St. Apollonia

Apollonia's martyrdom is one of the most precisely documented in the early Alexandrian records, because Eusebius preserved a letter written by Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, describing the persecution that broke out in that city during the reign of Philip the Arab, around the year 249, in advance of the Decian edict. It was a popular persecution, Dionysius explains — a riot rather than an official proceeding — and Apollonia was among its victims. She was an elderly deaconess, he says, who was seized by the crowd and had her teeth broken and knocked out one by one by blows to the jaw. She was then threatened with fire unless she recanted.

What happened next is the event that secured Apollonia's place in the calendar and generated centuries of reflection. Instead of waiting for her persecutors to throw her into the fire, she leapt into it herself. This act demands the careful theological attention it has always deserved. Augustine discussed the case explicitly in the City of God, recognising the apparent difficulty: that a voluntary death of this kind, taken without divine command, would in ordinary circumstances not be martyrdom but suicide. Augustine's answer — that Apollonia acted under a direct divine impulse, an interior movement that placed her action outside the ordinary moral category — is the answer the Church follows. The antiquity of the cult, the authority of Augustine's judgment, and the manifest heroism of the woman combine to warrant the veneration.

The patronage of dentists, which attaches to Apollonia universally, came directly from the manner of her suffering: teeth broken by blows, and then the fire. This is one of the more natural of the medieval patron saint connections, requiring no interpretive effort. The relics alleged to be her teeth — distributed across Europe in extraordinary quantities, with some dry acknowledgment of their improbable numbers — attracted devotion from the early medieval period onward and were among the most popular of all relic objects. The woman behind them was an aged deaconess in Alexandria whose story Dionysius of Alexandria told within a generation of her death.