Susanna of Rome
The Holy Virgin-Martyr Susanna of Rome, and those who suffered with her
Virgin · Martyr · d. c. 295, Rome
Commemorated 11 August — Beheading in her father's house at Rome, with her father and kinsfolk
Susanna was a Roman virgin, daughter of the presbyter Gabinus and niece of Gaius, bishop of Rome, who was beheaded in her father's house about the year 295, in the last years before the Great Persecution, for refusing marriage into the imperial house and refusing to sacrifice. Her passion — a Roman narrative of the sixth century attached to the ancient church that bears her name near the Baths of Diocletian — makes her the centre of a whole company of martyrs: the imperial envoys Claudius and Maximus, sent to negotiate the marriage and converted instead, with Claudius's wife Praepedigna and their sons Alexander and Cutias, all burned at Ostia and their ashes cast into the sea; and, afterwards, her father Gabinus and her uncle Gaius. The Byzantine calendar keeps the whole company with her on August 11, the day the Latin Church also keeps.
The house on the Vicus Mamurri
The Passio sanctae Susannae sets its story in the reign of Diocletian (284–305), in a Christian household of high standing in Rome: Gabinus, a presbyter of the city, brother of Gaius, who sat as bishop of Rome from 283 to 296, and — in the passion's telling — both of them kinsmen of the emperor himself. Gabinus's daughter Susanna had been brought up in the faith from childhood in a house that was itself a place of prayer, learned in the Scriptures, and had vowed her virginity to Christ.
The house stood in the region of the Vicus Mamurri, on the higher ground of the Quirinal near what would soon be the Baths of Diocletian. It is the one hard fact underneath the story: a titulus — a parish and its property — is attested there from the fourth century as the titulus Gaii, and by the sixth it was the titulus sanctae Susannae, the church of Santa Susanna alle Terme di Diocleziano that stands on the site still.
The refused marriage
The emperor, wanting to bind his caesar and son-in-law Maximian Galerius to a family of his own blood, and hearing of the beauty and modesty of his kinsman's daughter, sent to ask for her. Susanna refused: she was already espoused, and would take no husband but Christ. Diocletian sent a second and weightier embassy — the dignitary Claudius, a kinsman, and after him his brother Maximus — to overcome the refusal by persuasion.
The embassy failed in the way the passion most enjoys: the envoys were converted by the household they had come to coerce. Claudius believed, and with him his wife Praepedigna and their two sons Alexander and Cutias; Maximus believed after him. When the conversions came to the emperor's notice, the whole family was banished, and then put to death at Ostia — burned, and their ashes thrown into the sea, so that Christians should have nothing to bury.
The palace and the sentence
Susanna herself was brought into the palace. There, the passion says, she found an unexpected ally in the empress, who was secretly a Christian and who strengthened her to keep her virginity; and when the emperor gave Maximian leave to take her by force, an angel stood between them and the caesar fled the room in terror. Diocletian then handed the case to an officer named Macedonius, who set before her the customary alternative and told her to sacrifice to the gods. Susanna's answer, as the passion preserves it, plays on the word: she offered no sacrifice to idols; she offered herself as a sacrifice to her Lord. Macedonius had her beheaded in her father's own house.
The empress, the account continues, came by night and buried the body herself. Bishop Gaius consecrated the room where she had been killed, so that the place of the murder became an altar; and in due course the father, Gabinus the presbyter, died a martyr also, and Gaius after him, in 296.
The cultus
Whatever the history behind the narrative, the cultus is early and Roman. The station church on the Quirinal carried Susanna's name by the sixth century; her feast stands in the Roman calendars from the earliest lists; the church was one of the great tituli whose priests were cardinals of the Roman church; and pilgrims' itineraries direct visitors to it. From Rome the commemoration travelled east with the many Roman martyrs whom the Byzantine synaxaria absorbed, so that Susanna and her company are read on August 11 in the Greek and Slavonic books as securely as in the Latin ones.
