Historical Context
Pappias suffered during the Diocletianic persecution, the last and most severe of the Roman persecutions of Christianity, which ran from 303 to 313. Beginning under the emperors Diocletian and Maximian, it unfolded through a series of edicts that escalated from the destruction of churches and scriptures and the arrest of clergy to a final requirement, issued in 304, that all persons offer sacrifice to the gods.
Those who refused this demand of sacrifice faced execution and torture, and the persecution was enforced most intensely in the eastern provinces of the empire. The synaxarion's account of Pappias — a Christian pressed to sacrifice to the idols and killed when he would not deny Christ — places him squarely within this pattern, though it preserves no specifics of his trial or death.