St. Euplus of Catania

The persecution Diocletian began in 303 opened not with executions but with a book confiscation: the churches to be demolished, the Scriptures to be handed over and burned. Clergy who complied were called traditores, the handers-over, and the word became a permanent insult.

Euplus was a deacon of the church of Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily under Etna. Nothing survives of his life before the trial, not his parents, not his age, not how long he had served. What survives is a transcript.

In the spring of 304 he came to the governor's council chamber carrying the book of the Gospels, stood where he could be heard, and called out that he was a Christian and wished to die for it. The officers brought him in. The governor Calvisianus asked what he was carrying, whose it was, and whether he knew that possession of the books was itself the offense. He said he knew, and that he could not give them up and live. He was ordered to read from them, and did.

He was tortured, questioned again, and would not sacrifice. The sentence, as the Acts record it, was that Euplus, having refused the gods and confessed the Christian superstition and having been found with the writings, should be beheaded. They hung the book around his neck and led him out with a herald announcing the charge in front, and he was beheaded on the twelfth of August, 304.

The Eastern Church keeps his memory on the eleventh of August, the West on the twelfth. His relics were carried out of Sicily before the Arab conquest and are venerated at Trevico in southern Italy. He died holding a book.