The life of St Susanna the Virgin
The fuller story handed down about her, that she was the daughter of the Roman priest Gavinius and niece of Bishop Caius, that Diocletian sought to marry her to his co-ruler Maximian, that her refusal led to the conversion of the emperor's own kinsman Claudius, his wife Prepedigna, their sons, and eventually Diocletian's own brother Maximus, and that several of the newly baptized were burned at Ostia while Gavinius himself was put to death, comes from an Acts of her martyrdom written at least a century after she died. Acts of this kind, common for many early Roman martyrs, are treated by scholars as legendary in their particulars even where a genuine martyr almost certainly stands behind them, and that is how this account should be read. What the Church holds without dispute is simpler: a consecrated virgin of Rome who would not be moved from her faith and died for it, remembered together with Bishop Caius, who is said to have guided her and to have died himself the following year.
