Pope Saint Eutychian: The Twenty-Seventh Pope, the Reign No One Can Measure, and the Stone That Tells the Truth

The twenty-seventh in a series on the popes.

There is no pope whose reign the ancient sources measure more differently than Eutychian’s. Eusebius, the first historian of the Church, gives him less than ten months in the chair of Peter; the Roman archive that the Church kept of its own bishops gives him almost nine years. Between those two figures—a few months on the one hand, the better part of a decade on the other—lies most of what can honestly be said about the twenty-seventh pope, which is to say, not much. No letter of his survives, nor any record of a council, a controversy, a decree, or a single dated act. The great reference works reach for the same word: obscure. And yet under the silence there is one hard thing, harder than anything the legends later built on top of it—a broken slab of marble, cut with his name in Greek and nothing else, that turned up in a Roman catacomb in the nineteenth century and settled, at a stroke, the question the written sources had left open.⁠¹

This is the twenty-seventh entry in my series on the popes, which has followed the bishops of Rome in order from Peter down to Eutychian’s immediate predecessor, Felix I. The two popes make an instructive pair. With Felix, the sources are so thin that his very grave had to be inferred; the legends—a martyr’s crown, a forged letter on the person of Christ—rushed in to fill a vacuum, and the historian’s task was to strip them away and find the small true thing underneath. With Eutychian the vacuum is just as wide, and the legends just as thick, but here the excavator’s spade found something Felix’s reign never yielded: the man’s actual tombstone. It is the difference between a pope reconstructed from arithmetic and a pope confirmed by a stone. That is why Eutychian, obscure as he is, is worth an entry of his own.

Eight Months or Eight Years?

Begin with the disagreement, because it is the most interesting thing about him and it goes to the heart of how we know anything about the third-century papacy at all.

Our earliest witness is Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his Church History in the first decades of the fourth century. He disposes of Eutychian in a single clause, folded into the same sentence that ends Felix and begins Caius: “At this time, Felix, having presided over the church of Rome for five years, was succeeded by Eutychianus, but he in less than ten months left the position to Caius, who lived in our day.”⁠² Less than ten months. That is Eusebius’s whole account of the reign—not a portrait, not an event, only a term of office, and a very short one. Nor is it a slip of the pen in a single manuscript. Eusebius wrote a second work, the Chronicle, a comparative table of world history, and there he gives the same figure independently: in the Latin version that Jerome made and expanded, “Eutychianus received the twenty-sixth episcopate of the Church of Rome for eight months, after which Gaius was twenty-seventh for fifteen years.”⁠³ Two of Eusebius’s works, then, agree with each other: Eutychian reigned less than a year.

Against them stands the Roman record, and it says something entirely different. The Liberian Catalogue—a list of the bishops of Rome with their reign-lengths, compiled at Rome in the year 354 and preserved in the great almanac known as the Chronograph of that year—assigns Eutychian a reign of “eight years, eleven months, and three days,” running “from the consulship of Aurelian for the third time and Marcellinus”—that is, from 275—“to the seventh day before the Ides of December, in the consulship of Carus for the second time and Carinus,” which is 7 December 283.⁠⁴ The sixth-century Liber Pontificalis, the Roman Book of the Popes, follows this same tradition, giving him roughly the same span—though it cannot keep its own figures straight, printing “eight years, ten months, and four days” in one recension and a plainly corrupt “one year, one month, and one day” in another.⁠⁵ The gap between the two traditions is enormous: Eusebius counts the reign in months, Rome counts it in years, and there is no obvious way to split the difference.

How do historians choose? Not, as one might expect, by deferring to the earlier witness. Eusebius is older, but on the exact durations of the mid- and late-third-century Roman bishops he is demonstrably unreliable, and the same stretch of his history proves it. In the very chapter that narrates these years he runs through the Roman emperors and simply omits two of them—Tacitus and Florian, who reigned between Aurelian and Probus—as though they had never existed.⁠⁶ A historian in Caesarea, four hundred miles from Rome and working from imperfect lists, was in a poor position to time the reigns of distant bishops to the month; the compressions and omissions in his imperial chronology warn us not to trust his ecclesiastical one. The Liberian list, by contrast, was a Roman document about Roman bishops, and it does something Eusebius never does: it dates the death not merely to a year but to a named day under named consuls—the seventh before the Ides of December, Carus and Carinus being consuls. That is the fingerprint of an archive, not a guess. Modern scholarship, and the official Annuario Pontificio with it, accordingly follows the Roman tradition and dates Eutychian’s reign from 275 to his death on 7 December 283, treating Eusebius’s short figure as simply an error.⁠⁷

One honest caution belongs here. The conventional accession date one sees printed—4 January 275—is a modern reckoning, not a datum from the sources; the Liberian catalogue gives only the consular year for the start of the reign and the exact day only for its end. What is genuinely attested is the death: 7 December 283. Everything before it is convention laid over silence. The reign we can date to the day at its close we cannot date at all at its opening—a fitting condition for a pope about whom the one certain fact turned out to be the inscription on his tomb.

