Pope Saint Sixtus II: The Twenty-Fourth Pope, the Peacemaker, and the Martyrdom Rome Wrote Down

The twenty-fourth in a series on the popes.

Seventeen popes and a series of essays ago, the seventh Bishop of Rome presented a familiar problem. Sixtus I was a name on Irenaeus’s list and almost nothing else—a bishop onto whom four later centuries hung a liturgical innovation, a martyr’s death, and a small file of forged letters, none of it secure. His namesake presents the opposite problem, and the opposite gift. When the twenty-fourth pope was killed, someone who was alive at the time sat down and wrote it out: the day, the place, the manner, the companions. The letter survives. We do not have to reconstruct the death of Sixtus II from a martyrology composed centuries later, because a bishop in Carthage received the news, grasped its meaning at once, and forwarded it to his colleagues with the date attached. For once in this early history the evidence runs the right way round.

This is the twenty-fourth entry in my series on the popes, following in order Peter, Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, Callixtus I, Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius I, and Stephen I. It arrives at a hinge. Where the earliest popes in this series were names on Irenaeus’s list, reconstructed against the silence of the record and given lives only centuries later by the compilers of the Liber Pontificalis, Sixtus II belongs to a different order of evidence: a pope with a policy we can read in his correspondents’ letters, a death we can date from the hand of a contemporary, a grave archaeologists have found, and a name the Roman Church still speaks aloud in the Canon of every Mass offered in the old rite. If the lesson of his namesake Sixtus I was how a tradition treats a blank, the lesson of Sixtus II is how it treats a fact—and how, even around a fact, legend still grows.

A Death the Church Wrote Down

Begin where the evidence is strongest. In the late summer of 258, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, wrote a short letter to a fellow African bishop named Successus, relaying what his own agents had brought back from Rome. Cyprian would himself be dead within weeks, executed on 14 September under the same edict; the letter is one of the last things he wrote, and it is our earliest and best witness to the death of Sixtus. Its final lines are as plain as a telegram:

But know that Xistus was martyred in the cemetery on the eighth day of the Ides of August, and with him four deacons.⁠¹

Nothing about that sentence needs to be argued into place. The eighth day before the Ides of August is 6 August. “The cemetery” is a Roman catacomb. “Xistus”—the older spelling, from the Greek xystos, which the seventh pope of the name already carried—is Sixtus II. And “four deacons” is a number supplied by a contemporary who had no reason to invent it and every reason to get it right, because the letter’s whole purpose was accuracy: Cyprian wanted his colleagues to know exactly what was coming so that each “might animate his own flock to martyrdom.”⁠²

Set that beside the sources for the popes this series has been reconstructing entry by entry. For Evaristus and Alexander I and Sixtus I, the earliest witness is Irenaeus’s bare list, and everything beyond the name comes from the Liber Pontificalis four centuries later. For Sixtus II we have a letter written in the same season as the death it reports, by a bishop who would share that death. The Depositio Martyrum—the martyr-calendar of the Roman church preserved in the Chronograph of 354, the oldest such list in existence—records the same day and adds the place of his grave: “VIII idus Aug. Xysti in Callisti,” the sixth of August, Xystus in the cemetery of Callistus.⁠³ Two of the oldest documents the Roman church possesses agree on the date, and one of them is nearly contemporary. This is not the evidentiary world of the second-century popes. It is a different order of knowledge.

Even Eusebius, who is our great narrative source for the third century, adds less than one might expect—and the shape of what he adds is itself instructive. His Ecclesiastical History describes Valerian’s turn against the Church at length, blaming it on an Egyptian magician named Macrianus who corrupted an emperor previously friendly to Christians, whose household, Eusebius says, “was filled with pious persons and was a church of God.”⁠⁴ But Eusebius gives no martyrdom scene for Sixtus. Where he names Xystus of Rome at all, it is for something else entirely—a correspondence about baptism—and that silence is worth holding onto, because it means the vivid death-narrative that later grew up around Sixtus and his deacons is not in the earliest historian. The bones of the event are in Cyprian and the Depositio. The flesh came later. Keeping the two apart is the whole discipline of reading this pope well.

The Peaceable Priest

Before the sword, the peace. To understand what kind of bishop was seized in that cemetery, one has to go back a few years, into the most bitter intramural quarrel of the third-century Church—a quarrel Sixtus inherited and, to his lasting credit, defused.

The question was rebaptism. When a person had been baptized by heretics or schismatics and then sought entry into the Catholic Church, was that baptism valid, or must it be done again? Cyprian of Carthage, backed by the African councils, and Firmilian of Caesarea, speaking for the churches of Asia Minor, said it must be done again: outside the Church there is no true baptism to be had. Sixtus’s predecessor, Stephen I, said the opposite, and said it with a heavy hand. Rome’s rule was that heretical baptism, if rightly performed, was valid; the convert needed only the imposition of hands in penance, not rebaptism. Stephen pressed the Roman practice as binding on all and, according to Cyprian, threatened to break communion with the churches that resisted. His watchword survives, quoted back at him by Cyprian: “Let nothing be innovated”—nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est—“which has not been handed down.”⁠⁵ Firmilian’s reply, preserved among Cyprian’s letters, is one of the angriest documents in patristic literature: he told Stephen that in cutting off so many churches he had “cut himself off,” and that it was the excommunicator, not the excommunicated, who had become the schismatic.⁠⁶ The dispute was heading toward a formal rupture between Rome and half the Christian world when Stephen died in August 257.

Then Sixtus succeeded him, and the temperature dropped. The evidence for the change comes chiefly from Dionysius, the learned bishop of Alexandria, whose letters Eusebius preserved. Dionysius had written to Stephen on the baptism question; after Stephen’s death he wrote repeatedly to Sixtus, and the tone is that of a man addressing an ally rather than pleading with an antagonist. “But Stephen,” Eusebius reports Dionysius writing, “having filled his office two years, was succeeded by Xystus. Dionysius wrote him a second epistle on baptism.”⁠⁷ In another letter Dionysius laid before Sixtus a hard pastoral case—a man distressed that his own baptism among heretics had been worthless, begging to be baptized afresh—and confided his own hesitation to the Roman bishop as to a trusted colleague: “I should not dare to renew from the beginning one who had heard the giving of thanks and joined in repeating the Amen.”⁠⁸ A man does not write like that to a bishop with whom his church is at the point of schism. The correspondence is the documentary sign that the breach had healed.

It is important to say exactly what Sixtus did and did not do, because the point is easy to overstate. He did not reverse Stephen’s doctrine. Rome continued to hold, as it holds now, that baptism validly conferred even by heretics is not repeated; on the substance of the question Sixtus stood where Stephen stood. What he reversed was the coercion—the threat of rupture, the demand that every church conform to the Roman practice on pain of excommunication. He let the African and Eastern churches keep their own discipline and kept them in communion. The old Catholic Encyclopedia states the balance precisely: Sixtus “was more conciliatory than St. Stephen and restored friendly relations with these Churches, though, like his predecessor, he upheld the Roman usage of not rebaptizing heretics.”⁠⁹ That is the whole of it—doctrine kept, coercion dropped, communion restored. Later reference works press the point a little further, reporting that Sixtus reopened relations with Cyprian himself and even sent envoys to Carthage; the detail is a reasonable reconstruction of the warming that Dionysius’s letters attest, though it is the encyclopedias’ inference rather than a datum in the primary sources.⁠¹⁰

It fell to Cyprian’s own deacon to give Sixtus the epithet that has clung to him ever since. In his Life of Cyprian, written soon after his master’s martyrdom, Pontius reports the news of Sixtus’s death reaching Carthage as the sign that Cyprian’s own hour was near, and names the dead pope with a warmth that carries its own small argument: “a messenger came to him from the city from Xistus, the good and peace-making priest, and on that account most blessed martyr.”⁠¹¹ Bonus et pacificus sacerdos—the good and peaceable bishop. The phrase is not decoration. It is the judgment of a contemporary in the rival camp, a man whose own bishop had fought Sixtus’s predecessor to the edge of schism, and it records that the churches of Africa knew Sixtus as the man who had made the peace. That the peacemaker should be, in Pontius’s next breath, “most blessed martyr” is the irony the whole reign turns on: the bishop who cooled the Church’s hottest internal quarrel was himself cut down, within a year of his election, by the coldest external violence the Roman state could bring to bear.

Valerian’s Second Edict

That violence had a shape, and the shape explains why a bishop known for peace died a public death. The emperor Valerian moved against the Church in two stages, and the second was aimed with unusual precision at men exactly like Sixtus.

The first edict, in 257, was comparatively restrained. It required the clergy to perform at least an outward act of the state cult and forbade Christians to hold assemblies or to enter their cemeteries, on pain of exile.⁠¹² The prohibition on the cemeteries mattered more than it might seem, because the Roman church—as the Callixtus entry described—had by this date taken the catacombs into corporate ownership and made them the ordinary place of Christian burial and commemoration. To bar the cemeteries was to bar the community from its dead and from the graves of its martyrs. It is a mark of the danger of the moment that Sixtus, in August 258, was found not in a basilica but in a catacomb.

The second edict, in the first days of August 258, abandoned restraint. Cyprian’s letter to Successus preserves its terms, drawn from the imperial rescript to the Senate. Bishops, priests, and deacons were to be executed at once—incontinenti animadvertantur, in the Latin the rescript used, “let them be punished forthwith,” with a verb that in Roman usage ordinarily meant beheading. Senators and knights were to lose rank and property, and then their heads if they persisted; matrons were to lose their property and be banished; imperial freedmen who confessed were to be enslaved and sent in chains to the imperial estates. Cyprian relays the whole graduated scheme:

Valerian had sent a rescript to the Senate, to the effect that bishops and presbyters and deacons should immediately be punished; but that senators, and men of importance, and Roman knights, should lose their dignity, and moreover be deprived of their property; and if, when their means were taken away, they should persist in being Christians, then they should also lose their heads.⁠¹³

This was not a general pogrom. It was a decapitation strike in the literal sense: a law designed to kill the Church’s leadership and confiscate the fortunes of its wealthiest members, on the sound imperial theory that a body without a head and without money would not long trouble the state. Under the first edict a bishop might be exiled; Cyprian himself had spent the previous year banished to Curubis. Under the second, a bishop was a dead man the moment he was identified. Sixtus had held the see for less than a year when the rescript arrived, and it named his office as a capital one.

The Sixth of August

What happened next is recoverable in outline from the near-contemporary sources, though the sources are terse and the later tradition would supply drama they do not. On 6 August 258, Sixtus gathered his people in the cemetery of Praetextatus, on the left of the Appian Way, nearly opposite the more familiar cemetery of Callistus—a less-frequented spot, chosen, one gathers, in the hope of escaping notice under a regime that had made the assemblies themselves illegal.⁠¹⁴ He did not escape it. Seated in his chair in the act of addressing his flock, he was, in the old Catholic Encyclopedia’s phrase, “suddenly apprehended by a band of soldiers.”⁠¹⁵ Whether he was beheaded on the spot or first taken before a tribunal and then led back, the sources do not finally settle; but the outcome was the same, and swift. He died as the edict prescribed, by the sword, in the place his people used to bury their dead.

The companions are where the counting requires care, because the numbers do not match across the sources—and the mismatch is instructive rather than embarrassing. Cyprian, our earliest witness, says Sixtus died “with him four deacons.” The Depositio Martyrum, a century later, commemorates on the same day two deacons by name, Agapitus and Felicissimus, at the cemetery of Praetextatus. The Liber Pontificalis and the later Roman martyrologies give a full roster of six: Januarius, Vincentius, Magnus, and Stephanus—the four who, in the standard reconstruction, were seized and beheaded with Sixtus in the cemetery—together with Felicissimus and Agapitus.⁠¹⁶ The seventh deacon of the Roman church, the archdeacon Lawrence, is not in this list at all; he died separately, four days later. The tidy way to hold the numbers is this: Cyprian’s contemporary “four” are the deacons killed at Sixtus’s side; the Depositio’s “two” are commemorated at their own burial place; and the martyrologists’ “six” sum the two groups. The point worth keeping is that the earliest source counts fewest and names none—the names and the fuller totals accrued over the following centuries, exactly as one would expect. Even here, around a martyrdom this well documented, the tradition still grew.

His body was carried the short distance to the crypt of the popes in the cemetery of Callistus, the underground chamber that Callixtus I had once administered and that became, in these generations, the burial place of the Roman bishops.⁠¹⁷ There, a century later, Pope Damasus—the great fourth-century impresario of the martyr-cult, who combed the catacombs for the graves of the martyrs and adorned them with verse—set an inscription over the tomb, composed in Sixtus’s own voice. It imagines the pope still teaching when the soldiers came:

Tempore quo gladius secuit pia viscera matris,
hic positus rector caelestia iussa docebam.

At the time when the sword cut through the tender heart of the Mother, I, laid here, was the ruler teaching the commands of heaven.⁠¹⁸

The “Mother” is the Church, and the sword is Valerian’s; the epitaph makes the death an image of the whole persecution, the shepherd struck down in the act of feeding the flock. Damasus’s inscription is the kind of source the earlier popes of this series never had: a fourth-century pope, standing at a real grave whose location was still known, memorializing a predecessor whose martyrdom he did not have to invent. The grave was real. Nineteenth-century archaeology recovered the crypt and its fragments; the cult was continuous from within a century of the death. Whatever legend later added, the core is as solid as anything in early papal history.

Lawrence, and the Making of a Legend

And legend did come—which is the point at which Sixtus II becomes the mirror-image of Sixtus I. For the seventh pope, later centuries invented a biography to fill a void; for the twenty-fourth, they elaborated a biography around a core that was already there. The elaboration gathered, above all, around the archdeacon Lawrence, and it produced some of the most beloved scenes in Christian hagiography—scenes that a careful reader must admire and, at the same time, hold at arm’s length.

The historical core is secure and can be stated in a sentence. Lawrence was a deacon—by tradition the archdeacon—of the Roman church, martyred on 10 August 258, four days after Sixtus, and buried on the Via Tiburtina, where the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura would later rise; the Depositio Martyrum records him under that date, “Laurenti in Tiburtina.”⁠¹⁹ That much stands with Sixtus’s own martyrdom. Everything else—the dialogue, the prophecy, the treasure, the gridiron—comes from writers more than a century removed, and must be weighed as such.

The dialogue is Ambrose’s. In his treatise On the Duties of the Clergy, written around 391, the bishop of Milan gives us Lawrence weeping to be left behind as his bishop is led away, and pleading in words that have echoed through the liturgy ever since:

Whither, father, goest thou without thy son? Whither, holy priest, art thou hastening without thy deacon? Never wast thou wont to offer sacrifice without an attendant.⁠²⁰

Sixtus, in Ambrose’s telling, answers with a prophecy: “Cease weeping; after three days thou shalt follow me.” And so, Ambrose continues, it fell out—Lawrence martyred on the third day, and martyred by fire, mocking his executioners from the flames: “The flesh is roasted, turn it and eat.”⁠²¹ The other great scene, the “treasures of the Church,” Ambrose tells elsewhere in the same work: ordered to surrender the wealth of the Roman church, Lawrence gathered the poor and presented them to the prefect—“These are the treasures of the Church.”⁠²² The Spanish poet Prudentius, writing his Peristephanon around the same years, versified the whole passion at length, and it is Prudentius who fixed the gridiron in the Western imagination, though he phrases the taunt in his own extended way.⁠²³

These are magnificent stories, and it would be a poorer Church without them. But the honest historian has to notice that they sit uneasily with the earliest evidence. Cyprian’s contemporary letter shows Sixtus and his deacons executed together, in one action, on one day—which leaves little room for the staged farewell of a bishop led off while his deacon is spared, or for the prophecy of three days—an interval the calendar does not even keep, since Lawrence in fact followed his bishop after four, dying on 10 August. The old Catholic Encyclopedia, no enemy of the tradition, concedes that the meeting of Sixtus and Lawrence is “probably a mere legend,” not compatible with the contemporary reports of how the persecution actually proceeded.⁠²⁴ The gridiron itself has drawn even sharper doubt. Because Valerian’s edict prescribed summary execution—that verb animadvertantur, which ordinarily meant the sword—a number of scholars have judged the slow roasting improbable and argued that Lawrence, like his bishop, was more likely beheaded. Patrick Healy pressed the argument from the edict itself; Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri proposed that the gridiron was born of a scribe’s slip, the solemn formula passus est, “he suffered,” miscopied as assus est, “he was roasted.”⁠²⁵ That reconstruction is not the last word—more recent scholarship has pushed back and defended the fire, noting that an enraged official was not bound to the letter of an edict—and the question remains genuinely open.⁠²⁶ The responsible summary is that the historical Lawrence is certain, the manner of his death is disputed, and the tender dialogue with Sixtus is beautiful, late, and probably not what happened.

None of this diminishes the martyrs; it locates them. The relationship of Sixtus II to the Lawrence legends is precisely the reverse of the relationship of Sixtus I to the Liber Pontificalis. With Sixtus I, the later tradition supplied a life where the record was empty. With Sixtus II, the later tradition embellished a life the record already established. In the first case the accretion stands in for the fact; in the second it grows out of it. That is a difference the honest reader is bound to observe, and it is, in a quiet way, a comfort: the Church’s memory of Sixtus II is not a legend dressed up as history but a history that attracted legend, the way anything genuinely loved attracts embellishment.

The Name in the Canon of the Mass

There is a place where that memory is not embellished at all, only preserved—where the name of Sixtus II has been spoken continuously for sixteen centuries, stripped to a single word. In the Roman Canon, the ancient Eucharistic Prayer of the Latin Church, the priest names a series of saints in whose fellowship and by whose merits he prays. After the Apostles comes a roll of early martyrs:

Lini, Cleti, Clementis, Xysti, Cornelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysogoni, Ioannis et Pauli, Cosmae et Damiani—Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian.⁠²⁷

The “Xystus” here is Sixtus II—not the shadowy seventh pope but the martyr of 258, as the standard liturgical commentators have long recognized.⁠²⁸ And the company he keeps in that list is not random. Cornelius (died 253) and Cyprian (died 258) and Lawrence (died 258) are all martyrs of the same mid-century persecutions; Sixtus and Lawrence are the bishop and the deacon of the very same Roman church, four days apart. The Canon preserves, fossilized in the liturgy, exactly the knot of third-century Roman and African martyrs whose story this essay has been telling—a small monument, said at the altar, to the years when the Roman church lost a pope, six deacons, and its most famous archdeacon in a single fortnight, and Carthage lost Cyprian a month after. When a priest offers the old Roman Rite today and comes to the name Xysti, he is naming the peaceable pope seized in the catacomb of Praetextatus, and doing what Cyprian asked Successus to do in the summer of 258: keeping the memory, so that the flock might be animated.

The cult that the Canon distills was, for centuries, one of the most vigorous in Rome. Damasus’s verse marked the tomb in the crypt of the popes; the chair on which Sixtus was said to have been struck down was, by later report, enshrined behind his grave; an oratory rose over the cemetery of Praetextatus at the spot of the martyrdom, and drew pilgrims for centuries. Sixtus and his deacons and Lawrence became a fixed constellation of the Roman liturgical year, their August feasts among the oldest the city kept. The evidence of the cult—calendar, inscription, oratory, and Canon alike—is early, continuous, and mutually corroborating. It is the cult of a real man, remembered because he really died.

The Greek Philosopher Who Was Not

For all that solid documentation, Sixtus II did acquire one persistent legend of the older, void-filling kind—and it is worth setting straight, both for its own sake and because it echoes a theme this series has met before. The Liber Pontificalis, the serial papal biography compiled in Rome from the early sixth century, opens its notice of Sixtus with a claim about his origins: Xystus, natione Grecus, ex philosopho—“Sixtus, a Greek by birth, formerly a philosopher.”⁠²⁹ The line has a scholarly ring, and it has been repeated for centuries; the very engraving at the head of this essay carries the banner Xistus II PP Graecus, “Sixtus II, Pope, the Greek.” But the claim is almost certainly false, and its falsity is diagnostic.

Two things give it away. The first is that the Liber Pontificalis uses the identical formula elsewhere. It calls Pope Hyginus, the ninth pope, natione Grecus, ex philosopho, de Athenis—a Greek, formerly a philosopher, from Athens—which is to say that “Greek philosopher” is not a datum the compilers possessed about two particular popes but an inference the compilers reached for whenever a pope’s Greek name chimed with that of some known author or philosopher—a stock ornament pinned on a name when nothing better was known.⁠³⁰ The second is the specific source of the confusion in Sixtus’s case. As the Sixtus I entry discussed at length, there circulated in the early Church a collection of gnomic moral maxims called the Sentences of Sextus, an originally Pythagorean compilation that Rufinus of Aquileia, translating it into Latin around 400, attributed to a Roman pope named Sixtus. Jerome rejected the attribution, and modern scholarship has agreed: the author was a pagan philosopher named Sextus, not any pope. But the misattribution left its residue, and the residue is exactly the Liber Pontificalis’s “formerly a philosopher.” The old Catholic Encyclopedia draws the line plainly: “His origin is unknown. The ‘Liber Pontificalis’ says that he was a Greek by birth, but this is probably a mistake, originating from the false assumption that he was identical with a Greek philosopher of the same name.”⁠³¹ The pope who was named in the Canon of the Mass for a documented martyrdom was also, in the same tradition, given a fictitious Athenian education—proof that even the best-attested early popes could not wholly escape the machinery of legend that this series has watched at work on the least-attested.

The Liber Pontificalis betrays its distance from the events in smaller ways too. It dates Sixtus to the reigns of “Valerian and Decius,” though Decius had died seven years before Sixtus became pope; it gives his reign as one year, ten months, and twenty-three days, against the roughly eleven months the reliable chronology allows. These are the ordinary errors of a source four centuries downstream, and they are the reason the Liber Pontificalis has been, throughout this series, a witness to be handled with tongs. What is striking about Sixtus II is not that the Liber Pontificalis got things wrong—it usually does—but that for once we can check it against sources close to the event, and see precisely where the legend was laid over the fact.

That layering reaches even into the calendar. Sixtus died on 6 August, and the Roman Martyrology still commemorates him on that day—but his liturgical feast in the reformed calendar is 7 August, an optional memorial of “Saints Sixtus II, Pope, and Companions, Martyrs.” The reason is a collision of feasts: 6 August is the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, and when the calendar was revised in 1969 the martyrs’ commemoration was moved to the day after the day of their death, so as not to be permanently overshadowed.⁠³² It is a small thing, but characteristic: the historical date, fixed by a contemporary in 258, is preserved in the Martyrology; the liturgical observance bends around a greater feast; and a reader who wants the truth has to know that the death-day and the feast-day are, for once, not the same.

What We Can Actually Say

Strip Sixtus II to the load-bearing evidence, and—unusually for this series—a great deal remains standing. There was a bishop of Rome named Xystus, elected in 257, who inherited a Church at war with itself over rebaptism and made peace: keeping Rome’s doctrine that heretical baptism is not repeated, dropping his predecessor’s threat of schism, and restoring communion with the churches of Africa and the East. His contemporaries in the rival camp remembered him as bonus et pacificus sacerdos, the good and peaceable bishop. In August 258, under the second and deadlier of Valerian’s edicts, he was seized while teaching his people in the cemetery of Praetextatus and beheaded, with several of his deacons, on the sixth of the month—a death reported within weeks by Cyprian of Carthage in a letter that survives, dated to the day, and commemorated at a grave that later archaeology recovered. He was buried in the crypt of the popes; Damasus set a verse over his tomb; his name entered the Canon of the Roman Mass and has been said there ever since. That is a biography, not a blank—a papal martyrdom attested, for once, by a contemporary writing in the very season it occurred.

What the evidence does not support it is equally important to release. The tender deathbed dialogue with Lawrence, the prophecy of three days, the pageant of the poor as the treasures of the Church, the gridiron and the taunt from the flames—these are the gifts of Ambrose and Prudentius a century and more later, and they sit awkwardly against a contemporary letter that shows a bishop and his deacons cut down together in a single hour. The Athenian philosopher of the Liber Pontificalis is a template and a confusion, not a fact. Even the roster of deacons grew from four unnamed to six named across the centuries. The legends are not lies; they are the ordinary sediment that any deeply venerated death deposits over time. But they are sediment, and the historian’s task is to know the water from the silt.

Twenty-four popes into the Church’s memory of itself, Sixtus II stands in full daylight. Behind him, at the beginning of this series, lie the popes it had to reconstruct against silence—names on Irenaeus’s list, given lives by a sixth-century compiler because their own age left none. In him the third-century record stands wide open: a pope whose policy we can read in the letters of his correspondents, whose death we can date from the hand of a contemporary, whose grave has been found and whose name is still spoken at the altar. And yet the same forces that invented biographies for the blank popes were still at work on the documented one, adding a Greek education he never had and a farewell scene that never occurred. That is the double lesson of the twenty-fourth pope, and it is the lesson the whole series has been circling: that the Church’s tradition is neither the seamless record its defenders sometimes claim nor the tissue of invention its critics allege, but a real memory with real accretions—and that the way to honor it is not to swallow it whole or to spit it out entire, but to do the patient work of telling the fact from the legend, and to find, when the work is done, that the fact was worth keeping all along. Sixtus was a real man. He made peace and he died for the faith, and Rome wrote it down while the blood was fresh. The rest is love, doing what love does with a memory it will not let go.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Dionysius, the twenty-fifth pope.

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally, the two indispensable modern references are J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), the most reliable quick guide to the early bishops of Rome, and Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014), the best readable survey. The primary sources for Sixtus II are unusually accessible: Cyprian’s letters and Pontius’s Life of Cyprian are in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5; Eusebius’s account of Dionysius of Alexandria’s baptism correspondence is in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1; and the Lawrence traditions are in Ambrose’s On the Duties of the Clergy (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 10) and Prudentius’s Peristephanon. For the Liber Pontificalis entry with an essential introduction to its reliability, see Raymond Davis, trans., The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), 3rd rev. ed. (Liverpool University Press, 2010). On Damasus and the epitaph at the tomb, Dennis Trout, Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2015), is the standard edition and translation; on the saints of the Roman Canon, Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite (Missarum Sollemnia), remains the classic study.

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, and Saint Stephen I, the twenty-third pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Sixtus II?

Sixtus II (Xystus II) was the twenty-fourth Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning from 257 to his martyrdom on 6 August 258. He is best known for two things: he healed the bitter rebaptism controversy that his predecessor Stephen I had pushed to the edge of schism, restoring communion with the churches of Africa and Asia Minor while keeping Rome’s doctrine that heretical baptism need not be repeated; and he was seized while teaching his flock in the catacomb of Praetextatus and beheaded under the emperor Valerian’s second edict. His deacon Pontius called him “the good and peace-making priest.” Unlike almost every earlier pope in this series, his death is attested by a contemporary—Cyprian of Carthage, writing within weeks.

When did Sixtus II reign as pope?

From August 257 to 6 August 258—a pontificate of roughly eleven months. He succeeded Stephen I and was himself succeeded, after a vacancy, by Dionysius. The Liber Pontificalis gives his reign as one year, ten months, and twenty-three days, but this is one of that source’s many inaccuracies; the reliable chronology, anchored by Cyprian’s dated report of his death, allows only about eleven months.

How did Sixtus II die?

He was beheaded on 6 August 258, during the persecution under the emperor Valerian. Valerian’s second edict, issued in early August 258, ordered that bishops, priests, and deacons be executed immediately. Sixtus had gathered his congregation in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Appian Way—a less-frequented spot, since assemblies and the cemeteries themselves had been forbidden—and was seized by soldiers while seated in his chair addressing the people. Several of his deacons were killed with him; the archdeacon Lawrence died four days later, on 10 August. The contemporary account is in Cyprian of Carthage’s letter to Successus: “Xistus was martyred in the cemetery on the eighth day of the Ides of August, and with him four deacons.”

Is the Xystus in the Roman Canon of the Mass Sixtus II?

Yes. The Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I) names a series of early martyrs—“Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus…”—and the “Xystus” there is Sixtus II, the martyr of 258, not the earlier Sixtus I. The list preserves a tight cluster of third-century martyrs: Sixtus II and his deacon Lawrence, both killed in August 258, alongside the martyr-bishops Cornelius (died 253) and Cyprian (died 258). The identification with Sixtus II is standard among the liturgical commentators.

Did Sixtus II really meet Saint Lawrence on the way to martyrdom?

Probably not, at least not as the famous story tells it. The moving dialogue—Lawrence weeping, “Whither, father, goest thou without thy son?” and Sixtus prophesying that Lawrence would follow in three days—comes from Saint Ambrose, writing more than a century after the event, and from the poet Prudentius. The earliest evidence, Cyprian’s contemporary letter, shows Sixtus and his deacons executed together in a single action, which leaves little room for the staged farewell. The old Catholic Encyclopedia calls the meeting “probably a mere legend.” Lawrence himself is entirely historical—a Roman deacon martyred on 10 August 258—but the tender scene, and the celebrated gridiron, are later embellishments whose historicity many scholars doubt.

When is the feast of Saint Sixtus II?

His liturgical feast is 7 August, an optional memorial of “Saints Sixtus II, Pope, and Companions, Martyrs” in the current General Roman Calendar. He actually died on 6 August, and the Roman Martyrology still records him on that date—but 6 August is the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, so when the calendar was reformed in 1969 the martyrs’ commemoration was shifted to 7 August, the day after their death, to avoid being permanently overshadowed. In the older (pre-1970) calendar he was commemorated on 6 August within the Transfiguration. His deacon Lawrence keeps his own major feast on 10 August.

Was Sixtus II really a Greek philosopher?

Almost certainly not. The claim comes from the Liber Pontificalis, which calls him “a Greek by birth, formerly a philosopher.” But the same source uses the identical formula for Pope Hyginus, which suggests it is a stock template rather than real information, and the “philosopher” detail almost certainly arose from confusion with Sextus the Pythagorean, the pagan author of the Sentences of Sextus, a collection wrongly attributed to a Pope Sixtus by Rufinus of Aquileia around 400. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “His origin is unknown… this is probably a mistake.”

Footnotes

1. 1. Cyprian, Epistle 81 (to Successus), trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886). Available at NewAdvent.org. The letter is numbered 81 in the Wallis/ANF translation and 80 in the Hartel/CSEL critical edition; the numbering of Cyprian’s correspondence diverges between editions, and the two numbers refer to the same letter. The older spelling “Xistus” is that of the ANF translation; “Xystus” and “Sixtus” are the same name.

2. 2. Cyprian, Epistle 81, ANF vol. 5; the argument-heading of the letter states its purpose, that Successus should “intimate the same to the rest of his colleagues, that each one might animate his own flock to martyrdom.” Cyprian was himself martyred at Carthage on 14 September 258, some five weeks after Sixtus; the Depositio Martyrum records him under that date.

3. 3. Depositio Martyrum, in the Chronograph of 354: Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892), 71–72; transcription at Tertullian.org. The full entry reads “VIII idus Aug. Xysti in Callisti et in Praetextati Agapiti et Felicissimi”—Xystus in the cemetery of Callistus, and the deacons Agapitus and Felicissimus in that of Praetextatus. The Depositio is the oldest surviving martyr-calendar of the Roman church, its core generally dated to the 330s.

