Martyr Potitus at Naples

Potitus is an early Christian martyr venerated in the pan-Orthodox calendar, where the Orthodox Church in America's synaxarion commemorates him on July 1 as the Martyr Potitus at Naples. By tradition he suffered under the emperor Antoninus Pius (reigned 138-161), placing his death in the middle of the second century. His surviving life is wholly hagiographical and is known to scholars chiefly through a much later Passio Sancti Potiti, so the historical core beneath the legend is difficult to recover.

The tradition presents Potitus as a boy: having become familiar with Christian teaching, he came to believe in the true God and was baptized at thirteen years of age. He was the son of a wealthy pagan, who was greatly distressed when he learned of his son's conversion and is said to have tried to turn him back from the faith. The accounts that grew up around him attribute wonders to him even in his youth, the most famous being the healing of a daughter of the emperor — described variously as the curing of her madness or the exorcism of a demon — after which the emperor turned against him.

The legendary passion relates that Potitus was condemned to a series of torments: cast to the lions, which would not attack him, and then thrown into boiling oil, from which he emerged unharmed, before he was at last put to death by the sword. His cult took firm root in southern Italy, where he is honored as a patron of several towns in Apulia and the surrounding regions and where his relics are kept at Ascoli Satriano. Because the narrative is preserved only in a late and embellished form, these details are best received as the saint's traditional acta rather than as documented history.