Pontius of Cimiez
The Holy Martyr Pontius of Cimiez
Martyr · d. c. 257, at Cimiez in Gaul
Commemorated 5 August — Commemorated in the East with Pope Fabian, whose spiritual son he was
Pontius was a young Roman of senatorial family, the spiritual son of Pope Fabian, who spent his inheritance on the poor of the city and whose preaching, according to the passion, drew the emperor Philip the Arab and his son to baptism. When Decius seized the empire and the persecution began, Pontius left Rome for Cimiez (Cemenelum), the Roman town on the hill above what is now Nice, and there, under Valerian, was arrested by the prefects Claudius and Anubius, tortured, delivered unhurt from beasts and from fire, and at last beheaded, about the year 257. He is the patron of Nice and of the whole Provençal coast, where the abbey of Saint-Pons kept his relics; the Eastern books commemorate him on August 5 with Fabian.
The Roman years
The Passio S. Pontii, a Latin passion of no later than the sixth century and the source of everything transmitted about him, makes Pontius the son of a senator named Marcus, born in Rome in the reign of Alexander Severus. His father, it says, was childless and begged a son of the gods, and the child was given him after a Christian had prayed for the household; the boy grew up drawn to the Church.
He attached himself to Fabian, then a presbyter and afterwards bishop of Rome, who — in the phrase the Eastern synaxarion keeps — loved him as his own son. Together they went about the works of mercy: Pontius had wealth and gave it away, and the two are remembered as a pair, the bishop and the young patrician, feeding the poor of the city through the long peace of the 240s.
Philip the Arab
The passion's central claim, and the reason the Eastern calendar keeps Pontius at all, is that he converted the emperor. The emperor Philip the Arab (244–249) and his son Philip the Younger are said to have listened to his preaching, believed, and been baptised by Fabian; and that with the imperial licence the two saints overthrew a statue of Jupiter and raised a church in its place, so that the Church had four years of open peace.
This is not pure invention. Eusebius — writing within a lifetime — reports as current the tradition that Philip was a Christian, and tells the story of a bishop who barred him from the Paschal vigil until he had taken his place among the penitents and confessed his sins. Modern historians, faced with Philip's entirely conventional pagan public acts as emperor, treat the tradition as at most evidence of Christian sympathies at his court. The passion of Pontius has taken it up, given it a name and a mechanism, and made of it a scene. The reference records the story as the tradition gives it and the objection to it in the same breath.
Cimiez
With the murder of Philip in 249 and the accession of Decius, the peace ended and Fabian was the first Roman to die under the new edict, on 20 January 250. Pontius left the city. He went to Cimiez in the Maritime Alps — Cemenelum, the Roman administrative capital of the province, on the hill above the harbour of Nice, of which the amphitheatre and baths still stand — and lived there, the passion says, as a Christian teacher among a largely pagan population.
Under Valerian (253–260), whose edicts of 257 and 258 struck at the clergy and at Christians of rank, two officials named Claudius and Anubius came to Cimiez to enforce them. Pontius was denounced and brought before them. The passion recounts the tortures in the accustomed sequence of such texts, and in each the instrument fails: the rack or wheel to which he is bound breaks apart; two bears loosed upon him in the arena lie down and do him no harm; a fire kindled about him goes out. Whatever is made of the miracles, the pattern is the standard rhetoric of the Gallic passions, and its function is to say that the man could not be moved.
At the end the prefects gave over and had him beheaded with the sword, about the year 257. A friend named Valerius — the Eastern notice calls him Valerian — took the body and buried it.
Relics and cultus
The grave became a shrine and the shrine an abbey: the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Pons at the foot of the hill of Cimiez, one of the oldest monastic foundations of Provence, which held his relics through the Middle Ages, and about which the modern quarter of Nice called Saint-Pons has grown. His cult spread along the coast and inland — Saint- Pons-de-Thomières in Languedoc, and a scattering of churches and villages named for him from the Var to Catalonia, where he is Sant Ponç and is invoked, by a folk association with herbs and honey blessed on his day, as a healer.
Feast and commemoration
August 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 18), the forefeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition fast. He is listed with Fabian in the Eastern synaxaria and shares the day with the Roman bishops Anterus and Fabian; the Orthodox Church in America also carries a second, separate notice of him under the same date. In the West he is kept on May 14, and at Nice and Cimiez, where he is the city's own martyr, with a proper observance.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Pontius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
Pontius is shown as a young layman-martyr: beardless or lightly bearded, in the tunic and mantle of a Roman of rank, holding the cross and often a palm. Provençal and Catalan art gives him the attributes of his passion — the broken wheel and the two bears that would not touch him — and the sword; a well-known type shows him standing between the two bears. Where he appears with Fabian he is the younger of the two, standing beside the vested bishop. In Eastern menologion sequences he is not usually distinguished from the general company of Roman martyrs.
No pre-1900 image identified as Pontius has been located for storage in this reference; the searches return modern parish statuary and photographs of churches bearing his name.
Disputed questions
- The historical residue. That a martyr named Pontius was venerated at Cimiez from an early date, and buried where the abbey afterwards stood, is not doubted. Everything else — the senatorial father, the Roman years with Fabian, the conversion of Philip, the names Claudius and Anubius, the bears and the fire — comes from the one passion, a text of the sixth century or thereabouts, written to furnish a local shrine with a founder's history. It is transmitted here as the tradition, not as ascertained fact.
- The date of his death. 257 is the passion's own indication and fits Valerian's first edict. Some accounts place him under Valerian and Gallienus more loosely, in 258 or 259.
- His feast day. The West keeps him on 14 May (and Nice on 11 May, the day of the translation of his relics); the East on 5 August, attached to Fabian, because the two are transmitted together in the same notice. This reference follows the Eastern date as the church date, and records the Western one.
- Not to be confused with Pope Pontian of Rome (†235), who was deported to Sardinia and whose relics Fabian brought home; the similarity of name and the shared association with Fabian make the two easy to confuse. Nor with the several other Latin martyrs named Pontius.