Suggest an Edit — Symphorosa

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Biography

Short Description

Saint Symphorosa is venerated as a Christian martyr of the second century, associated by tradition with the town of Tivoli (ancient Tibur) in Latium, not far from Rome. The principal source for her story is a Latin passio of late and uncertain date, which most modern hagiographers, including the Bollandists, regard as legendary in its details and as partly modeled on earlier narratives such as the mother and seven sons of the Second Book of Maccabees and the Roman legend of Saint Felicitas. According to that tradition, Symphorosa was the wife of Getulius (in some texts also called Zoticus), a Roman who had held military office, had become a Christian, and had been put to death for the faith together with companions named Cerealis, Amantius, and Primitivus, in the countryside around Gabii or Tivoli during the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117-138). After Getulius's martyrdom she is said to have remained a widow, living with her seven sons on an estate in the Tiburtine region.

The same Acts relate that Hadrian, who kept a villa at Tivoli, wished to complete a pagan dedication and was told that the presence of the Christian widow and her children hindered the rites. Symphorosa was brought before the emperor and urged to sacrifice to the gods. She refused, invoking the example of her husband's death and declaring that she and her sons would rather die than offer incense to idols. After interrogation and torture (later retellings speak of her being hung by the hair, beaten, and wounded), she was killed and her body disposed of in the river Anio, a stone having been tied to her neck according to some versions, or her side having been pierced with a stake according to the Roman Martyrology. A Christian named Eusebius is said in the legend to have recovered her body.

Her seven sons, named in the Roman Martyrology as Crescens, Julian, Nemesius, Primitivus, Justin, Stacteus, and Eugenius, were then executed one after another. The passio assigns to each a distinct torment, in the rhetorical manner of many late martyr acts: limbs broken, bodies transfixed with stakes or swords, and similar cruelties. Their remains, together with their mother's, were buried in a cemetery on the Via Tiburtina, at roughly the ninth mile from Rome, a site that later bore her name. A basilica or oratory of Saint Symphorosa stood there in late antiquity. In the eighth century, according to a later report, Pope Stephen II translated relics associated with Symphorosa, her husband, and her sons to the church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria in Rome; a sarcophagus with an inscription referring to that translation was described in the sixteenth century.

Independent of the legendary Acts, an early cult of Saint Symphorosa on the Via Tiburtina is reasonably well attested. The Hieronymian Martyrology records her feast, and the cemetery ad Sanctam Symphorosam was known to medieval itineraries of the Roman shrines. Archaeological investigation in the nineteenth century identified catacomb galleries in that area. Precise years of birth and death are not preserved in any contemporary document; even the placement of the martyrdom under Hadrian remains a traditional attribution rather than a date fixed by reliable chronicle evidence. The Roman Martyrology commemorates Saint Symphorosa and her seven sons on 18 July. She is presented in the tradition as a married woman and mother, not as a member of a religious order, and she was never Bishop of Rome or a patriarch. Formal canonization in the later papal sense did not apply to such ancient martyrs, whose cult grew from local veneration and liturgical commemoration.

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