Blood on the Rhône

In the summer of AD 177, the Roman city of Lugdunum - modern Lyon - turned on its Christian community with a ferocity that shocked contemporaries. What began as spring exclusions from the baths and the forum ended in the Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls, where forty-eight men and women were tortured and executed before the delegates of sixty Gallic nations. Among them: Pothinus, a bishop over ninety years old, beaten by a mob and left to die in prison. Sanctus, a deacon, burned with heated bronze plates until his body no longer resembled a man - and then healed. And Blandina, an enslaved woman whose mistress feared she was too frail to endure anything, who outlasted every torturer and became, in the account her community preserved, the supreme exemplar of courage.Blood on the Rhône reconstructs the Lugdunum persecution in full: the civic world that produced it, the legal machinery that processed it, the fiscal calculus that sent the condemned to the arena, and the extraordinary letter that carried their testimony east, ensuring that the Roman attempt to erase these lives became instead the most thoroughly documented martyrdom in the second-century world. It is a history of power meeting an identity power cannot reach - and of the words that outlasted the empire that tried to silence them.