Episode 966: St Prisca

Prisca was a young Roman woman allegedly tortured and executed for her Christian faith. The dates of her birth and death are unknown. She is revered as a saint and martyr in Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Catholic Church, and in the Anglican Communion.

Scholars say she was friends of the Apostle Paul.

She is honored, especially in England, as a child martyr. January 18 is her feast day.

Saint Prisca was of a noble family. At age thirteen, she was baptized by St. Peter. Emperor Claudius ordered her to make a sacrifice to the god Apollo. When she refused because of her Christian faith, she was beaten and sent to prison. She was at last thrown to a lion in the amphitheater, but it quietly lay down at her feet. The Italian poet Martha Marchina (1600-1646) describes this moment of Prisca's martyrdom in a pair of poems in her book Musa Posthuma where the lion's humane nature is contrasted against human savagery.

She was starved for three days in a slaves' prison house, tortured upon the rack, and thrown on a burning pile. Still she remained alive,but was beheaded at the tenth milestone on the Via Ostiensis—the road from Rome to Ostia.

• There exists on the Aventine a church of St. Prisca. Titulus Priscoe, stated it in the fifth century and was built probably in the fourth. In the eighteenth century there was found near this church a bronze tablet with an inscription of the year 224, by which a senator named Caius Marius Pudens Cornelianus was granted citizenship in a Spanish city. As such tablets were generally put up in the house of the person so honoured, it is possible that the senator's palace stood on the spot where the church was built later. The assumption is probable that the Prisca who founded this church, or who, perhaps as early as the third century, gave the use of a part of the house standing there for the Christian church services, belonged to the family of Pudens Cornelianus.