Martyr Pamphylius and His Companions

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Martyr Pamphylius and His Companions

• Flavian of Constantinople

  Flavian (died 449) was Archbishop of Constantinople from 446, a defender of the apostolic faith against the heresy of the archimandrite Eutyches, who taught that in Christ there was but one nature after the Incarnation. At a synod in Constantinople in 448 Flavian condemned and deposed Eutyches; but at the "Robber Council" (Latrocinium) of Ephesus in 449 — dominated by Dioscorus of Alexandria and the emperor's officials — Eutyches was restored and Flavian himself anathematised, deposed, and so brutally handled that he died of his injuries a few days later, on the road into exile. Two years afterward the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) vindicated his faith, condemned Eutyches, received the Tome of Pope Leo, and acclaimed Flavian a saint and martyr. The Church keeps him as Flavian the Confessor.

• Maruthas of Martyropolis

  Maruthas (died c. 422) was the Syrian bishop of Maiferkat in Mesopotamia — a learned man and, by repute, a physician — who gathered into his episcopal city the relics of the many Christians slain in the great persecution of the Persian king Shapur II, so that his see came to be called Martyropolis, the "city of martyrs." Trusted at the court of the Persian king Yazdegerd I and honoured by the emperors of Constantinople, he served repeatedly as an envoy between Rome and Persia, and used that favour to win peace for the Church of Persia after decades of blood. He presided, with the catholicos Isaac, at the Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (410) that gave the Persian Church its ordered structure and received the Nicene faith. He wrote acts of the Persian martyrs and other works, and is venerated in East and West alike.

• Pamphilus of Caesarea and his Companions

  Pamphilus (c. 240 – 309) was the learned priest of Caesarea in Palestine — the keeper and restorer of the great library that Origen had founded there, the teacher and dearest friend of the historian Eusebius (who out of love took the name "Eusebius Pamphili"), and, with him, author of an Apology for Origen composed from prison. Arrested in the persecution of Maximinus and held two years in chains, he was beheaded at Caesarea on February 16 together with a company of eleven: Valens the aged deacon of Jerusalem and Paul of Jamnia, five Egyptian brethren who had taken the names of the prophets — Elias, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Samuel and Daniel — and the youths and confessors Porphyrius, Seleucus, Theodulus and Julian, who were drawn into their crown for honouring the martyrs' bodies. Their acts are told by an eye-witness, Eusebius himself, in his Martyrs of Palestine.

• Romanos of Karpenisi

  Romanos (died 1694) was a new venerable-martyr of the Ottoman period, born at Karpenisi in the mountains of central Greece, who took up the monastic life on Mount Athos and, burning to confess Christ before the Turks, went to Constantinople, openly professed the faith, and after imprisonment and suffering was put to death there in the year 1694. He is honoured among the neomartyrs of the Holy Mountain and is commemorated on February 16.

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