A Pope in the Little Peace

If we cannot say how long Eutychian reigned, we can at least say when, and the when explains a great deal about why his pontificate is such a blank.

His years fall squarely inside the long lull that historians call the little peace of the Church—the roughly forty-year interval between the collapse of the emperor Valerian’s persecution around 260 and the outbreak of Diocletian’s Great Persecution in 303. The emperor Gallienus had issued a rescript of toleration that returned confiscated churches and cemeteries to Christian communities, and for two generations the faith spread without systematic imperial assault. Eutychian’s whole reign, 275 to 283, sits in the middle of that calm.⁠⁸ The political surface above him was anything but calm—the empire was churning through soldier-emperors at a dizzying rate—but the churn never touched the Church. Aurelian, who had reunited the shattered empire, was assassinated in 275, the very year Eutychian’s reign is reckoned to have begun; then came Tacitus, and after a few months Florian, and then Probus for six years, and then Carus, and then Carus’s sons Carinus and Numerian—five or six emperors in Eutychian’s eight years, and not one of them turned on the Christians. Diocletian, whose accession in 284 would eventually end the peace in blood, came to the throne only the year after Eutychian died.⁠⁹

This is the frame within which the emptiness of the record has to be read. There is no persecution to record, no confessor to bury, no lapsed to reconcile, no schism to fight—none of the dramatic material that gives the reigns of a Fabian or a Cornelius their shape. The Church in these years was consolidating quietly, growing in numbers and property, organizing its clergy and its cemeteries, and its bishop of Rome went about that unspectacular work and left no paper trail. “We know no details of his pontificate,” the Catholic Encyclopedia says flatly, and the verdict has not been improved on in the century since.⁠¹⁰ No council met under him; no letter of his was kept; no controversy attached to his name. The one event the sources can date to the day is his funeral.

That blankness is not a defect in our records so much as a fact about the man’s times. A bishop who governs in peace, breaks no new ground in doctrine, and dies in his bed leaves little for a historian to hold. It is precisely the popes of the persecutions whom the sources illuminate, because catastrophe generates documents. Eutychian had the good fortune—his name, fittingly, means “fortunate”—to reign when nothing went wrong.⁠¹¹ The reward for that fortune is obscurity.

The Book of the Popes and Its Beautiful Inventions

Silence, however, is intolerable to hagiography, and the Liber Pontificalis abhors a vacuum. Where the reliable record gives nothing, the Book of the Popes—compiled in its first form in the sixth century, two and a half centuries after Eutychian died—supplies a small, vivid dossier, and it is worth reading closely, both for what it claims and for what the claims reveal about the workshop that produced them.

It opens with the pope’s origins: he was “by nationality a Tuscan, son of Marinus, from the city of Luna.”⁠¹² Luna—the modern Luni, on the frontier of Tuscany and Liguria—is a specific enough detail that it may well preserve a genuine memory, and it is charming to find the Cavalieri engraving that heads this post still labeling him, a thousand years later, Etrus—Etruscan. Then the Book of the Popes turns to his deeds, and here the ground gives way. It credits him with three things, and all three are almost certainly false.

The first is liturgical: “He ordained that fruit might be blessed upon the altar, but only beans and grapes.”⁠¹³ It is a lovely, homely detail—the pope legislating the harvest, the bean and the grape carried up to be blessed—and it is exactly the kind of thing a sixth-century compiler would retroject onto a third-century name. Prayers for the blessing of first-fruits are indeed found in the early Roman liturgies, with both Jewish and pagan antecedents, and the bean and grape were from ancient times the staple crops of Italy; but the custom is a broad and gradual growth, not the decree of one pope, and the ascription to Eutychian, as the Catholic Encyclopedia says without hedging, “undoubtedly belongs to a later period.”⁠¹⁴ The compiler has taken a familiar practice of his own day and given it an apostolic founder, as the Liber Pontificalis does again and again.

