Saint Soter

Soter survives in someone else's thank-you note. Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, wrote to Rome around 170 acknowledging a gift of money and a letter, and Eusebius preserved the passage. From the beginning, Dionysius said, it had been Rome's custom "to do good in various ways to all the brethren, and to send contributions to many churches in every city," relieving the poor and supporting Christians condemned to the mines; Soter had not only kept the custom but increased it, and had treated the visiting brethren "as a loving father his children." The Corinthians, he added, had read Soter's letter aloud that Sunday and would go on reading it, as they still read the one Clement had sent them seventy years before.

The passage is the clearest evidence of how the Roman church acquired its standing in the second century: not by decree but by generosity, backed by the wealth of the capital and the discipline to distribute it. A church that paid for other churches' prisoners was listened to when it wrote.

Soter's own letter is lost. His years coincided with the plague that Marcus Aurelius's armies brought back from the East in 165, with the first stirrings of the Montanist prophecy in Phrygia, and with the beginning of Rome's slow shift from Greek to Latin. Eusebius gives him eight years.