Holy Martyr and Archdeacon Lawrence of Rome

Saints commemorated

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  Holy Martyr and Archdeacon Lawrence of Rome

  Laurence, archdeacon of the Roman Church, was put to death on 10 August 258, in the persecution of the emperor Valerian, four days after his bishop Sixtus II had been seized and beheaded in the catacombs. As archdeacon he had charge of the alms and the treasury of the Church; ordered by the city prefect to surrender its wealth, he asked for three days, spent them distributing everything to the poor, and then presented the beggars, the crippled and the widows of Rome with the words that have never been forgotten — "Behold the treasures of the Church." For that he was, in the tradition received by both East and West, roasted alive on an iron gridiron, and from the fire he mocked his executioners, telling them to turn him over because one side was done. He is one of the very few Latin martyrs whom the Byzantine calendar keeps at full rank, and his August 10 is one of the oldest fixed commemorations in Christendom.

• Agathonike of Carthage

  Agathonike is a virgin-martyr of Carthage commemorated on August 10 in the Greek calendar, of whom nothing whatever is transmitted but the name, the epithet παρθενομάρτυς, and the city. The Greek synaxaristes says so in as many words — we have no details of the life of Saint Agathonike — and adds only the etymology of the name, from ἀγαθός and νίκη, "good victory." She is entered here at her proper day because the calendar carries her, with an honest statement of the emptiness of the record and a note on the several better-known saints with whom she is liable to be confused.

• Felicissimus and Agapitus

  Felicissimus and Agapitus were deacons of the Roman Church who were beheaded with their bishop Sixtus II in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Via Appia on 6 August 258, at the beginning of the second and bloodier phase of Valerian's persecution. Their names stand in the Depositio martyrum of 354, the oldest calendar of the Roman Church, alongside that of Sixtus himself; they are therefore among the very small number of third-century martyrs about whom nothing has to be taken on trust. In the Byzantine and Slavic calendars they are carried over to August 10 and commemorated among "those with" Laurence the Archdeacon.

• Heron the Philosopher

  Heron "the Philosopher" is one of the smallest entries in the Greek calendar: a name, an epithet, and a couplet of iambic verse under August 10, with no life, no country, and no date. The synaxarion says of him only that he was perfected in peace — the formula for a saint who died in his bed and not by violence — and the verses over the notice, which speak of a sophist crowned and of a head given up to the confounding of the sophist of error, sit awkwardly beside it. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and the later Greek editors suggest that he may be the philosopher Hero to whom Gregory the Theologian addressed an oration; the suggestion is old and has never been proved. He is entered here as the tradition transmits him, with the little that can be said and the several things that cannot.

• Hippolytus the Jailer

  Hippolytus is the keeper of the prison in which the archdeacon Laurence was held at Rome in August 258. Set to guard the Church's most conspicuous prisoner, he saw a blind fellow-prisoner named Lucillus receive his sight at the archdeacon's hands, asked for baptism, and was baptised with his whole household; after the martyrdom he took up the body from the fire and buried it, and for that was seized, scourged, and — in the form the tradition has always given — dragged to death behind wild horses. The Greek Menaion names him in the very heading of August 10, beside Laurence and Xystus; the Latin books keep him on August 13. He must be distinguished with care from Hippolytus of Rome, the third-century writer and bishop kept on January 30, with whom he has been confused since antiquity.

• Laurence of Kaluga

  Blessed Laurence of Kaluga (†10 August 1515) was a fool-for-Christ who lived in a hut on a wooded hill above the Oka, beside the wooden church of the Nativity of Christ outside Kaluga, going barefoot summer and winter in a plain shirt and a sheepskin. He is remembered above all for a single day: on a May morning in 1512, while sitting in the house of Prince Simeon Ivanovich of Kaluga, he leapt up crying for his sharp axe because "dogs have set upon Prince Simeon" — and was seen the same hour on the prince's boat in the middle of the Oka, heartening the men against a Crimean Tatar raiding force which was driven off. He is painted with a long-handled axe in his hand for that reason. Over his grave a monastery grew, named from his church the Laurentiev or Nativity monastery, and by the reign of Ivan IV his tomb was one of the recognised holy places of the Russian south-west.

• Romanus the Soldier

  Romanus was a soldier of the guard set over the imprisoned archdeacon Laurence at Rome in August 258. Watching the tortures, he saw — so the Roman passio relates — a young man of shining appearance standing by the martyr and wiping the sweat and blood from his limbs; and he asked at once for baptism. Laurence baptised him in the prison with water brought in a pitcher, and Romanus was beheaded on 9 August, the day before his teacher. He is one of the converts of the Laurentian martyrdom whom the Slavic calendars name among "those with" Laurence on August 10, and one of the earliest instances of a hagiographical type that recurs through the whole Byzantine martyrology: the executioner or guard converted by what he is made to watch.

• Six Martyrs of Bizye

  Six martyrs, whose names have not come down, are commemorated on August 10 in the Greek Menaion under the heading "the six martyrs at Bizye" — the Thracian city of Bizye, the modern Vize in eastern Thrace. All that the synaxarion transmits of them is the manner of their death, and that only in a couplet: that some had their bones broken and others their flesh torn, and that these torments were the seizing of their crowns. Neither the reign, nor the persecutor, nor the year is given, and the manuscripts do not even agree on the place: the synaxarion of the monastery of Dionysiou on Athos sets their martyrdom in Libya rather than in Thrace. The entry is one of the shortest in the fixed year, and is given here without supplement.

• Sixtus II of Rome

  Sixtus — Xystus in the Greek and in the older Latin — was bishop of Rome for less than a year, from August 257 to August 258, and is one of the most securely dated martyrs of the whole third century. On 6 August 258, days after Valerian's second rescript ordered the immediate execution of all Christian clergy, he was seized while seated in the teaching chair in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Via Appia and beheaded on the spot, with the deacons Felicissimus and Agapitus and others of his clergy. Four days later his archdeacon Laurence followed him. The Greek Menaion keeps Sixtus not on his own day of death but on the tenth, in a single notice with Laurence and Hippolytus; the Latin Church, which knows him best, names him in the Canon of the Mass, and remembers him above all as a peacemaker — the bishop who healed the rupture between Rome, Africa and Asia over the rebaptism of heretics without conceding either side's dignity.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Gerontius (Geraint) of Gerrans in Cornwall and Magor in Gwent (6th C)
• St. Blane , bishop of Bute (6th C)
• St. Bettelin (Bertram) of Stafford (8th C)

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