Lugdunum, Its Martyrs and Its Bishop

Lyon was founded as a Roman colony in 43 BCE where the Rhone meets the Saone and became the administrative capital of the three Gallic provinces, with an imperial cult sanctuary at the confluence to which delegates from sixty Gaulish peoples came each year. Its Christian community is the earliest in Gaul about which anything detailed is known, and what is known comes from a letter the churches of Lyon and Vienne sent to Asia Minor describing the persecution of 177, preserved almost entire by Eusebius.

The letter names the deacon Sanctus, the physician Attalus, the ninety year old bishop Pothinus who died in prison, and above all the slave Blandina, whose endurance in the amphitheatre it describes at length and whose social position it deliberately underlines. Irenaeus, who had come from Smyrna and had heard Polycarp as a boy, became bishop after Pothinus, and his Against Heresies is the fullest early account of the Gnostic schools and the first sustained argument that the public teaching held in common by widely separated communities is the test of what the apostles taught. The see still carries the title Primate of the Gauls, and the amphitheatre on the Croix-Rousse slope where the martyrs died is still visible.