Saint Apollonius, a 2nd-century Roman senator and Christian martyr, earned the title “the Apologist” for his powerful defense of the faith before the Roman Senate. Under Emperor Commodus, he was betrayed by his own slave and ultimately sentenced to death for refusing to renounce Christ.
April 18, 185 AD. Rome.
Apollonius sat as a senator of the empire when a slave entered and accused him of being a Christian. But Roman law was clear and unyielding: a slave could not accuse his master—no matter the crime. Not theft. Not murder. Not even heresy. Only treason against the emperor broke that boundary.
The slave believed he had found his opening. Christianity was forbidden. That made Apollonius, in his mind, an enemy of the state.
The court responded without hesitation. The accusation was invalid. The slave was executed immediately. The law had spoken.
Now Apollonius stood alone before the Praetorian Prefect Perennis and the Senate—no accuser, no witnesses, only his own confession.
The Senate offered him a way out: sacrifice to the Roman gods, and live.
He refused.
Then, instead of pleading, Apollonius did the unexpected—he taught.
For hours, he addressed the Senate, not with defiance, but with reason. Drawing on Greek philosophy, quoting Plato and Homer, he argued that Christianity was not a superstition, but the fulfillment of reason itself. Christ, he said, was not a criminal, but the Logos—the divine order underlying all truth.
The chamber listened. Some senators leaned in. One is said to have murmured, “This man speaks like a philosopher.”
But admiration did not overturn the law.
The verdict was guilty.
That same day, Apollonius was led out and beheaded.
He would not deny the truth—not even to save his life.
Apollonius was not afraid to die, because, he said: “There is waiting for me something better: eternal life, given to the person who has lived well on earth.” And he argued for the superiority of Christianity’s concepts of death and life.
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