The second and third claims are graver, and they are the ones that made Eutychian famous. “He in his time buried three hundred and forty-two martyrs in divers places with his own hand,” the Book of the Popes says; “he also ordained that whenever anyone of the faithful buried a martyr, he should bury him in a dalmatic or a purple tunic.”⁠¹⁵ Three hundred and forty-two martyrs, interred by the pope’s own hands—it is a striking image, and it is almost certainly an invention, for the simplest of reasons: there were no martyrs to bury. Eutychian reigned in the middle of the forty-year peace; no persecution touched Rome in his lifetime. The Catholic Encyclopedia draws the necessary conclusion and does not soften it: the claim “that he promulgated rules for the burial of martyrs and buried many of them with his own hands, has but slight claim to acceptance, since after the death of Aurelian (275) the Church enjoyed a long respite from persecution.”⁠¹⁶ Louise Ropes Loomis, translating the Book of the Popes, is blunter still in her note: the two sentences “may both be entirely apocryphal.”⁠¹⁷

And yet even here the honest verdict should be deflating rather than dismissive. The instinct behind the false attributions is not foolish. The pope who buries the martyrs with his own hands, who wraps their bodies in a dalmatic of honor—this is the Liber Pontificalis imagining what a bishop of Rome in the age of the catacombs was for: the guardian of the holy dead, the man who saw to it that those who died for the faith were laid to rest with reverence. The specific decrees are legend. The world they picture—a Roman church organized around the tombs of its martyrs, its bishop the keeper of that sacred ground—is real, and it is, as we are about to see, the world in which Eutychian himself was buried.

The Martyr He Probably Wasn’t

The Liber Pontificalis saves its boldest claim for last: “And he was crowned with martyrdom.”⁠¹⁸ On the strength of that clause, Eutychian was venerated for more than a thousand years as Saint Eutychian, Pope and Martyr; the older Roman Martyrology, following Cardinal Baronius, filled in the picture: after burying his three hundred and forty-two martyrs, the entry continued, “under the emperor Numerian he became their companion, being crowned with martyrdom, and buried in the cemetery of Callistus.”⁠¹⁹ It is a satisfying ending, and it is false, and the evidence that unmakes it is the same kind of evidence that unmade the martyrdom of his predecessor Felix: the oldest calendar of the Roman church.

The Chronograph of 354 preserves two ancient Roman lists side by side—the Depositio Martyrum, the calendar of the martyrs’ anniversaries, and the Depositio Episcoporum, the register of the bishops’ burials. Eutychian appears in exactly one of them, and it is not the martyrs’ list. Under the sixth day before the Ides of December—8 December—the Depositio Episcoporum records simply: “Of Eutychianus, in [the cemetery] of Callixtus.”⁠²⁰ He is filed with the bishops who died in their beds, not with the martyrs who died under the sword. The men who buried him, a bare seventy years after his death, did not think he was a martyr. The Catholic Encyclopedia states the case with precision: “It is highly probable that Eutychianus did not die a martyr. The fourth-century Roman Calendar mentions him (8 December) in the ‘Depositio Episcoporum’, but not in its list of martyrs.”⁠²¹ The chronology says the same thing the calendar does. A pope who reigned entirely within the peace of the Church, and whose oldest commemoration files him among the bishops, was no martyr, whatever a book written two and a half centuries later chose to add.

The unwinding of the legend in modern times is quieter than the Felix case, and it is worth getting right, because it is easy to overstate. Eutychian was never carried on the General Roman Calendar—the calendar of the Mass—at all; 8 December in that calendar has for centuries belonged to the Immaculate Conception, and Eutychian existed only as a line in the Roman Martyrology, the Church’s daily roll of the saints.⁠²² So there was no feast to suppress; the correction, when it came, was made in the Martyrology itself. The current edition, the Martyrologium Romanum of 2004, keeps him on 8 December but strips the legend to the bone: “At Rome, in the cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the burial of Saint Eutychian, pope.”⁠²³ Pope, not martyr. The official French edition goes further and says out loud what the old sources implied, noting that he “governed the Church in a time of peace.” After seventeen centuries the Church’s own book put Eutychian back where the men who buried him had placed him: among the bishops, on the day they recorded, with the title they gave him.

There is a small tangle of dates worth naming and then setting aside, since it is a good specimen of how unreliable the later sources are on this pope. The Liberian catalogue puts his death on 7 December; the Depositio Episcoporum commemorates him on 8 December; the Liber Pontificalis, characteristically, contradicts both, dating his death to 13 December and his burial to the following 25 July.⁠²⁴ When a source cannot keep a pope’s death and burial within seven months of each other, its confident report that he was “crowned with martyrdom” is not the sort of thing on which to hang a cult.

The One True Fragment

Everything so far has been subtraction—the reign we cannot measure, the deeds we must delete, the martyrdom that dissolves under the calendar. It is time for the one addition, and it is the best-attested fact in the whole file, because it is not written on parchment but cut in stone.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the founder of modern Christian archaeology, was working through the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia—the official burial ground of the third-century Roman church. In 1854, in the heart of that vast underground cemetery, he identified the small chamber that has been known ever since as the Crypt of the Popes: the very room where the bishops of Rome of the persecution age were laid to rest, one after another, their names cut in Greek on marble slabs set into the walls.⁠²⁵ Among the fragments de Rossi recovered from that crypt was a broken slab bearing, in Greek capitals, a single name and a single word: ΕΥΤΥΧΙΑΝΟϹ ΕΠΙϹ—Eutychianus, epis[kopos], “Eutychian, bishop.”⁠²⁶

