St. Zoe of Rome

Who was St. Zoe of Rome?

St. Zoe of Rome was a martyr of the persecution of Diocletian, the wife of a Roman official named Nicostratus. The Roman Martyrology honors her on July 5 in a few plain words: she was seized while praying at the tomb of the apostle St. Peter, thrown into a dark dungeon, and then, "being suspended on a tree by her neck and hair, and suffocated by a loathsome smoke, she yielded up her soul in the confession of the Lord."

Her story belongs to the larger story of St. Sebastian. It is told in his Passion, which the Catholic Encyclopedia dates to the early fifth century and judges legendary. We cannot know how much of it is history. What the Church has kept is her name, her husband's, and the memory of a woman who could not speak and then would not stop speaking of Christ.

The silent wife of Nicostratus

The Passion tells it this way. Two young Christian brothers, Marcus and Marcellianus, were held under arrest in the house of Nicostratus, an official of Rome, while their pagan parents and wives begged them to save their lives by sacrificing to the gods. Sebastian, an officer of the emperor's guard and a secret Christian, came and spoke to them all of eternal life with such fire that the brothers stood firm.

Zoe, the wife of Nicostratus, was listening. For six years an illness had left her unable to speak. In the Golden Legend's telling, she "had understood that which St. Sebastian had said and had seen the light about him," and she fell at his feet and begged him with her hands.

Her voice restored

Sebastian asked God to give back her speech, praying to him "that opened the mouth of Zacharias the prophet," and made the sign of the cross over her. At once she cried out:

The word that thou hast said is very true, and blessed be thou and the word of thy mouth, and blessed be all they that by thee believe in Jesu Christ the son of God.

Nicostratus believed, and so did the parents of the two brothers and their whole household. The Golden Legend says seventy-eight people, men, women and children, were baptized by a priest named Polycarp.

Her martyrdom

When the persecution struck the circle around Sebastian, Zoe was the first of them to die. She went to pray at the tomb of St. Peter on the Vatican hill, and she was arrested there. After a time in a dark prison she was hung from a tree by her neck and hair over a fire of foul-smelling smoke, and she died praying.

The Golden Legend adds a line that says much about her. When the old Christian Tranquillinus heard of her death, he cried out, "Alas! why live we so long? Women go tofore us to the crown of martyrdom." He was stoned to death a few days later. Her husband Nicostratus and his companions, the Roman Martyrology records on July 7, were tortured and thrown into the sea, and Marcus and Marcellianus, Tiburtius and at last Sebastian himself followed.

The miracles of St. Zoe

• Traditional: the healing of her speech through the prayer of St. Sebastian, after six years of muteness.
• Traditional: her vision of seven angels holding a book in which Sebastian's words were written, which she described as soon as she could speak.

Both come from the Passion of St. Sebastian. They have never been formally examined by the Church.

Symbols of St. Zoe in art

• The tree: she is shown hanging from a branch by her hair, as in Jacques Callot's small engraving of 1636.
• Smoke and fire: the fire lit below her, the means of her death.
• Palm and crown: the signs of every martyr's victory.
• Cross: nineteenth-century holy cards often show her simply as a young veiled woman holding a cross.

To tell her apart from other women martyrs, look for the tree and the smoke. A painting of a saint hanging by her hair over a fire, especially in a series of saints of July, is almost certainly St. Zoe of Rome.

Feast day and prayer

We keep the memory of St. Zoe on July 5, the day the Roman Martyrology gives her. See the feast day calendar.

A nineteenth-century French holy card, now in the MAS museum in Antwerp, carries a short prayer to God in her honor. It reads, in our translation:

Lord, you loosed the tongue of St. Zoe, who had become mute through a painful illness, so that she might openly confess the faith of Jesus Christ. This great saint could say with the prophet: I believed, and therefore I have spoken. Grant me, then, the grace to bear sufferings and trials with resignation, since they can be for me the occasion of experiencing your goodness and your power.

Let us ask St. Zoe to pray for all who cannot speak, for those whose faith has been silenced by fear, and for every Christian who prays at the tombs of the apostles.