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Biography

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Saint Euplius (also Euplus or, in Italian, Sant'Euplio; Greek: Εὔπλους) was a Christian deacon of Catania in Sicily who was put to death in the Great Persecution under the emperor Diocletian. He is venerated as a martyr by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Almost nothing can be established about his family, place of birth, or life before his arrest. The principal source is the Latin Acta (or Passio) Eupli, which recounts his interrogation, imprisonment, torture, and execution at Catania. Although the text as transmitted shows later rhetorical and liturgical shaping, historians of early Christianity have often judged its core to stand closer to official proceedings than many other martyr acts of the period, and they generally place the events in 304, when Diocletian’s edicts against Christian scriptures and assemblies were being enforced in the province.

According to the Acta, Euplius was arrested on 29 April after he was found carrying the Christian Gospels, whose possession imperial law had forbidden. He was brought before Calvisianus, the governor (corrector) of Sicily, at Catania. Questioned about the books, he declared himself a Christian and described the Gospels as the law by which he lived. He refused both to surrender them and to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. After imprisonment and further hearings in which he persisted in his confession, he was tortured, including on the rack, and still would not recant.

The Acta date his execution to 12 August of the same year. He was led to beheading at Catania with the Gospel book hung about his neck and is said to have continued reciting scripture until he was killed by the sword. Later tradition held that the local Christian community buried him in Catania and that a church was in time built in his honor at the site associated with his martyrdom or tomb. The historic church of Sant'Euplio in Catania, long a center of his cult, was destroyed by bombing in 1943 during the Second World War.

From late antiquity he has been commemorated on 12 August in both East and West. He is honored as a patron of Catania, where his cult stands beside the older and more famous devotion to Saint Agatha, and he is also the patron saint of Trevico in Campania. As an early martyr he was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; his sainthood rests on ancient public veneration, subsequently recorded in the martyrologies. Beyond the trial narrative, the historical record is silent.

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