The Saint with Almost No History
The question that closed the Prologue is an uncomfortable one, and perhaps for that reason it is rarely asked: what can really be known about the man behind the holy card of Saint Expedite?
Before attempting an answer, the reader needs to adjust one expectation. To know something about a martyr of the early centuries is almost always to know very little, and the smallness of that knowledge reflects the ordinary condition of the subject.
Readers today are accustomed to a kind of knowledge that antiquity rarely offers. They expect exact dates, documents from the period, certificates, and records that can be cross-checked. For the great majority of martyrs of the first three centuries, none of this exists, for a simple reason.
The persecuted Church kept no registries and wrote no biographies. What it chose to preserve was the memory that these men and women had died faithful. Of the ancient martyrs, in most cases, little more than three facts reached us: a name, a place, and a day.
Seen this way, the scarcity of data about Expedite loses its air of scandal and shows itself as the common lot of nearly all the saints of that age. What makes his case peculiar is the contrast between the silence of the sources and the colossal size of the devotion that grew above it.
Before examining the little that is known of Expedite, the setting in which the tradition placed him deserves reconstruction. The setting, unlike the individual portrait, is solid, documented, and impressive. Tradition says that Expedite died in 303, during the persecution under Diocletian. That persecution belongs to the best documented episodes of Christian antiquity, and knowing it helps explain why the saint's story, though unproven, sounds plausible.
Diocletian had ruled since 284 under a system he devised himself, the tetrarchy, in which imperial power was shared among four men, two with the title of Augustus and two with the title of Caesar.
He was a cold and capable administrator who saw himself as the restorer of Rome's ancient glory, and that restoration included the worship of the traditional gods, on whom, in his view, the health of the Empire depended. The Christians refused that worship, and so they stood in the way.
In the winter before 303, Galerius, the Caesar of the East and the fiercest enemy of the new faith, pressed a cautious Diocletian to act. The persecution began in February 303 with the destruction of the church in the imperial capital itself, Nicomedia, in present-day Turkey. Four edicts followed, each harsher than the last. The first ordered churches destroyed, sacred books burned, and Christians stripped of office and rights. The later edicts ordered the imprisonment of the clergy and finally required everyone to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death.
What Rome demanded was a public gesture of worship toward the gods of the state. For the Christian, that gesture amounted to apostasy, and many met martyrdom through their refusal of it, a refusal of religious fidelity that carried no political aim.
The persecution was uneven across the Empire. In Gaul and Britain, where the Caesar Constantius governed, father of the future Constantine, it was mild and amounted to the demolition of a few church buildings. In the East, under Galerius and later under Maximinus, the repression reached its greatest severity, and the tradition places the martyrdom of Expedite there.
The ancient sources that transmit these events, above all the historian Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History and the Christian writer Lactantius in his treatise On the Deaths of the Persecutors, described the violence of those years with horror.
Many of the dead were soldiers, since the army had been one of the first targets of the purge. The presence of soldier martyrs in that time and region shows that the figure of a Christian officer executed for his faith has nothing implausible about it.
Here, then, is the setting: real, dated, bloody, and fully compatible with the story the tradition tells. The word to keep in mind is compatible, because it is the key to this whole chapter. That the persecution truly happened is one matter. To prove that this man, with this name and this rank, died in it in the manner reported is a different matter altogether.
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