Apollonia belonged to the Church of Alexandria in the middle of the third century, in the last years of the Emperor Philip the Arab. Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria from 247 to 265, calls her a "parthenos presbytis" — an aged virgin, most likely a woman consecrated to God and serving the community as a deaconess — and says plainly that she was held in high esteem among her people. She had grown old in the service of Christ, and the whole city knew it. Tradition adds that her mother had obtained her birth by fervent prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that from her first breath she was a child asked of God.
The year 248 saw Rome celebrate the thousandth year from its legendary founding, and with it came a fresh surge of devotion to the old gods. The Christians of Alexandria held themselves apart from the festivities. When a pagan poet of the city prophesied calamity, the fury of the mob rose to a great height, and the civil authorities made no effort whatever to protect the faithful. What followed was not a formal trial but a pogrom.
An old man named Metras died first: he refused to blaspheme the name of Christ, so they beat him, drove sharpened reeds into his cheeks and eyes, dragged him outside the city and stoned him to death. Next they seized a Christian woman named Quinta, led her to a heathen temple and commanded her to worship. She turned her head away in disgust and cursed the false gods again and again, so they bound her feet, dragged her on her back over the stones to the same place where Metras had died, and stoned her also. Then the houses of the Christians were sacked and plundered — and the faithful, as the Apostle says, took the spoiling of their goods with joy.
Apollonia was their third victim, and the most famous of that whole company of martyrs. The mob laid hands on the aged virgin, and with repeated blows they broke her jaw and struck out all her teeth. Then they built a great pile of wood outside the city gates and stood her before it, telling her she must repeat their impious words after them — either a blasphemy against Christ or an invocation of their gods — or be burned alive. She asked to be released a little, as though she were about to comply. When they loosened their hold, she sprang quickly and of her own accord into the fire, and was burned to death rather than let one word against her Lord pass her broken mouth.
Dionysius, writing to Fabius, Bishop of Antioch, records the act without the least breath of reproach: in his eyes she was as truly a martyr as the rest, and so the Alexandrian Church revered her. Later, Saint Augustine in the first book of The City of God weighed the question of holy women who anticipated their executioners in order to keep their faith or their chastity, and refused to condemn them, allowing that such souls may have acted "not through human caprice but on the command of God, not erroneously but through obedience." Saint Ambrose likewise pondered the same mystery. The Church has answered by keeping her feast.
The origins of her public cult are hidden, but by the ninth century her name stands in the martyrologies — in the additions of Florus to the Martyrology of the Venerable Bede on 20 February, and in the Martyrology of Ado of Vienne on 9 February, the date that passed into the Roman Martyrology and is kept by Catholics and by the Eastern Churches alike. Jacobus de Voragine retold and expanded her story in the Golden Legend around 1260, and from then on her fame in the West was immense. Other traditions grew up around her: that she was a king's daughter tortured at her own father's command; that she was the sister of the deacon Saint Lawrence, who went to Egypt and there suffered under Decius; that her grave lay on Mount Tabor or on Sinai. A later narrative even duplicated her, making a second Apollonia a Roman virgin under Julian the Apostate who suffered the same dental torment. These are pious legends; the letter of Dionysius remains the sober and sufficient account.
Her relics were dispersed across Christendom: the greater part in the former church of Saint Apollonia at Rome, her head at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, her arms at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, portions of her jaw in Saint Basil's, and single teeth or splinters of bone at Antwerp, Brussels, Mechlin, Liège, Porto and several churches of Cologne. The Roman church dedicated to her has vanished, leaving only the little Piazza Sant'Apollonia. At Lezat-sur-Leze in the Ariege a supposed tooth of the saint, set in a silver handle, is still rubbed on the gums of teething infants.
Because of the torment she bore, Apollonia is invoked against toothache and is honoured as patroness of dentists and dental technicians; her image supports the arms of the British Dental Association. She is one of the two patron saints of Catania. Artists show her holding a martyr's palm and a pair of pincers gripping a tooth — at Sens Cathedral in stained glass, at Avenches in a fifteenth-century fresco, and most famously in Jean Fouquet's Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia. Fifty-two of her images survived the English reformers, chiefly on the rood screens and in the windows of Devon and East Anglia. Portuguese navigators named the island of Mauritius Santa Apolonia in her honour in 1507; a great railway station of Lisbon still bears her name. In parts of Italy she is said to gather children's fallen milk teeth by night and leave a gift in their place, and in the Flemish Ardennes the faithful still eat geutelings on her feast.
What the mob broke in her was the very organ of speech, so that she could not blaspheme even had she wished; what they could not break was her will, wholly given to Christ.
May Saint Apollonia obtain for us the courage to keep our mouths pure of every denial of God, and to bear our own small pains today with her patient, unbroken love.
