Prisca was a young Roman woman tortured and executed for her Christian faith. The dates of her birth and death are unknown. She is revered as a saint and martyr in Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Catholic Church, and in the Anglican Communion.
Though some legends suggest otherwise, scholars do not believe she is the Priscilla (Prisca) of the New Testament couple Priscilla and Aquila, who were friends of the Apostle Paul.
thumb|Saint Prisca and the lion, in a print by [[Adriaen Collaert, ]]
She is honored, especially in England, as a child martyr. January 18 is her feast day.
Legend
Legend says that Saint Prisca was of a noble family. At age thirteen, she was supposedly baptized by St. Peter. Emperor Claudius ordered her to make a sacrifice to the god Apollo. When she refused because of her Christian faith, she was beaten and sent to prison. She was at last thrown to a lion in the amphitheater, but it quietly lay down at her feet. The Italian poet Martha Marchina (1600–1646) describes this moment of Prisca's martyrdom in a pair of poems in her book Musa Posthuma, where the lion's humane nature is contrasted against human savagery.
She was starved for three days in a slaves' prison house, tortured upon the rack, and thrown on a burning pile. Still she remained alive, but was beheaded at the tenth milestone on the Via Ostiensis—the road from Rome to Ostia.
Commentary
It is difficult to establish the true identity of this Roman martyr since the various information concerning her probably refers to three different people.
There exists on the Aventine a church of St. Prisca. It stands on the site of a very early title church, the Titulus Priscoe, mentioned in the fifth century and built probably in the fourth. In the eighteenth century there was found near this church a bronze tablet with an inscription of the year 224, by which a senator named Caius Marius Pudens Cornelianus was granted citizenship in a Spanish city. As such tablets were generally put up in the house of the person so honoured, it is possible that the senator's palace stood on the spot where the church was later built. The assumption is probable that the Prisca who founded this title church, or who, perhaps as early as the third century, gave the use of a part of the house standing there for the Christian church services, belonged to the family of Pudens Cornelianus.