Demetria

Saint Demetria was a virgin of Rome, the daughter of Saints Flavian and Dafrosa and the sister of Saint Bibiana, who suffered in the time of the emperor Julian the Apostate, in 362 or 363. The whole family was martyred in the course of Julian's campaign against the Christians, after he came to power in 361.

After the killing of Dafrosa, Demetria and Bibiana were held under house arrest, where attempts were made to turn them from the faith. According to Alban Butler, they spent their confinement in prayer and fasting, and after their parents' death they were stripped of everything they had and suffered much from poverty. Brought before the prefect Apronianus, the same who had condemned their parents, they were sentenced to death. After she confessed her faith in Christ, Demetria fell dead before the tribunal, in the presence of the judge, apparently from shock.

Her relics, together with those of her mother and sister, are preserved in an alabaster urn beneath the high altar of the little basilica of Santa Bibiana in Rome. She is commemorated on 21 June as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.