Martyrs Platon and Roman

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyrs Platon and Roman

• Holy New Martyr Anastasius of Epirus (1750), and Daniel, whom he converted

• Plato of Ancyra

  Plato of Ancyra (†c. 306) was a young confessor of Galatia who was martyred in his native city during the Great Persecution. Still in his youth, he travelled the cities preaching Christ with a persuasiveness and command of Greek learning that astonished his hearers, until he was arrested and tried before the governor Agrippinus. Flattery, the offer of a noble marriage, threats, and prolonged torture and starvation all failed to move him, and he was beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to the idols. The tradition remembers him as the brother of the Martyr Antiochus the Physician, and his memory was kept with a proper hymn at Ancyra. He is commemorated on November 18.

• Romanus of Antioch and Barulas

  Romanus (†303) was a deacon of the church of Caesarea in Palestine who, during the Great Persecution, was staying at Antioch and there boldly resisted the demolition of the churches and denounced the pagan sacrifices before the prefect. Tortured, condemned to the fire, saved from it by a sudden rain, and finally deprived of his tongue and strangled in prison, he became one of the most celebrated martyrs of the age, honoured by a homily of John Chrysostom and a long hymn of Prudentius. His memory is inseparable from that of Barulas, a small child who, brought forward in the trial, confessed the one true God, shamed the idolaters, and was beheaded while his mother urged him on. The two are commemorated together on November 18.

• Zacchaeus and Alphaeus

  Zacchaeus and Alphaeus were among the first martyrs of the Great Persecution in Palestine, put to death at Caesarea in the year 303. Zacchaeus was a deacon of the church of Gadara who confessed Christ openly and would not renounce him under torture; Alphaeus, a reader of the church of Caesarea, seeing crowds of the lapsed on their way to sacrifice, publicly begged them not to defile themselves with the idols and was seized for it. Shackled together and thrown into prison, where they spent the night in prayer, the two were beheaded the next morning. They are commemorated together on November 18.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Mawes, bishop in Cornwall and Brittany (5th C)
• St. Constant, priest-hermit at Lough Erne (777)
• St. Keverne, friend of St. Kieran (6th C)
• St. Mummolus companion of St Fursey (c.690)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings