Saint Leonidas of Alexandria

Leonidas is remembered for two things: for how he died, and for who his son was. He lived in Alexandria in Egypt, and was beheaded in 204, during the persecution of Septimius Severus, which claimed many victims in that city. His story comes to us from Clement of Alexandria and above all from Eusebius of Caesarea. His son was named Origen, and he would become one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time. Back then he was seventeen and wanted to turn himself in too, to die with his father. His mother stopped him in a way that says everything about that family and that moment: she hid his clothes. The boy couldn’t leave the house. So he did the only thing left to him, and wrote to his father in prison. Eusebius preserves a fragment: he urged him to hold firm, not to give in out of concern for them. He was seventeen and was writing to a man about to be killed, telling him not to change his mind for their sake. Leonidas is remembered in Greek hagiography and in the Synaxarion of Constantinople. It was Caesar Baronius who added him to the Roman Martyrology, on April 22. If your name is Leonidas, today is your name day.