Lucia the Virgin and Rixius Varus

The Holy Virgin-Martyr Lucia and the Holy Martyr Rixius Varus and those with them at Rome

Martyr · Virgin · d. c. 301

Commemorated 6 July — Beheading at Rome under Diocletian

Lucia was a virgin of Campania in southern Italy, consecrated to Christ from her youth, who was carried off as a captive by a Roman officer named Rixius Varus and taken far from her own country. He first pressed her to sacrifice to the idols and, failing, gave her and her companions a house of their own, where they lived some twenty years in prayer; and in the end the persecutor himself was won to Christ by what he had watched. When the persecution of Diocletian broke out, Lucia asked to return to Italy, and the two came to Rome, where the prefect condemned them, with a company of some twenty-two others, to be beheaded. She is not the Lucy of Syracuse kept on December 13.

The virgin of Campania

Of Lucia's family the synaxaria say only that she was born in the region of Campania, and that from childhood she gave herself to God, refusing marriage and living in continence with a household of like-minded companions. This is the whole of her early biography as the Byzantine tradition transmits it, and the Latin passio behind it is no fuller: the interest of the narrative lies entirely in what followed.

Captivity and the conversion of Rixius Varus

In one of the disorders of the late third century — the Greek text speaks simply of a commander who overran the district — Lucia was taken prisoner by Rixius Varus, a vicarius, that is a deputy of a praetorian prefect holding military and judicial authority over a diocese. He carried her away with her household to the province where he was stationed.

Varus first attempted what an officer of that rank would be expected to attempt: he required her to offer sacrifice to the gods, and when she would not, he pressed and threatened her. The account records that she was unmoved, and that he was disarmed rather than provoked by her steadiness. In the end he assigned to Lucia and those who had come with her a house apart, in which they might live undisturbed, and there they remained in silence and unceasing prayer.

The years passed — the tradition puts the span at about twenty — and the persecutor became a witness. What he saw of the manner of their life worked in him, and Rixius Varus confessed Christ, receiving baptism at the hands of the very captives he had taken. This reversal is the heart of the commemoration, and it is the reason the Church numbers the officer among the martyrs and not among the tyrants.

Return to Rome and martyrdom

When news came that Diocletian had begun the general persecution of the Christians, Lucia asked to be allowed to go back to Italy — the sources present this plainly as a wish to suffer rather than a wish to escape. Varus went with her. At Rome the two were denounced and brought before the prefect (the passion names him Aelius), who found them obdurate and sentenced them to the sword.

They were beheaded together with a company whose names the synaxaria transmit as Antoninus, Lucian, Isidore, Dion, Diodorus, Cutonius, Arnosus, Capicus and Satyrus; the whole number of those who suffered on that occasion is given as twenty-four. Their memory was joined from an early date to that of the other Roman martyrs of the sixth of July.

Feast and commemoration

July 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 19). Lucia and Rixius Varus are listed on this day in the Greek synaxaria, the Slavonic Menaion, and the calendars of the Antiochian Archdiocese and the Orthodox Church in America. No proper office is appointed; they are commemorated at the sixth ode with the other martyrs of the day, and the service is that of St Sisoes the Great, who is the principal commemoration.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)

Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.

Iconography

Lucia is shown as a young woman in the maiden's tunic and maphorion, most often in red, with the martyr's cross in her right hand and the left open before her breast, her head uncovered or lightly veiled and never crowned — the ordinary type of the virgin-martyr; where she is distinguished at all from her Sicilian namesake it is by the inscription. Rixius Varus is painted beside her as a soldier or an official in the chlamys, bearded, likewise holding the cross, so that captor and captive stand as equals in the same rank of martyrdom; the companion martyrs are ranged behind them, and the scene of the beheading may occupy the lower register. No pre-1900 icon of this Lucia alone has been identified for this collection, and candidate images retrieved under the name "St Lucy" all proved to be of Lucy of Syracuse.

Disputed questions

Not to be confused with Lucy of Syracuse (December 13), the great Sicilian virgin-martyr of the same persecution, with whom this Lucia is regularly confounded in Western reference works. They are distinct: the Syracusan died in Sicily under the prefect Paschasius and has an ancient, independent cultus with proper hymns; the Lucia of July 6 is a Campanian carried into captivity, whose companion in martyrdom is her former captor.
The names of the companions. The list is transmitted in Greek transliterations of Latin names and is corrupt in places: Cutonius, Arnosus and Capicus have no secure Latin originals, and manuscripts vary. The count of twenty-four is given as a total and does not match the nine names ordinarily printed; the difference is presumably made up by the unnamed members of Lucia's household.
Rixius Varus in the Latin passions. A magistrate of this name appears as the persecutor in several Latin passiones of Italy and the Rhineland, where he is a straightforward villain and is not converted. Whether the Byzantine account preserves an independent tradition of his conversion, or whether it represents a hagiographical development of the familiar figure, is not determinable from the surviving texts; the historicity of the whole episode is uncertain, and the dating to the outbreak of the Diocletianic persecution (c. 301–303) is inferred from the narrative rather than attested.
The prefect Aelius is otherwise unknown; the name may be a corruption.