Early Church (2nd century)
Feast: June 2
A slave girl so small her mistress feared she would break — who outlasted every torturer in the Lyon amphitheater.
Her mistress worried Blandina was too frail to endure. She was a slave, probably small, certainly nobody important by Roman standards. In the summer of 177 AD, during the persecution under Marcus Aurelius, she was arrested with dozens of Christians in Lyon. The letter from the churches of Lyon and Vienne — one of the most vivid documents of early Christianity — records what happened next. Torturers worked on Blandina in shifts from dawn until evening. They ran out of ideas before she ran out of strength. ‘I am a Christian,’ she kept saying. ‘Nothing wicked happens among us.’ In the arena, she was hung on a post in the shape of a cross while wild animals were released around her. The beasts would not touch her. The other prisoners, watching from their cells, said she looked like Christ. Days later she was brought back, scourged, burned on a hot iron chair, and finally wrapped in a net and thrown to a bull. The letter calls her a ‘noble athlete.’ She was the last of the Lyon martyrs to die, having encouraged every one of them first. The people who wrote about her could not stop marveling: the weakest member of the group had turned out to be unbreakable.