The life of Juliana and Companions
She had, by then, quietly received baptism on her own, having seen through what she took to be the emptiness of the household's pagan religion, and when the time came for the marriage she had never agreed to in her heart, she refused outright, telling her betrothed that she would have nothing to do with him unless he too renounced the old gods and became a Christian. Her father tried first to persuade her out of the engagement she was breaking, then turned to violence when persuasion failed, and finally handed her over to the very man she had refused, now acting in his official capacity as the region's governor. Eleusius had her beaten repeatedly, and tradition holds that she was restored and strengthened after each beating rather than broken by it, until he at last condemned her to death; she was executed in the year 304, during the reign of the emperor Maximian. Among the crowd that had gathered to watch her suffering and steadfastness, several hundred people, remembered as roughly five hundred men and some hundred and thirty women, were moved enough by what they saw to confess Christ themselves on the spot, and were beheaded together for that confession. Juliana is remembered together with this whole company of companions, baptized, as the tradition puts it, in the blood of their own witness rather than in water, on the single day that gathers all of their names into one shared memory.
