhine, where medieval translations of relics established lasting local cults. He has traditionally been invoked against epilepsy and gout. Because the cult predates the later papal processes of beatification and canonization, he is recognized as a saint by ancient veneration rather than by a dated decree. The historical Apollinaris remains, on a careful reading of the evidence, an early bishop of Ravenna whose precise dates, birthplace, and manner of death cannot be established from reliable contemporary sources, but whose memory shaped the Christian identity of the city from late antiquity onward.