Saturday after Elevation

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Sophia and Daughters Faith, Hope, and Love

  Sophia ("Wisdom") was a Christian widow of Italy whose three young daughters — Faith, Hope and Love (Pistis, Elpis and Agape; in Slavic use Vera, Nadezhda and Lyubov), aged twelve, ten and nine — were tortured and beheaded at Rome under the emperor Hadrian (117–138), the mother being compelled to watch. Burying her children on a hill outside the city, Sophia kept vigil at their grave and died there on the third day; the Church crowns her as a martyr in heart though not in blood. Their relics have been venerated at Eschau in Alsace since 777. They are commemorated together on September 17.

• Our Holy Father Lambert, Bishop of Maastricht (705)

• Agathoclia

  Agathoclia was a Christian slave in the household of a man named Nicolas, himself a Christian, and his pagan wife Paulina. For eight years her mistress tormented her for her faith — beatings, forced walking barefoot over sharp stones, a rib broken with a hammer, her tongue cut out, and starvation in confinement — and, unable to break her, finally killed her. The synaxaria transmit no place or date for her contest. She is commemorated on September 17.

• Herakleides and Myron of Tamassos

  Herakleides and Myron were bishops of Tamassos in Cyprus in the apostolic age. Herakleides, a Cypriot who guided the apostles Barnabas and Mark through the island, was baptised by them and consecrated first bishop of Tamassos by Barnabas; Myron was his successor in the see. Both ended their episcopates in martyrdom — the synaxarion verses say they were given to the pyre, "offered to Christ like the fragrance of myrrh." Their joint memory is kept on September 17, above all at the monastery of Saint Herakleidios near ancient Tamassos, where the first bishop's relics rest.

• 156 Martyrs of Palestine

  The 156 Martyrs of Palestine were confessors — most of them Egyptians, with Palestinians among them — condemned to the mines of Palestine in the last great persecution and put to death about the year 310 under the governor Firmilian, in the reign of the emperor Galerius and his caesar Maximinus. At their head the tradition names the Egyptian bishops Peleus and Nilus, a presbyter Zeno, and the noblemen Patermuthius and Elias; of the company, one hundred were beheaded and the rest, with their leaders, were burned. They are commemorated together on September 17.

• Theodota of Nicaea

  Theodota was a wealthy Christian woman of Cappadocia who suffered a long martyrdom ending at Nicaea around the year 230, in the reign of Alexander Severus. Denounced to the governor Symplicius, she endured raking with iron hooks, imprisonment, a red-hot furnace from which she emerged unharmed between two shining figures, torture on heated iron at Ancyra, and an attempt to saw her body apart, before she was finally beheaded at Nicaea and buried by its bishop Sophronius. She is commemorated on September 17.

• Socrates and Stephen

  Socrates and Stephen are early martyrs of Britain known from the martyrologies alone. Their names stand against September 17 in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum tradition, in the early amplifications of Bede's martyrology, and in the Roman Martyrology ("In England, the holy martyrs Socrates and Stephen"); with Alban and with Julius and Aaron of Caerleon they are the only martyrs the ancient martyrologies place in Britain. No acts, history, or shrine survives. Later tradition, from Cressy in the seventeenth century, makes them disciples of St Amphibalus who suffered under Diocletian (whence the conventional date c. 304), and the nineteenth-century menologies place their passion in Monmouthshire or South Wales on the strength of reported church dedications that Baring-Gould could not verify. They are commemorated on September 17.

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