Potitus
The Holy Martyr Potitus, who suffered under Antoninus Pius
Martyr · Child Martyr · d. c. 160
Commemorated 1 July — Martyrdom by beheading after the loss of his tongue and his eyes
Potitus was a boy of the second century who was baptised at thirteen against his pagan father's will, converted that father by his constancy, and then spent what was left of his short life travelling and preaching. The tradition gives him two great cures — the senator's wife Kyriake, healed of leprosy at her baptism in Epirus, and the demon-possessed daughter of the emperor Antoninus Pius — and makes the second of them the cause of his death: the emperor credited the healing to his own gods, and, when the boy refused to sacrifice, had his tongue cut out and his eyes put out and then had him beheaded, about the year 160. Between the cures he lived alone among the wild beasts on Mount Garganus. His cult passed early into southern Italy, where he is patron of Tricarico and Ascoli Satriano; the Byzantine books keep him on July 1.
The boy who was baptised against his father
The passion of Potitus is a boy's story throughout, and the Church has always read it as such. He was born of pagan parents — the Latin recensions place his birth at Serdica (Sardica, the modern Sofia) in the Balkans, the Greek and Slavic books say nothing of his origin and the Russian calendars know him only by the epithet of the mountain he later lived on. At thirteen he came to believe in Christ and received holy baptism.
His father, whom the Latin texts name Hylas, set himself to break the boy of it. The synaxarion is careful about the order of the attempt: first coaxing and endearments, then threats — the whole apparatus of a Roman father's authority brought against a child — and neither moved him. What broke was the father: worn down by his son's steadiness, and (in the fuller recensions) by a cure the boy worked in his own household, Hylas himself came to faith and was baptised. It is the first of the conversions the tradition credits to Potitus, and the one it tells with most relish.
Kyriake, and the mountain
Freed of his household, the boy went about preaching Christ, and healings followed him. The episode the calendars single out took place in Epirus, where the wife of a senator — the Greek books name her Kyriake, "the Lord's woman," the name she was given at the font — was wasting with leprosy and had been given up. Potitus catechised her, she believed, and at her baptism she rose from her sickness clean. Her husband and their whole household were baptised with her.
Rather than settle where he was honoured, Potitus withdrew to Mount Garganus — the great limestone promontory on the Adriatic coast of Apulia, later famous as the place of the apparition of the Archangel Michael — and lived there alone in the wild, among the beasts, which the account says did him no harm. This is the detail the Russian calendars preserved in his title, Гаргарский, "of Gargara"; Greek and English books that call him "of Naples" are naming instead the region of his later cultus.
Martyrdom
He was found on the mountain because he was needed. The daughter of the emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161) was tormented by a demon which, the account says, declared through her mouth that it would not go out except at the word of "Potitus the Christian" — and the emperor's servants were sent to search him out. Brought to the court, the boy prayed and the demon departed.
Antoninus, whose reign is remembered in secular history as the mildest of the century, answered the cure with sophistry: the healing, he said, had come from the gods of Rome, and the boy should now sacrifice and be rewarded. Potitus refused, confessed Christ before the court and named the emperor's gods for demons; and the tortures followed. The tradition specifies mutilation aimed at the two instruments of his witness — his tongue was cut out, and he continued to speak; his eyes were put out, and he continued to see, or to bless. He was at last beheaded. The Latin passion sets the execution at Tricarico in Lucania under a prefect named Gelasius; the Greek books give no place.
Cultus in southern Italy
Whatever his origin, his veneration is Apulian and Lucanian. His relics are kept in the cathedral of Tricarico in Basilicata, of which he is principal patron; Ascoli Satriano in Apulia, San Potito Sannitico and San Potito Ultra in Campania carry his name, and the Naples region gave him the epithet by which the OCA and most English lists know him. The Roman books keep him on January 13 or 14, the Byzantine on July 1: one of the substantial number of pre-schism Italian martyrs whose Greek and Latin feasts never converged, the southern Italian sees having been under Constantinople for much of the period in which such dates were fixed.
Feast and commemoration
July 1 on the church calendar (Old Calendar civil July 14). The Greek Menaion gives Potitus a synaxarion notice with verses but no proper service, the day's offices belonging to the unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Rome; in practice the common of a martyr serves him. He is kept by Greek, Russian and OCA usage on this day and by the Roman calendar on January 13–14.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Potitus, 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.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Potitus is painted as a beardless youth, sometimes plainly as a child, in tunic and mantle, holding the martyr's cross and, in the Italian tradition, the palm; the southern Italian panels and processional statues that carry his cult give him a boy's short hair and often the loose Roman paenula. Scenes of his passion show the exorcism of the emperor's daughter and the beheading, and occasionally the mountain with its beasts. No pre-1900 Byzantine icon of him has been identified for this collection: his surviving imagery is Latin and largely post-Tridentine, and the Menologion of Basil II — which would ordinarily supply a minor martyr's portrait — covers only September to February and is useless for a July commemoration.
Disputed questions
- His age at martyrdom. Every version agrees he was baptised at thirteen and that he died a boy or a youth; none says how much time the preaching, the Epirot cure and the years on Garganus are supposed to have occupied, and the narrative plainly requires more than a few months. This entry carries child-martyr on the strength of the tradition's own insistence that he suffered as a child, while noting that the chronology of the passion does not work as it stands.
- Where he was from. Serdica in the Latin passion; nothing in the Greek. The Russian epithet "of Gargara" names the mountain of his solitude and the English "at Naples" the region of his cultus — three epithets, one saint, all recorded in alternate_names for deduplication.
- The date. The reign of Antoninus Pius (138–161) is fixed by every recension; c. 160 is the conventional year and is what this entry indexes. The historical difficulty is well known — Antoninus Pius did not persecute, and no Christian martyrdom at his personal order is securely attested — and the passion belongs with the large class of southern Italian passiones composed long after the events they narrate.
- Not to be confused with the many martyrs of southern Italy commemorated in both calendars under Latin names; nor with Kyriake, the woman he healed in Epirus, who is not the great-martyr Kyriaki of Nicomedia of July 7 — the coincidence of name and of near feast-days makes the confusion easy, and the two accounts have nothing else in common.