The life of St Agrippina of Rome
When persecution against Christians intensified under the emperor Valerian, she came forward of her own will to confess her faith and was handed over for torture, beaten so severely that her bones were broken; tradition holds that she was afterward freed from her chains by an angel while imprisoned, though she did not survive what she had suffered and died of her injuries.
Three Christian women, Bassa, Paula, and Agathonike, carried her body in secret to Sicily, where it was venerated at Mineo and many healings were reported at her grave; centuries later, in the eleventh century, part of her relics were carried to Constantinople. Modern historians note that the surviving Greek Acts of her martyrdom cannot be treated as reliable evidence and that no early record of her veneration has been found, though her cult flourished in Sicily from the medieval period onward and endures there, and in the wider Orthodox Church, to this day.