Consider what that stone does. Where Felix left no personal epitaph and had to be located by inference, Eutychian’s own gravestone was found in place, and it confirms, against Eusebius and in favor of the Roman tradition, that he was indeed buried among the popes of Callixtus, exactly as the Depositio Episcoporum said. He was, in fact, the last of the popes to be laid in that crypt. His stone is one of the five papal epitaphs de Rossi recovered from it in the original Greek—the gravestones of Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, and Eutychian.⁠²⁷ His neighbors in that room include several this series has already visited: Pontian, whose bones were carried back from a Sardinian mine to lie here, and Anterus, whose stone, like Eutychian’s, reads only “bishop.” A century and a half after the burials, Pope Sixtus III set a marble plaque at the crypt listing the bishops who rested there, Eutychian’s name among them—an inscription confirming an inscription.⁠²⁸

But the most eloquent thing about Eutychian’s epitaph is a word that is not on it. The stone says bishop. It does not say martyr. This is not an accident of breakage; it is the pattern of the crypt. The epigrapher can read the difference in the marble itself: the stones of Pontian and Fabian carry the title martyr alongside bishop—and on Pontian’s, tellingly, the word martyr was cut in a second, later hand—while the stones of Anterus, Lucius, and Eutychian bear the title bishop alone.⁠²⁹ The men who carved these slabs distinguished carefully between the popes who had died for the faith and the popes who had merely governed it, and they placed Eutychian, without hesitation, in the second class. The one contemporary object that survives from his whole existence quietly contradicts the martyr’s crown that a later age would set on his head. It is the most economical refutation imaginable: not an argument, but a stone that simply declines to call him what he was not.

There is a coda to the epitaph that is worth a sentence, though it must be labeled as what it is. The great Roman epigrapher Margherita Guarducci, studying the fragment in the twentieth century, read into its lettering a small cryptogram—an interlaced iota and chi, the initials of Iēsous Christos, worked into the stone as a hidden confession of faith.⁠³⁰ Whether the mark is a deliberate monogram or an accident of the cutter’s hand is a scholar’s question, and I will not pretend to settle it. But the reading is a fitting emblem of the man: whatever certainty we have about Eutychian is cut in stone, and even that has to be squinted at.

As for the rest of him—the relics, the later cult—we are back among traditions that cannot be verified. His bones, like all the catacomb relics, were removed from the crypt in the early Middle Ages; a much later tradition, cherished in his supposed homeland, holds that in the seventeenth century his relics were given by Pope Innocent X to a nobleman of Sarzana and enshrined in the cathedral there, near the Luni of his birth.⁠³¹ It is a pious devotion of the region that claims him as its own first pope, and it may be true; but the identification of a specific reliquary of the seventeenth century with the third-century bishop cannot be established, and it belongs with the legends rather than the evidence. The stone in the crypt is another matter. That we can trust.

What We Can Actually Say

Reduce Eutychian to the load-bearing evidence and the portrait is very thin, but every line of it holds. A man, remembered as a Tuscan from Luni, elected bishop of Rome in succession to Felix I around the year 275; pope through most of the little peace of the Church, in the churning years of Probus and Carus; the author of no surviving act, letter, or decree; dead on 7 December 283, and buried in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus, the last bishop of Rome to be laid there, his Greek epitaph surviving to prove it. That is the whole of what can be documented, and it can all be documented.

What the evidence does not support is nearly everything that made him memorable: the blessing of beans and grapes (a later custom retrojected); the three hundred and forty-two martyrs buried by his own hands (there were no martyrs to bury); the decree on burying martyrs in dalmatics (the same invention); the martyr’s crown itself (contradicted by the oldest calendar and by his own stone); the reign of less than a year (Eusebius’s error, corrected by the Roman archive). And there is one more layer of fiction to note, because it completes the pattern this series has seen before. Like several obscure early popes, Eutychian became a convenient name for forgers: the ninth-century compilers of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals fathered spurious letters on him—one addressed to the bishops of Spain, another to the bishops of Sicily—and the wider medieval canonical tradition swelled the number to about a dozen decretals in all, every one of them a fabrication.⁠³² “No documents ascribed to him are authentic,” the New Catholic Encyclopedia says, closing the account.⁠³³

A closing distinction, since the name invites confusion. Pope Eutychian must not be mistaken for Eutyches, the archimandrite of Constantinople whose heresy—that Christ had but one nature—was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The two men are separated by a hundred and seventy years and by everything else; they share only the root of a Greek name that means “fortunate.”⁠³⁴ The pope was neither a heretic nor, so far as anyone can show, a martyr. He was a bishop of Rome in a quiet time, and then he was a grave.

