Apostle Hermes of the Seventy

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  

  Apostle Hermes of the Seventy

  Hermas, Patrobus, Linus, Gaius and Philologus were five apostles of the Seventy whom the Byzantine calendar commemorates together on November 5. Each is named in the closing greetings of Paul's Epistle to the Romans or in the Second Epistle to Timothy, and each is remembered as a bishop of the apostolic age: Hermas at Philippopolis in Thrace, where he died a martyr; Patrobus at Puteoli and Naples in Italy; Linus at Rome, the successor of the Apostle Peter and the Linus of the Roman episcopal succession named in Second Timothy; Gaius at Ephesus, after Timothy; and Philologus at Sinope on the Black Sea, consecrated by the Apostle Andrew. The Church keeps their joint memory among the Seventy sent out by the Lord.

• Apollo of the Thebaid

  Apollo — Apollonius in the fuller form of the name — was one of the great abbots of fourth-century Egypt, the father of a community of some five hundred monks near Hermopolis in the Thebaid. Withdrawing to the desert at fifteen and living forty years in solitude before being called by a divine word to gather disciples and "destroy the wisdom of the wise" among the pagans of the region, he became the most celebrated ascetic of Upper Egypt in the generation after Antony. The History of the Monks in Egypt, whose authors visited his monastery, gives him one of its longest chapters, and records of him the note that made him famous: that his face was always radiant with joy, and that he would not have sorrow in the house of God. He reposed about 395, very old.

• Eusebius and Charalampus

  Eusebius and Charalampus were two Christians of Nicomedia who refused to sacrifice to the idols and were burned alive. The Greek synaxarion joins their memory to that of the martyrs commemorated the previous day — Romanus, Teletius (or Meletius) and Christina — with whom they were put to death in the same fire, and remembers them in a single couplet: that the fire of their zeal kindled two contenders before the fire that consumed them. Beyond the place, the manner of death and the company, nothing of their history is transmitted; not even the reign in which they suffered is recorded.

• Eustathius of Constantinople

  Eustathius was Patriarch of Constantinople from 1019 to 1025, in the last years of the emperor Basil II. He came to the throne of the Great Church not from a monastery or a provincial see but from the imperial palace, where he had been protopresbyter — the senior priest of the court clergy — and he governed the Church, in the words of the notice that preserves his memory, in a manner pleasing to God, reposing in peace towards the end of 1025. His sanctity is not carried by the printed Menaia: it survives in a manuscript synaxarion of the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre, which enters his commemoration on May 31, and he is one of the most obscure of all the canonised occupants of the see.

• Five Martyrs of Ascalon

  Five martyrs, whose names the tradition has not preserved, suffered at Ascalon on the coast of Palestine and were dragged along the ground until they died — the whole of what the synaxarion transmits of them, conveyed in a single verse which turns their death into an image of a bed made of the earth itself. Neither the reign, the year, nor the occasion of their martyrdom is recorded. They are kept on May 31 as one of the many small anonymous companies by which the fixed calendar holds open the memory of martyrs whose histories were lost while their number and their city were remembered.

• Hermias of Comana

  Hermias was an aged soldier — a veteran of the Roman armies — who confessed Christ at Comana and was tortured over many days and at last beheaded, about the middle of the second century. His passion is among the most elaborate in the synaxarion: flaying of the face, three days in a furnace, two cups of poison prepared by a sorcerer named Marus (who, seeing the poison fail, believed and was himself beheaded on the spot), boiling oil, the gouging out of his eyes, three days hung head-downward, and the healing of the men sent to remove his corpse, who found him alive and were struck blind with terror. The governor Sebastian, maddened at being unable to kill him, finally struck off his head with his own sword. He is to be sharply distinguished from the Apostle Hermas of the Seventy, commemorated on the same day.

• Philosophus of Alexandria

  Philosophus was a young Christian of Alexandria who was put to death in the persecution of the emperor Decius (249–251). His passion is remembered for one episode: when torture failed to move him, the magistrates changed their method and attempted to break him by defilement rather than pain, binding him hand and foot upon a soft bed and shutting a prostitute in the room with him. Unable to resist with his hands, he bit off his own tongue and spat it in her face, so that she fled from the room in horror; and his judges, defeated by an act they could not answer, ordered him beheaded. He stands in the synaxarion as the type of the martyr whose chastity, not merely his confession, was the thing on trial.

British Isles and Ireland

• SS. Winnow, Mancus and Myrbad, missionaries in Cornwall (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings