Baring-Gould’s sources: Greek Menaea, Russian Kalendar; Modem Roman Martyrology Authority ' The Greek Acts.] SS. Sabas and Nicetas are the two most renowned martyrs among the Goths. The former is honoured on the 1 2th of April, the latter, whom the Greeks place in the class of the great martyrs, is commemorated on this day. Nicetas was a Goth, born near the banks of the Danube, and converted to the faith in his youth by Ulphilas the Arian,1 Bishop of the Scythians and Goths in the reign of Constantine the Great. When Valens ascended the imperial throne in the East, in the year 364, the Gothic nation broke into two kingdoms. Athanaric, King of the Eastern Goths, who bordered upon Thrace, in 370 raised a furious persecution against the Church in his dominions. By his order, an idol was carried in a chariot through all the towns and villages where it was suspected that any Christians lived, and all who refused to adore it were put to death. The usual method of the persecutors was to bum the Christians with their children in their houses, or in the churches where they were assembled together; sometimes Christians were stabbed at the foot of the altar. In the numerous army of 1 The Acts say of him, “ He being a prudent learned man, found out letters suitable to the sounds of the Gothic tongue, and when he had translated the sacred and divinely inspired Scriptures out of Greek into the Gothic tongue, he laboured diligently to teach it to his nation.0 The Greek writer of the Acts did not know he was an Arian. Alban Butler, to obscure the fact that Nicetas was the disciple of the Arian Ulphilas, boldly alters the name of the bishop to Thcophilus, whose heresy is not so certain.

-51. Aichard. martyrs which glorified God amongst that barbarous people, on this occasion, S. Nicetas is one of the few whose name has been preserved. He had, probably, been ordained by Ulphilas, for he preached the faith, or, perhaps, the mutilated faith held by the Arians [followers of Arius, who taught that the Son is a created being, not fully God], with great zeal. The soldiers of Athanaric fell on him when he was preaching, beat him, and then threw him into the fire. He sang hymns in the midst of the flames till his tongue was silenced by death. The relics [the bodily remains of a saint, or objects they used, kept with honor] were carried to Mopsuestia.

The Bollandists [Jesuit scholars who since the 1600s have critically studied the lives of the saints], to save the orthodoxy of S. Nicetas, have supposed that the persecution broke out before Ulphilas finally adhered to Arianism, a.d. 376. But from the account of the persecution given by Sozomen (let. vi. c. 37), it is clear that it broke out subsequently to the Gothic war of a.d. 377- The persecution was waged by Athanaric in revenge for the declaration of war against the Goths [Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire, many of them Arian Christians] by Valens. Before that they had sued for his protection against the Huns [nomadic invaders from Central Asia, led in the 5th century by Attila]; and the persecution was specially directed against Arians, as Valens persecuted Catholics, and professed Arianism.

If S. Nicetas was an Arian, as seems probable, he was so through ignorance, because he knew not the full truth.