Today is the feast of St. Agatha of Sicily, Virgin and Martyr. She died in the third century in the Decian persecution of the 250s, probably in Catania, Sicily, where she apparently had been born. We have very little direct information about here; most of our early information about her is very indirect. According to later legend, she was a fifteen-year-old girl from a Christian family who made a vow of virginity. The local prefect, Quintianus, had taken a fancy to her and attempted to pressure into marriage. When she still refused, he reported her to the authorities as a Christian; she was tortured, with (among other things) her breasts being cut off, and was sentenced to burned to death. Thus far, the pattern of her story is fairly standard for an early Virgin Martyr, but the story has an interesting twist; Agatha was not burned to death. While she was in prison, there was an earthquake, and for obvious reasons the local magistrates had more immediately serious matters on her mind, and St. Agatha at some point died in prison, for reasons unknown. It would make sense if she did so because of complications from her torture, but in fact the legend itself says that her wounds were healed by St. Peter after the earthquake, and thus Agatha is an unusual case of an early martyr for whom we have a legend and tradition but no early story of how she died, at all.
In any case, St. Agatha, like many of the early Virgin Martyrs, is easy to recognize in paintings because she usually has her cut-off breasts on a platter. And her name is preserved in part because she is such an early martyr that she is already commemorated in the Roman Canon, so her name is explicitly said every Mass along with several other early martyrs venerated in Rome.
(The other Virgin Martyrs mentioned in the Canon are Agnes, Lucy, and Cecilia. Incidentally, in making sure that I got that right -- as it turns out I was forgetting Cecilia -- I was struck by how diverse the saints listed in the Roman Canon are. Besides the holy Virgin, the Baptist, and the Apostles, we have the early Papal Martyrs [Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius], Bishop Martyrs [Cyprian, Ignatius], a martyred priest [Marcellinus; maybe also Alexander (there are several different Alexanders who could have originally been meant, including a pope, a priest, and a soldier-martyr)], deacon-martyrs [Stephen, Lawrence], a martyred exorcist [Peter], and various lay martyrs -- a lay catechist [Chrysogonus], soldier-martyrs [John and Paul], physician-martyrs known for their almsdeeds [Cosmas and Damian], catechumens [Perpetua, Felicity], Virgin Martyrs [Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia], and a married woman about whom we know nothing else [Anastasia, although some sources list her as a Virgin Martyr, probably incorrectly; but Perpetua and Felicity were also married women]. While most are for obvious reasons associated directly with Rome, Sicily, the East, and North Africa are all represented. This is so diverse that it is obviously deliberately so, picking saints of all sorts of background from those who were popularly venerated in Rome when the Roman Canon was formed in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries -- probably the saints that had churches in Rome at the time.)
