Since 264 BC, the year in which the First Punic War Rome took the island from the Carthaginians, in Sicily had been imposed the pagan religion of the Romans, with its load of popular deities and enjoy, examples of corruption and debauchery in customs. When the Christian community began to be quite large, around 40 AD, the first persecutions fell on it. Initially with Nero, in the middle of the first century, they had only occasional character. Then, during the second century, they were given a legal basis by a law prohibiting Christian worship. Of these first centuries, the Church recalls many martyrs who, with their courage and determination to accept death for Christ, helped to accelerate the spread of Christianity. In the early 3rd century, Emperor Septimius Severus issued an edict of persecution. He decreed that Christians should first be denounced to the authorities and then invited to publicly deny their faith. If they agreed to return to the pagan religion they were entitled to the libellurn, a kind of certificate of religious conformity, but if they refused to sacrifice to the gods, they were first tortured and then killed.
With this system, cold and calculating, the emperor tried to make apostates, that is, people who abandoned the Christian faith, and not martyrs, who were considered more dangerous than living Christians. Then, faced with the spread of Christianity and fearing that the increase of the faithful could threaten the stability of the empire, in 249 the emperor Decius ordered an even more radical repression: all Christians, denounced or not, were wanted by the office, Tracked down, tortured and finally killed.