The ancient city of Vita's location is identified with the ruins of Beni-Derraj in modern Tunisia. It was important enough in the late Roman province of Byzacena[5] to become one of the many suffragan sees of its capital Hadrumetum (modern (Sousse))'s Metropolitan Archbishorpic. Founded during Roman times, it survived the Vandal and Byzantine rule, but ceased to function following the Umayyad conquest of 670AD.
Among the bishops of Vita is noted especially Victor (487–?), an ecclesiastical writer who witnessed the occupation of Roman North Africa and the persecution of Catholics by the Vandals.[6][7]
Another well-known bishop of Vita was Pampiniano, a victim of the Arian 487AD persecution by Vandal king Genseric and remembered by the Roman Martyrology on November 28.[8]
^Victor Vitensis. History of the Vandal Persecution. Translated by John Moorhead, (Translated Texts for Historians; 10). Liverpool, 1992.
^A. H. Merrills, "totum subuertere uoluerunt: ‘social martyrdom’ in the Historia persecutionis of Victor of Vita", in Christopher Kelly, Richard Flower, Michael Stuart Williams (eds), Unclassical Traditions. Vol. II: Perspectives from East and West in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011) (Cambridge Classical Journal; Supplemental Volume 35), 102-115.
^By Henri Irénée Marrou, André Mandouze, Anne-Marie La Bonnardière, Prosopographie de l'Afrique chrétienne (303–533) (Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982) p 1298