Dorothea of Alexandria

Dorothea of Alexandria is venerated as a virgin and saint, and tradition holds that she died in Arabia around the year 320. Very little reliable information about her survives, and in the Eastern tradition she has no firmly established commemoration.

The earliest testimony is that of Eusebius of Caesarea. He writes that the emperor Maximinus Daia conceived an insane passion for a maiden of Alexandria renowned for her wealth, learning and purity. When she refused him, the emperor exiled her and seized all her property. Eusebius does not name the maiden.

The name Dorothea appears only with Rufinus of Aquileia, who also writes that she fled to Arabia. Caesar Baronius took the maiden in Eusebius to be Saint Catherine, but the Bollandists, the scholars of the saints' lives, rejected this view.

In the sixteenth century Dorothea was confused with the better known Holy Martyr Dorothea of Caesarea, commemorated on 6 February. For that reason that day was sometimes taken as a feast of the Alexandrian saint as well. She is not listed in the Roman Martyrology of the Catholic Church.

Her story thus rests on a few pages of church history and on the tradition that gave her a name, not on a life written in ancient times.