He was a deacon of the church of Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily under the shadow of 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 the year three hundred and four he came to the governor's council chamber carrying the book of the Gospels, stood outside the doors 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 was Calvisianus, and the first question was the obvious one: what was he carrying.

He said it was the holy Gospels. He was asked whose they were, and whether he knew the edict, and whether he knew that possession of the books was itself the offense. He said he knew, and that he had them because he was a Christian, and that he could not give them up and live. He was ordered to read from them, and he did, and the passages he chose are given in the Acts.

He was tortured, questioned again, and would not sacrifice or curse the name. The governor sentenced him, and the Acts record the terms: 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, and a herald walked in front announcing the charge, and he prayed as he went, and was beheaded on the twelfth of August, three hundred and four. He is one of the last martyrs of the Sicilian church before the peace.

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, and Catania has never forgotten him.

There are hundreds of martyrs in the calendar whose Acts are pious compositions written centuries later. There are perhaps a dozen whose Acts are, in the judgment of historians of all confessions, essentially what was said in the room. Euplus is in the second group, with Justin, with Cyprian, with the martyrs of Scilli, with Polycarp.

What the record shows is not heroic in the way later hagiography is heroic. It is a man giving short answers to procedural questions, refusing an obvious escape several times over, and being sentenced by an official who plainly would have preferred a different outcome and who followed the law.

He died holding a book. In an app whose whole purpose is putting the Scriptures and the Fathers in a reader's hand, that is worth a day.