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Feast Day of Saint Eleutherius of Nicomedia, Reverend Lovejoy counselor

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October 2 is the feast date of Saint Eleutherius of Nicomedia,* a martyr circa 303 who was accused of trying to burn down the palace of the Christian-persecuting emperor Diocletian.

One notices him in 2020 for a rather less pious achievement, however: he appears in the Simpsons episode In Marge We Trust** as a stained-glass icon come to life to banter with the town pastor during the latter’s crisis of faith.

While Saint Eleutherius is a real entry in the martyrology, not all the other witty apparitions in this episode can say the same. Alongside actual martyrs Saint Lucian and Saint Bartholomew, there’s a fictitious “Saint Donickus” who is simply a tribute to the episode’s writer, Donick Cary.

* Nicomedia was an old Greek-founded Anatolian city on the Sea of Marmara that had stood capital of the empire’s easternmost quadrant under Diocletian’s four-way division of power. It was here that Diocletian unleashed his great persecution of 303 by razing the church and issuing an anti-Christian Edict of Nicomedia. Within a few years of this persecution, Nicomedia would be supplanted as the capital by Byzantium/Constantinople, but it still exists to this day: it’s now the Turkish city of Izmit.

** This episode is also notable for the memorable B-plot, with Homer Simpson — the cartoon character, of course, not the real-life executed guy of that name — discovering that his face is a Japanese detergent icon known as Mr. Sparkle.

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1744: Jan, of Johonnes Van Houten

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From the Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, only one small instance of the “terrible example” in store for the Garden State’s “large body of slaves to be kept in subjection.”

May 10, 1744 — The negro man “Jan,” of Johonnes Van Houten, was tried “for poysoning and attempting to do the same to several blacks at the township of Bergen; to wit, the negro man of Arent Toers, named Lowis, and has some time past poysoned two wenches of Garret Ross, of the same precinct, and attempted several more.” Convicted and sentenced to be hanged May 11, between 10 and 12, at Bergen; “at the suitablest place, where Peter Marselis and Michel Vreeland shall think proper.”


Was it the slave trade that capitalized the Van Houten cracker empire?

On this day..