And that, in the end, is why the small stone is worth more than all the manufactured glory heaped on him afterward. The legends made Eutychian a hero of the catacombs, burying the martyrs with his own hands and joining them in death; the forgers made him a lawgiver of the universal Church; the calendars made him a saint and martyr for a thousand years. Strip all of it away and what remains is a broken slab that says only Eutychian, bishop—not martyr, not lawgiver, not miracle-worker, just the plain office and the plain name. It is a smaller thing than any of the inventions. But it is true, and it is his, and in the long memory of the Church a true grave outlasts a thousand embroidered legends. The men who cut that stone knew something the later centuries forgot: that it is enough, for a bishop of Rome, to have held the office faithfully and to be buried among his brethren. They did not need to make him a martyr. Neither do we.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Caius, the twenty-eighth pope.

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally, the indispensable reference works are J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014). The primary sources for Eutychian are few and public: Eusebius, The Church History, Book VII, in the translation of Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890); the Liber Pontificalis in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Columbia University Press, 1916), with the great critical edition of Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris, 1886–1892), for the notes; and, for the ancient Roman calendars, the Chronograph of 354 as edited by Theodor Mommsen in the Chronica Minora. On the Crypt of the Popes and Eutychian’s epitaph, the enduring authority is Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana (1864–1877); the fullest modern treatment of the pope himself is Giovanni Maria Vian’s entry “Eutichiano, santo” in the Enciclopedia dei Papi (Rome, 2000).

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, Saint Linus, the second pope, Saint Anacletus, the third pope, Saint Clement, the fourth pope, Saint Evaristus, the fifth pope, Saint Alexander I, the sixth pope, Saint Sixtus I, the seventh pope, Saint Telesphorus, the eighth pope, Saint Hyginus, the ninth pope, Saint Pius I, the tenth pope, Saint Anicetus, the eleventh pope, Saint Soter, the twelfth pope, Saint Eleutherius, the thirteenth pope, Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope, Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope, Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope, Saint Urban I, the seventeenth pope, Saint Pontian, the eighteenth pope, Saint Anterus, the nineteenth pope, Saint Fabian, the twentieth pope, Saint Cornelius, the twenty-first pope, Saint Lucius I, the twenty-second pope, Saint Stephen I, the twenty-third pope, Saint Sixtus II, the twenty-fourth pope, Saint Dionysius, the twenty-fifth pope, and Saint Felix I, the twenty-sixth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Eutychian?

Eutychian was the twenty-seventh Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning from about 275 to his death on 7 December 283. He is one of the most obscure of the early popes: no letter, decree, council, or genuine act of his survives, and he governed during the “little peace of the Church,” the long lull between the persecutions of Valerian and Diocletian. Almost everything later ages claimed to know about him—that he blessed the harvest on the altar, buried hundreds of martyrs with his own hands, and died a martyr himself—is legend. The one certain relic of his existence is his gravestone, a broken Greek inscription reading “Eutychian, bishop,” recovered from the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus.

How long did Pope Eutychian actually reign?

The sources disagree by an extraordinary margin. Eusebius of Caesarea, in both his Church History and his Chronicle, gives Eutychian a reign of only eight to ten months. But the Liberian Catalogue, a list of Roman bishops compiled at Rome in 354, gives him eight years, eleven months, and three days, ending on a precisely dated day—7 December 283. Modern scholarship, and the Annuario Pontificio, follow the Roman tradition and date his reign 275–283, because the Liberian list supplies a consul-dated death that reflects a genuine Roman archive, whereas Eusebius, writing far from Rome, is demonstrably unreliable on the exact reign-lengths of the late-third-century popes—in the same passage he even omits two Roman emperors. The conventional accession date of 4 January 275, however, is a modern convention; only the death is firmly attested.

Was Pope Eutychian really a martyr?

Almost certainly not. The medieval Liber Pontificalis says he was “crowned with martyrdom,” and for over a thousand years he was venerated as “Pope and Martyr,” but the earliest evidence is against it. The oldest Roman calendar, the Depositio Episcoporum of 354, lists him among the buried bishops, not among the martyrs; he reigned entirely within a period of peace, with no persecution at Rome to make a martyr of him; and his own surviving epitaph calls him only “bishop,” not “martyr”—unlike the neighboring stones of Pontian and Fabian, which carry the martyr’s title. The current Roman Martyrology has dropped the martyr title and commemorates him simply as “Saint Eutychian, pope.”

What is Pope Eutychian known for?

Chiefly for legends that do not survive scrutiny. The Liber Pontificalis credits him with three things: decreeing that fruit—specifically beans and grapes—might be blessed upon the altar; burying three hundred and forty-two martyrs with his own hands; and ordering that martyrs be buried in a dalmatic or purple tunic. All three are regarded as sixth-century retrojections: the fruit-blessing custom developed gradually and was not one pope’s decree, and there were no martyrs to bury during his peaceful reign. What he is genuinely “known” for, in the end, is the opposite of a deed—his silence, and the single stone that proves he existed.

