Saint Leucius the Confessor (also Leukios) is venerated as the first bishop of Brindisi (ancient Brundisium) in the Apulia region of southern Italy. According to the synaxarion tradition followed in the Orthodox Church, he was an Egyptian by birth, raised in monastic life at Alexandria, who was sent by a heavenly command across the sea to the still-pagan town of Brindisi, which he is said to have brought to the Christian faith. He is commemorated on June 20.
By tradition Leucius was born in Alexandria to pious parents and was given another name at birth; the sources differ on the particulars, recording his parents and his original name variously (for example Eutropius or Eupressios, with parents named Eudykius and Euphrosyne or Euphrodisia). After his mother died while he was a child, his father entered the monastery of Saint Hermias and brought the boy with him, so that he was reared in monastic discipline from an early age. While still young he was chosen by the brethren to lead the community, and a new name, Leucius, is said to have been revealed to him in a vision concerning his future episcopate.
The accounts relate that Leucius, after serving the Church in Egypt, crossed over to Italy in obedience to a revelation and settled at Brindisi, where the people had not yet received Christianity. There he is remembered for turning the inhabitants from idols, for building a church dedicated to the Mother of God, and for a celebrated miracle in which, during a long drought, rain fell after his prayer and the supplication of the newly baptized, leading to many conversions. He bears the title “Confessor,” marking a life of ascetic labor and steadfast witness rather than death by martyrdom in the Orthodox commemoration.
The hagiographic traditions surrounding Leucius are layered and not uniform: the Orthodox synaxarion places his life in the fourth-to-fifth centuries (one account naming the reign of the emperor Theodosius II), while a separate Western tradition, which commemorates him on January 11, sets him in the earliest Christian centuries and gives the founding of the see of Brindisi a much earlier date. As a saint of the pre-schism West venerated in both traditions, his memory is preserved at Brindisi, where his relics were honored before being moved to Trani and later to Benevento.