4. 4. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.10, quoting a letter of Dionysius of Alexandria to Hermammon, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890). Available at NewAdvent.org. Eusebius supplies the context and cause of the Valerian persecution but gives no martyrdom narrative for Sixtus; where he names Xystus of Rome (HE VII.5, VII.9) it is only as the recipient of Dionysius’s letters on baptism.

5. 5. Cyprian, Epistle 73 (to Pompey), ANF vol. 5, quoting Stephen: “Let nothing be innovated… which has not been handed down” (nihil innovetur nisi quod traditum est). Available at NewAdvent.org. This is Epistle 73 in the ANF numbering, Epistle 74 in Hartel/CSEL. On the rebaptism controversy generally, see J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “Stephen I” and “Sixtus II.”

6. 6. Firmilian of Caesarea to Cyprian, preserved as Epistle 74 in the ANF numbering (Hartel/CSEL 75), ANF vol. 5, §24: “it is yourself that you have cut off… you have excommunicated yourself alone from all.” Available at NewAdvent.org. Stephen died in August 257 before the quarrel reached a formal, universal rupture.

7. 7. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.5.3, quoting Dionysius of Alexandria, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org. Of Dionysius’s series of letters “on baptism,” the first was addressed to Stephen and several of the later ones to Sixtus—the shift of address that tracks the restoration of peace.

8. 8. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.9.4, quoting Dionysius’s fifth epistle, addressed to Xystus, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org. Dionysius lays before Sixtus the case of a convert distressed that his baptism among heretics had been invalid and declines to rebaptize him, seeking the Roman bishop’s counsel.

9. 9. Michael Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912). Available at NewAdvent.org. The distinction is essential: Sixtus retained the Roman doctrine (heretical baptism valid, not repeated) while abandoning Stephen’s coercion (the threat of excommunication), and so restored communion without conceding the point of doctrine.

10. 10. The New Catholic Encyclopedia (s.v. “Sixtus II, Pope, St.,” by E. G. Weltin), following Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, reports that Sixtus “adopted a tolerant policy toward the divergent rebaptism policies of the Eastern Churches” and “also sent envoys to Cyprian of Carthage.” The “envoys” detail is the encyclopedia’s reconstruction of the rapprochement that Dionysius’s letters attest, rather than a datum in a primary source, and is presented here as such.

11. 11. Pontius the Deacon, Life and Passion of St. Cyprian 14, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5; NewAdvent.org. The Latin phrase is bonus et pacificus sacerdos; the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia renders it “a good and peaceful priest,” the ANF “the good and peace-making priest.”

12. 12. On Valerian’s first edict of 257 (participation in the state cult; prohibition of Christian assemblies and of entry into the cemeteries, on pain of exile), see Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II,” and McGiffert’s note to Eusebius HE VII.10 (NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1). The bar on the cemeteries is why Sixtus’s fatal assembly took place in a catacomb.

13. 13. Cyprian, Epistle 81, ANF vol. 5. The Latin of the clause on the clergy, quoted by Ott from the same letter, is episcopi et presbyteri et diacones incontinenti animadvertantur—“let bishops, priests, and deacons be punished forthwith”—the verb animadvertere being the ordinary Roman term for capital punishment by the sword.

14. 14. Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14: Sixtus “assembled his flock on 6 August at one of the less-known cemeteries, that of Praetextatus, on the left side of the Appian Way, nearly opposite the cemetery of St. Callistus.” The arrest took place at Praetextatus; the burial, at the adjacent cemetery of Callistus (see n. 17).

15. 15. Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II”: “While seated on his chair in the act of addressing his flock he was suddenly apprehended by a band of soldiers.” Ott judges it “more probable” that Sixtus was taken before a tribunal and then led back to the cemetery for execution than beheaded on the spot; the sources do not finally decide the question.

16. 16. The number of deacons varies across the sources: Cyprian (Ep. 81) says “four deacons,” unnamed; the Depositio Martyrum names two (Agapitus and Felicissimus) at Praetextatus; the Liber Pontificalis and the later Roman martyrologies give six—Januarius, Vincentius, Magnus, and Stephanus (in the standard reconstruction, the four beheaded with Sixtus in the cemetery), together with Felicissimus and Agapitus. See Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II,” and the Liber Pontificalis notice (“alii sex diaconi”). The archdeacon Lawrence, the seventh deacon, died separately on 10 August.

17. 17. On the crypt of the popes in the cemetery of Callistus—identified by Giovanni Battista de Rossi in 1854 and holding a cluster of third-century popes, Sixtus II among them—see the Callixtus I entry of this series and the standard catacomb topographies. Sixtus was arrested at Praetextatus but interred in the papal crypt at the neighboring cemetery of Callistus.

18. 18. Damasus, Epigrammata 17 (in the numbering of Antonio Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana [Vatican City, 1942], retained in Dennis Trout, Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry [Oxford University Press, 2015]; = ICUR IV, 9514). The translation here is the author’s. The opening hexameter, Tempore quo gladius secuit pia viscera matris, Damasus reused in a second epigram; this one is identified by its second line, hic positus rector caelestia iussa docebam, which places the poem in Sixtus’s own voice. Some witnesses read docebat (third person); the first-person docebam is the reading of the standard editions and suits the epigram’s voice.

19. 19. Depositio Martyrum, 10 August: “IIII idus Aug. Laurenti in Tiburtina”—Lawrence, on the Via Tiburtina; Mommsen, Chronica Minora I, 71–72. On Lawrence as a historical figure, the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia (J. P. Kirsch, “St. Lawrence”) concedes that “there can be no question that St. Lawrence was a real historical personage, nor any doubt as to… the date of his burial,” even while doubting the manner of his death. Available at NewAdvent.org.

