Martyr Agathonicus and Companions

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Agathonicus and Companions

  Agathonicus was a well-born and learned Christian of Nicomedia, the eastern capital of the Roman world, who used his standing and his knowledge of the Scriptures to argue the Greeks of that city out of their idolatry — winning among others a leading man of the senate. Arrested with a company of fellow confessors when the comes Eutolmius swept Bithynia and the Pontic shore for Christians, he was tortured, marched westward toward the imperial tribunal in Thrace, and at last beheaded at Selymbria on the Sea of Marmara, about the year 305. Of those taken with him — Zoticus, Theoprepius, Acindynus, Severian, Zeno and others — several died of their wounds on the road. His memory was kept with honour in Constantinople, where a church bore his name and pilgrims venerated his relics into the thirteenth century.

• Holy Martyr Eulalia of Barcelona (303)

  Eulalia was a girl of about thirteen or fourteen from a Christian family of the country outside Barcinona — Roman Barcelona — who, when the governor Dacian came to the city in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian to compel sacrifice, slipped out of her parents' house by night and denounced him to his face. She was scourged, torn with iron hooks, burnt with torches and set upon a cross, and died about the year 303; the tradition adds that the flames turned back upon her executioners, that a white dove was seen to leave her mouth as she gave up her spirit, and that snow fell and covered her body until the Christians came for it. With her the Byzantine calendar names the martyr Felix, who buried her and followed her in death. She is the patroness of Barcelona, and the Eastern Church keeps her on August 22.

• Anthusa of Seleucia

  Anthusa was the daughter of rich pagans at Seleucia, who in the third century heard of the Christian faith, left her father's house on a pretext, sought out Athanasius, bishop of Tarsus, and would not go home again. He baptised her, and at her own insistence tonsured her a nun; her two servants Charisimus and Neophytus were baptised with her. The bishop and the two young men were beheaded soon after, but Anthusa was not taken: she went into the wilderness and lived there in ascetic labour for twenty-three years, dying in peace about the year 298. She is the rarest kind of figure in the third-century calendar — a woman ascetic of the persecuting age, keeping in solitude a monastic life that had not yet been given a name.

• Athanasius of Tarsus

  Athanasius was bishop of Tarsus in Cilicia — the city of the Apostle Paul, and a metropolitan see of the Patriarchate of Antioch — in the middle of the third century, when his church was hunted rather than established. He is remembered above all as the bishop who received, catechised, baptised and tonsured the young pagan noblewoman Anthusa, who had run away from her family at Seleucia to find him, and who baptised with her her two servants Charisimus and Neophytus. Brought before the emperor and commanded to sacrifice to the idols, Athanasius refused and was beheaded with the sword; his two young converts were beheaded after him, while Anthusa outlived them all in the desert. The Church keeps the four together on August 22.

• Charisimus and Neophytus

  Charisimus and Neophytus were the two household servants who attended the young pagan noblewoman Anthusa on her flight from Seleucia to Tarsus, were baptised with her by the bishop Athanasius, and paid for it with their lives. When their mistress had been tonsured and sent into the desert and the bishop had been beheaded, the two young men were examined in their turn, confessed Christ openly before the emperor, and were beheaded — in the third century, probably under Aurelian (270–275). They are commemorated with Anthusa and Athanasius on August 22.

• Isaac of Optina

  Isaac (Antimonov) — Ivan in the world, the son of a Kursk merchant house — entered the Optina Hermitage in 1847 at thirty-seven, was formed under the great elder Macarius, and in 1862 was made superior of the monastery, which he governed for thirty-two years until his death. His rule spans the golden age of Optina: he rebuilt and enlarged the monastery's churches, raised its hospital, guest-house and workshops, put its finances in order, and stood behind the foundation of the women's convent at Shamordino — while himself remaining, though he was the superior, an obedient spiritual son of the elder Ambrose, whose eldership he protected against every attempt to suppress it. He reposed on 22 August 1894 and was glorified with the whole company of the Optina elders in 1996 and 2000.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Sigfrid, abbot of Wearmouth (c.688)
• St. Ethelgitha of Northumbria, abbess (c.720)
• St. Arnulf of Cambridgeshire (9th C)

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