When is the feast of Pope Saint Eutychian?

His commemoration is on 8 December, the day recorded in the fourth-century Depositio Episcoporum (“of Eutychianus, in the cemetery of Callixtus”). He was never on the General Roman Calendar of the Mass—8 December there belongs to the Immaculate Conception—but existed only as an entry in the Roman Martyrology, where he remains, now commemorated as “pope” rather than “pope and martyr.” His death is dated by the Liberian catalogue to the previous day, 7 December 283.

Where is Pope Eutychian buried, and is his tomb still known?

He was buried in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the burial place of the third-century Roman bishops—and he was the last pope laid to rest there. When the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi rediscovered the crypt in 1854, he recovered fragments of Eutychian’s own Greek epitaph, reading ΕΥΤΥΧΙΑΝΟϹ ΕΠΙϹ, “Eutychian, bishop.” It is the one contemporary object that survives from his whole life. His bodily relics, like all the catacomb relics, were removed in the early Middle Ages; a later devotional tradition claims them for the cathedral of Sarzana, near his reputed birthplace of Luni, but that identification cannot be verified.

Is Pope Eutychian the same as Eutyches, the heretic?

No—this is a common confusion of similar names. Pope Eutychian (died 283) was a third-century bishop of Rome. Eutyches (c. 380–456) was an archimandrite of Constantinople, living some hundred and seventy years later, whose teaching that Christ had only one nature was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The two men have nothing in common but the root of a Greek name meaning “fortunate.” Pope Eutychian was neither a heretic nor, on the evidence, a martyr—simply an obscure pope of a peaceful age.

Footnotes

1. 1. J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. "Eutychian," treats him as one of the obscurest popes and adopts the regnal dates 4 January 275 – 7 December 283. The competing ancient figures for the length of his reign, and the epitaph, are set out below (nn. 2–7, 26).

2. 2. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.32.1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890): "At this time, Felix, having presided over the church of Rome for five years, was succeeded by Eutychianus, but he in less than ten months left the position to Caius, who lived in our day." Available at NewAdvent.org.

3. 3. Jerome's Latin version of Eusebius's Chronicle: "Eutychianus received the twenty-sixth episcopate of the Church of Rome for eight months, after which Gaius was twenty-seventh for fifteen years" (trans. Roger Pearse, 2005). Jerome numbers Eutychian the twenty-sixth by his own internal count (Felix twenty-fifth, Gaius twenty-seventh), one short of the modern reckoning that counts Peter first; the point here is the figure of eight months, which agrees with the Church History.

4. 4. Liberian Catalogue (Chronograph of 354), ed. Theodor Mommsen, Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892): "Eutycianus ann. VIII m. XI d. III. fuit temporibus Aureliani, a cons. Aureliano III et Marcellino usque in diem VII idus Dec. Caro II et Carino cons."—eight years, eleven months, and three days, from the consulship of Aurelian (III) and Marcellinus (275) to the seventh day before the Ides of December (7 December) in the consulship of Carus (II) and Carinus (283). (Some online transcriptions mis-render the Latin "d. III," three days, as "eleven days"; the manuscript reading is three.)

5. 5. Liber Pontificalis, "Eutychianus," in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 33–34, printing two recensions in parallel: "occupied the see 8 years, 10 months and 4 days" / "1 year, 1 month and 1 day." The latter figure is corrupt. The Book of the Popes numbers Eutychian XXVIII rather than XXVII, because it counts Cletus and Anacletus—in fact one man—as two popes.

6. 6. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.22, trans. McGiffert, passes directly from Aurelian to Probus, omitting the emperors Tacitus (275–276) and Florian (276) who reigned between them—an index of how compressed and imperfect his chronology of this period is. On the general unreliability of Eusebius for the exact reign-lengths of the third-century Roman bishops, see the standard discussion in Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris: Thorin, 1886–1892), vol. 1, introduction.

7. 7. The modern consensus—reflected in Kelly and Walsh, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, s.v. "Eutychian," and in the Annuario Pontificio—follows the Liberian tradition (275 to 7 December 283) over Eusebius's short figure, on the ground that the Roman list preserves a day-precise, consul-dated death drawn from a genuine archive. Giovanni Maria Vian, "Eutichiano, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000), lays out the competing figures and the internal contradictions of the Liber Pontificalis.

8. 8. On the "little peace of the Church," the roughly forty-year interval (c. 260–303) of freedom from systematic persecution that followed Gallienus's rescript of toleration and preceded the Diocletianic persecution, see the narrative in Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII, and the standard modern surveys of the period. The Catholic Encyclopedia independently notes that "after the death of Aurelian (275) the Church enjoyed a long respite from persecution" (n. 16 below).