20. 20. Ambrose of Milan, On the Duties of the Clergy (De officiis ministrorum) I.41.214, trans. H. de Romestin, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 10 (1896). Available at CCEL.org. The passage is numbered §§214–216 in the NPNF English (I.41.205–207 in the Latin numbering).

21. 21. Ambrose, De officiis I.41.215–216, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 10: “Cease weeping… after three days thou shalt follow me”; and, of the martyrdom by fire, “The flesh is roasted, turn it and eat” (Latin assum est, versa et manduca). The crisp Latin form of the taunt is Ambrose’s; Prudentius phrases it differently (see n. 23).

22. 22. Ambrose, De officiis II.28.140–141, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 10: ordered to produce the treasures of the Church, Lawrence “brought the poor together… and pointed to the poor, saying: ‘These are the treasures of the Church.’” Available at CCEL.org. Ambrose tells the anecdote in the course of defending his own melting of church plate to ransom captives.

23. 23. Prudentius, Peristephanon II (the hymn on Lawrence), an early-fifth-century poem of some 584 verses that is the principal literary source for the gridiron scene. Prudentius voices the taunt at length (“coctum est, devora…”—“it is cooked, devour it”), rather than in the compact form Ambrose gives. No clean public-domain English verse translation of Peristephanon II is readily available; the Latin is at The Latin Library.

24. 24. The verdict “probably a mere legend” is Ott’s: Michael Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (1912), on “the pathetic meeting between St. Sixtus II and St. Lawrence.” J. P. Kirsch, “St. Lawrence,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), makes the same judgment on the ground that the meeting is “not compatible with the contemporaneous reports about the persecution of Valerian,” under which Sixtus and his deacons were executed together on 6 August.

25. 25. Patrick J. Healy, The Valerian Persecution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), argued that the verb of the edict (animadvertantur) “ordinarily meant decapitation,” making the slow death by fire hard to reconcile with the law. Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, “San Lorenzo e il supplizio della graticola,” Römische Quartalschrift 14 (1900): 159–176, proposed that the gridiron tradition arose from a scribal corruption of the solemn formula passus est (“he suffered”) into assus est (“he was roasted”). Both are arguments on the sceptical side of a genuinely open question, not settled conclusions.

26. 26. For the counter-case, see Lawrence B. Porter, “St. Lawrence’s Death on a Grill: Fact or Fiction? An Update on the Controversy,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 20, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 96–121, who reviews the sceptics (Healy, Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Delehaye) and defends the historicity of the death by fire, noting that a “humiliated and outraged Roman official” was not bound to the letter of the edict. Porter concedes that the sceptical view “has become the standard accepted judgment”; the majority scholarly position treats the gridiron as doubtful, with the fire’s defenders in the minority.

27. 27. The Communicantes of the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I): …Lini, Cleti, Clementis, Xysti, Cornelii, Cypriani, Laurentii, Chrysogoni, Ioannis et Pauli, Cosmae et Damiani…; English from the 2011 ICEL Roman Missal. See the discussion at the Archdiocese of Washington’s liturgical commentary and the New Liturgical Movement series on the saints of the Roman Canon.

28. 28. On the identification of the Canon’s “Xystus” with Sixtus II rather than Sixtus I, see Josef A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite (Missarum Sollemnia), in his treatment of the martyrs of the Communicantes; the point is standard among liturgical commentators, who note that the Canon’s martyr-list favors the great third-century martyrs (Sixtus II, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence) over their earlier namesakes. The Sixtus I entry of this series makes the same identification.

29. 29. Liber Pontificalis, Life 25 (Xystus II), ed. Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1 (Paris, 1886), 155–156: “Xystus, natione Grecus, ex philosopho, sedit ann. I m. X d. XXIII. Martyrio coronatur.” English in Raymond Davis, trans., The Book of Pontiffs, 3rd rev. ed. (Liverpool University Press, 2010).

30. 30. Liber Pontificalis, Life 9 (Hyginus), ed. Duchesne, vol. 1: “Yginus, natione Grecus, ex philosopho, de Athenis…” The recurrence of the identical formula—“a Greek, formerly a philosopher”—for two different popes marks it as a stock ornament of the compilers rather than genuine biographical information.

31. 31. Ott, “Pope St. Sixtus II,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14: “His origin is unknown. The ‘Liber Pontificalis’ says that he was a Greek by birth, but this is probably a mistake, originating from the false assumption that he was identical with a Greek philosopher of the same name, who was the author of the so-called ‘Sentences’ of Xystus.” On the Sentences of Sextus, Rufinus’s misattribution, and Jerome’s rejection, see the Sixtus I entry of this series, with Henry Chadwick, The Sentences of Sextus (Cambridge University Press, 1959).

32. 32. In the current General Roman Calendar the commemoration of “Saints Sixtus II, Pope, and Companions, Martyrs” is an optional memorial on 7 August; see the Calendarium Romanum (1969) and the readings for the day at USCCB.org. The date of death, 6 August, is preserved in the Roman Martyrology; the observance was shifted to 7 August in the 1969 reform because 6 August is the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. In the pre-1970 calendar Sixtus and the companion martyrs Felicissimus and Agapitus were commemorated on 6 August within the Transfiguration.