Ss. Ptolemy, Lucius and a Companion

Ptolemy was a Christian teacher at Rome whose instruction helped a woman embrace the faith. Her husband opposed her conversion and treated her cruelly. After she obtained a separation, his resentment turned against the man who had instructed her. He denounced Ptolemy as a Christian, bringing him into imprisonment and eventually before the prefect Urbicius.

At his examination Ptolemy acknowledged his faith. Butler’s account, drawn from St. Justin’s apology and the history of Eusebius, records that he was sentenced to death without another crime being proved. A Christian named Lucius, who witnessed the proceedings, protested against condemning someone merely for his religious profession. Asked whether he too was a Christian, Lucius answered openly and received the same sentence.

A third man then made the same confession and was condemned with them. His name was not preserved in the account Butler used. The three are remembered together because a prosecution directed against one Christian became the occasion for two others to bear public witness beside him. Their story is unusually close to an early Christian defence of the faith, rather than depending only on a much later martyr legend.