9. 9. The imperial succession of the years 275–284: Aurelian (assassinated 275), Tacitus (275–276), Florian (276), Probus (276–282), Carus (282–283), and his sons Numerian (283–284) and Carinus (283–285), followed by the accession of Diocletian in 284. None instituted a persecution of the Church; the Great Persecution began under Diocletian only in 303.

10. 10. Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Eutychianus," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909): "He succeeded Pope Felix I a few days after the latter's death, and governed the Church from January, 275, until 7 December, 283. We know no details of his pontificate." Available at NewAdvent.org.

11. 11. The name Eutychianus (Greek Εὐτυχιανός) derives from εὐτυχής, "fortunate, well-fated," from εὖ ("well") and τύχη ("fortune, chance"). See n. 34 below on the distinct fifth-century heresiarch Eutyches.

12. 12. Liber Pontificalis, "Eutychianus" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 33): the pope was "by nationality a Tuscan, son of Marinus, from the city of Luna" (Latin: "natione Tuscus, ex patre Marino, de civitate Luna"); Loomis notes that Luna is "the modern Luni." Luna lay on the Etruria–Liguria border, which is why the Liber Pontificalis styles him a Tuscan and the Cavalieri engraving labels him Etruscan.

13. 13. Liber Pontificalis, "Eutychianus" (Loomis, 34): "He ordained that fruit might be blessed upon the altar, but only beans and grapes" (Latin: "Hic constituit ut fruges super altare tantum fabae et uvae benedici").

14. 14. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eutychianus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909): "The rite for blessing the produce of the fields, ascribed to him by the 'Liber Pontificalis', undoubtedly belongs to a later period." Loomis (The Book of the Popes, 34 n. 1) adds that prayers for blessing first-fruits "are found in various early Roman liturgies," having "both Jewish and pagan archetypes," the bean and grape being "from ancient times the chief food crops of the Italian people." The blessing of first-fruits does appear in the later Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries; the custom is real, but its ascription to one third-century pope is anachronistic (Vian, "Eutichiano, santo").

15. 15. Liber Pontificalis, "Eutychianus" (Loomis, 33–34): "He in his time buried 342 martyrs in divers places with his own hand. He also ordained that whenever anyone of the faithful buried a martyr, he should bury him in a dalmatic or a purple tunic" (Latin: "Hic temporibus suis per diversa loca CCCXLII martyres manus suas sepelivit. Qui et constituit ut quicumque de fidelium martyrem sepeliret, sine dalmaticam aut colobium purpuratum nulla ratione sepeliret"). The figure 342 is the standard reading; variant numbers (324, 362) appear in some later sources.

16. 16. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eutychianus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909): "The statement also that he promulgated rules for the burial of martyrs and buried many of them with his own hands, has but slight claim to acceptance, since after the death of Aurelian (275) the Church enjoyed a long respite from persecution."

17. 17. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 34 n. 2: "No persecution of importance is recorded under Eutychianus. Whether this sentence and the following refer to the original burying of martyrs or to the translation of their bodies is impossible to say. They may both be entirely apocryphal."

18. 18. Liber Pontificalis, "Eutychianus" (Loomis, 34): "And he was crowned with martyrdom" (Latin: "Et martyrio coronatur"). Loomis (34 n. 3) comments: "There is no other record of Eutychianus' martyrdom. The words may be an interpolation." The Oxford Cult of Saints database notes that the martyrdom clause appears in the second recension of the Liber Pontificalis but not the first—i.e., it is a later addition.

19. 19. The pre-1970 Roman Martyrology, following the edition of Cardinal Cesare Baronius (1586), commemorated Eutychian on 8 December; in the standard English of the 1916 Baltimore edition the notice, after recounting the 342 martyrs, reads: "Under the emperor Numerian he became their companion, being crowned with martyrdom, and buried in the cemetery of Callistus"—the fullest form of the legend, retailing as history what the Liber Pontificalis had asserted.

20. 20. Depositio Episcoporum (Chronograph of 354), ed. Mommsen, Chronica Minora, vol. 1: "VI idus Decemb. Eutychiani, in Callisti"—the sixth day before the Ides of December (8 December), "of Eutychianus, in [the cemetery] of Callixtus." Eutychian is absent from the companion Depositio Martyrum. The Depositio Episcoporum registers the burials of the bishops of Rome from Lucius (254) onward.

21. 21. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eutychianus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909): "It is highly probable that Eutychianus did not die a martyr. The fourth-century Roman Calendar mentions him (8 December) in the 'Depositio Episcoporum', but not in its list of martyrs." (New Advent's transcription carries an obvious typo, "died not die a martyr," for "did not die a martyr.")