Feast and commemoration
August 11 (church date; New Calendar civil August 11, Old Calendar civil August 24) — the same day in East and West, which is unusual for a Roman martyr received into the Byzantine calendar and a sign of how early the commemoration was fixed. The day falls within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast (August 1–14), and the festal propers take precedence over the martyrs.
The Slavonic Menaion and the calendars derived from it enter the group as a single commemoration: "the virgin-martyr Susanna, and with her Gaius bishop of Rome, Gabinus the presbyter, Claudius, Maximus, Praepedigna, Alexander and Cutias." The Greek books commemorate Susanna alone on this day, the companions following her in the synaxarial notice. In Rome the station is at her own church on the Quirinal.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a virgin-martyr)
Thou wast a lamb of the Word, O Susanna, and didst offer thyself to Christ thy Bridegroom as a sacrifice unblemished; thou didst spurn a marriage of this world for love of Him who is thy true Betrothed, and by the sword thou didst enter into the bridal chamber of the Kingdom. Wherefore, O martyr and virgin, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Susanna is painted according to the settled Byzantine type of the virgin-martyr: a young woman standing frontally, the head covered by the maphorion or bound with a fillet, in a long tunic and mantle of red over blue, holding the cross of her confession in the right hand and with the left open in prayer or covered by the mantle; the inscription is Η ΑΓΙΑ ΣΟΥΣΑΝΝΑ. Where a painter distinguishes her from her many sisters in the calendar, the attribute is the sword or the palm, and in narrative programmes the scene is her beheading in a domestic interior — the passion is emphatic that she died in her father's own house, and the setting of a room rather than an arena is her one distinguishing note. In Western art from the late Middle Ages she acquires a crown laid aside or trampled, the symbol of the imperial marriage she refused.
No pre-1900 image identifiable as this Susanna has been located for this collection. Candidates under the name are dominated by the very numerous depictions of Susanna and the Elders from the Book of Daniel, an entirely different subject, and by post-Tridentine altarpieces of the Roman titular church; and the Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for minor saints of the fixed year, covers only September to February and so cannot serve an August commemoration.
Disputed questions
- A late passion over an early church. Critical hagiography has long treated the Passio Susannae as a sixth-century Roman romance composed to explain the name of the titulus Gaii / titulus Susannae, and not as a record of the events of the 290s. The marks of the genre are all present: the imperial kinship, the refused dynastic marriage, the converted envoys, the intervening angel, the secretly Christian empress. What is not in doubt is that a martyr named Susanna was venerated at that church in Rome from a very early date; the surviving story is the church's memory of her, elaborated.
- The empress. The passion names Diocletian's wife, who buries Susanna, in terms that cannot be historical as they stand — the name attached to her in the tradition belongs to a different and later imperial lady — and it is one of the clearest internal signs that the narrative was composed long after the events. This entry therefore reports the episode as the passion's, without asserting the name.
- Pope Gaius. Gaius, bishop of Rome 283–296, is a historical figure; the passion's claim that he was Susanna's uncle, of imperial blood, and a martyr is the story's, and the martyrdom in particular is doubted, since he appears to have died in peace shortly before the persecution began. The Byzantine synaxaria nevertheless commemorate him with her, and this entry keeps the company as the calendar hands it down.
- The date. Wikidata and the Latin martyrologies give 295; the Slavonic Menaion brackets the whole group at 295–296, which allows for Gaius's death in 296. Both are the passion's chronology, not independent evidence.
- The companions' names vary in the manuscripts and in translation: Gabinus / Gavinius, Cutias / Cufias / Cythius, Praepedigna / Prepedigna. They are given here in the forms most usual in English, with the variants noted, rather than asserted as a fixed roll.
- Not to be confused with the Susanna of the Book of Daniel, nor with the Susanna of Salamis group of virgin-martyrs, nor with Sosanna the mother of St Nina.