22. 22. Eutychian was never inscribed in the General Roman Calendar (the calendar of Masses in the Missal), on which 8 December is the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception; his commemoration existed only in the Roman Martyrology. This distinguishes his case from popes whose feasts were removed from the General Calendar in the 1969 reform: there was no feast of Eutychian to remove.

23. 23. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 8 December: "Romae in coemeterio Callisti via Appia, depositio sancti Eutychiani, papae"—"At Rome, in the cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the burial of Saint Eutychian, pope." He is commemorated as papa, without the title of martyr; the official French edition adds that he governed the Church "in a time of peace."

24. 24. The Liberian Catalogue dates his death to 7 December 283 (VII idus Dec.); the Depositio Episcoporum commemorates him on 8 December (VI idus Dec.); the Liber Pontificalis dates his death to 13 December (idus Dec.) and his burial to the following 25 July (VIII kal. Aug.). The last two dates cannot both be right, and the incoherence is a fair measure of the Book of the Popes' reliability on this pope.

25. 25. On Giovanni Battista de Rossi's identification of the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus in 1854 (the cemetery itself having been located in 1849), see de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 2 (Rome, 1867), 70–72, and the summary in J. Spencer Northcote and W. R. Brownlow, Roma Sotterranea, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1879).

26. 26. Kirsch, "Pope St. Eutychianus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (1909): "When this famous crypt was discovered the fragments of the epitaph of Eutychianus were found, i.e. his name (in Greek letters): EUTYCHIANOS EPIS(KOPOS)." Kirsch cites de Rossi, Roma sotterranea, II, 70–72. The surviving text is the name plus the abbreviation ΕΠΙϹ for ἐπίσκοπος, "bishop."

27. 27. The original Greek epitaphs of the bishops of Rome that de Rossi recovered from the Papal Crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus are those of Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, and Eutychian—the same five named in the companion post on Felix I (Pope Cornelius's Latin epitaph lies in the adjoining Crypt of Lucina); Vian, "Eutichiano, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000), notes that Eutychian was "the last pope to be entombed in the Crypt of the Popes."

28. 28. The marble plaque set up by Pope Sixtus III (432–440) at the Crypt of the Popes listed the bishops buried there; its text, known from de Rossi's reconstruction, includes Eutychian's name. See Vian, "Eutichiano, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000), and, for the crypt inscriptions generally, de Rossi, Roma sotterranea, vol. 2.

29. 29. Among the papal epitaphs of the crypt, the stones of Pontian and Fabian bear the title "martyr" alongside "bishop"—and on Pontian's the word ΜΑΡΤΥΡ was added later, in a second hand and in ligature—while those of Anterus, Lucius, and Eutychian read "bishop" (ΕΠΙϹΚΟΠΟϹ) only. The later addition on Pontian's stone is noted by Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Pontian," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1911); the broader distinction between the martyr- and bishop-titled stones is de Rossi's, drawn from the crypt itself.

30. 30. The reading of an interlaced iota-and-chi (the initials of Ἰησοῦς Χριστός) hidden in the lettering of Eutychian's epitaph is that of the epigrapher Margherita Guarducci, reported in Vian, "Eutichiano, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000); it is a scholarly interpretation of the fragment, not a settled fact.

31. 31. A local tradition, cherished in the old diocese of Luni (now La Spezia–Sarzana–Brugnato), holds that Eutychian's relics were granted in the seventeenth century by Pope Innocent X to a nobleman of the Casoni family of Sarzana and enshrined in the cathedral of Sarzana, where he is honored as the region's own pope. The tradition is devotional; the identification of the relics with the third-century bishop cannot be historically verified. It should not be confused with the well-attested burial and death of Pope Pontian in Sardinia.

32. 32. The ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals attribute to Eutychian two forged letters—one addressed to the bishops of the province of Baetica in Spain, the other to the bishops of Sicily; counting the later medieval canonical collections (Gratian, Ivo, and others) as well, the spurious pieces number about a dozen, catalogued at Philipp Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1885), vol. 1, 24–25. All are forgeries. See Vian, "Eutichiano, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000), and, on the Pseudo-Isidorian corpus generally, the Catholic Encyclopedia article "False Decretals."

33. 33. Encyclopedia.com, quoting the New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Eutychian, Pope, St.": "Beyond the dates of his pontificate, no reliable reports on Eutychian are extant, and no documents ascribed to him are authentic."

34. 34. Eutyches (c. 380–456), archimandrite of a monastery near Constantinople, taught that in Christ the human nature was absorbed into the divine, so that Christ had but one nature after the Incarnation; his doctrine (Eutychianism, a form of Monophysitism) was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. He has nothing to do with Pope Eutychian beyond the shared Greek root of their names; the Catholic Encyclopedia keeps them in separate articles ("Eutyches," cathen/05631a; "Pope St. Eutychianus," cathen/05638a).