Ascension of the Lord

Saints commemorated

• Hieromartyr Theodotus, Bishop of Ancyra

  Theodotus was an innkeeper of Ancyra in Galatia — a married layman, a wine-seller, whose tavern became in the Great Persecution the hiding-place of the hunted Church, the house where the Liturgy was served when the churches were pulled down, and the office from which the bodies of the martyrs were ransomed and buried. With him are honoured seven aged consecrated virgins — Tecusa his own aunt, Alexandra, Claudia, Phaina, Euphrasia, Matrona and Julitta — who were seized under the governor Theoteknos, refused to serve as priestesses at the washing of the images of Artemis and Athena, were handed over to be violated and preserved their purity, and were at last drowned in the lake outside the city with stones tied to them. Theodotus recovered their bodies by night and buried them, and for that act was betrayed, tortured and beheaded, about the year 303–304. Their passion, told by an eyewitness named Nilus, is one of the most vivid and most disputed documents of the Diocletianic persecution in Asia Minor.

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• Hieromartyr Marcellinus, pope of Rome (304)

  Marcellinus was bishop of Rome from 296 to 304, and his pontificate ended inside the Great Persecution of Diocletian. The Byzantine synaxarion honours him as a hieromartyr and tells his story as a fall and a recovery: worn down by torture he offered incense to the idols, was rewarded by the emperor with honours and friendship, and then, undone by his conscience, confessed his apostasy before a synod of bishops at Sinuessa in Campania in sackcloth and ashes, judged himself unworthy of the priesthood and asked that his body be left unburied. The bishops refused to condemn him, reminding him that Peter also had denied Christ and had wept and been forgiven; and Marcellinus returned to Rome, renounced his compliance to the emperor's face, and was tortured and beheaded with three companions, Claudius, Cyrinus and Antoninus. His body lay unburied thirty-six days until the Apostle Peter appeared to his successor Marcellus and bade him bury it, and it was laid in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. His feast is June 7 in the Byzantine calendars and April 26 in the Latin.

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• St Daniel of Skete in Egypt (5th c.)

  Daniel of Sketis was the great Egyptian elder of the sixth century, priest and hegumen of Sketis in the Nitrian desert, remembered less for sayings of his own than for a group of narratives — the Life and Tales of Abba Daniel of Sketis — which made him the Church's chief witness to the hidden saint: the holy man or woman whose sanctity is covered by folly, drunkenness, disguise, poverty or the ordinary business of a trade, and whom Daniel is repeatedly given to recognise. He himself is remembered as a penitent: taken captive twice in a barbarian raid on the desert, he killed one of his captors in escaping, and spent the rest of his life seeking a penance that no patriarch would impose, until he took one upon himself and served a leper in his inner cell in secret until he died. The cycle attached to his name gathers Mark the Fool of the Alexandrian hippodrome, Eulogius the Hospitable the stonecutter, Anastasia the Patrician hidden as a eunuch, Thomais of Alexandria the martyr for chastity, the nun who feigned drunkenness, and Andronicus and Athanasia; in one of them the elder himself is the man corrected. His memory is kept on June 7.

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• Kyriake, Kaleria and Mary of Caesarea

  Kyriake, Kaleria — the name is also transmitted as Valeria — and Mary were three women of Caesarea in Palestine who turned from paganism to Christ during the persecution of Diocletian, left the city and settled together in a solitary place, and gave their lives to prayer, whose one recorded petition was that the persecution of the Christians might cease. Denounced and brought before the governor, they refused to worship the idols, confessed Christ before the tribunal, and were tortured to death, about the year 304. Nothing more of them is transmitted: no passion, no tomb, no relics, no proper hymn — three converts, a hut outside a city, one prayer, and a death. Their memory is kept on June 7.

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• Marcellus of Rome

  Marcellus was bishop of Rome for a little under two years at the very end of the Great Persecution, about 308 to 309, taking up a see that had been vacant since the death of Marcellinus and a city divided over the readmission of Christians who had complied with the edicts. He reorganised the clergy and the cemeteries of Rome into twenty-five parish districts, and his severity toward the lapsi provoked riots that gave the emperor Maxentius his pretext: the bishop was deposed from his church and sentenced, the Roman account says, to labour at the catabulum, the public cattle-station and stable into which his own titular church had been turned, and there he died worn out about 309 or 310. In the Byzantine calendars he is remembered on June 7, at the head of the long company of Roman martyrs of the persecution — the deacons Sisinius and Cyriacus and those with them — whom the same cycle of Acts associates with him. The Latin calendars keep him on January 16.

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• Potamiaena of Alexandria

  Potamiaena was a young Christian woman of Alexandria, in the household of a pagan master who desired her and could not have her. To his demands she answered — in the form the tradition has kept — that she was a Christian, and that she valued her honour above her life; and when he threatened her with the courts she told him plainly that she would rather die. He denounced her to the prefect of Egypt, who offered her the usual choice and, when she refused, had her lowered into a cauldron of boiling pitch, in which she died, keeping both her virginity and her faith; the older and better witness adds that her mother Marcella was burned with her, and that the executioner Basilides was converted by what he had seen and was himself martyred soon after, Potamiaena having appeared to him in the night and set a crown upon his head. The Byzantine calendars keep her on June 7, the Latin on June 28.

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• Sisinius, Cyriacus and the Martyrs of Rome

  On June 7 the Byzantine calendars commemorate, in one long notice, the company of Roman martyrs formed around the relief of the Christian prisoners in the last years of the Great Persecution. A wealthy Christian of the city, Thrason, spent his fortune feeding and ransoming those condemned to the public works; his almoners Sisinius and Cyriacus were ordained deacons for the work by Marcellinus, and carried it on under Marcellus. Arrested for it, they turned the prison into a mission: the jailer Apronian was converted by the light that shone from Sisinius's face and was baptised with those he guarded, and the soldiers Papias and Maurus by the melting of the pagan incense-tripods at the prayer of Saturninus. The whole company was destroyed piecemeal between about 304 and 310 — Sisinius and Saturninus beheaded on June 7, Apronian beheaded, Papias and Maurus dying under the lash, and Cyriacus with Smaragdus, Largus and Crescentian perishing in the torments, together with the women Priscilla, Lucina and Artemia and, the account says, twenty-one others. They are honoured together as the martyrs of the works of mercy.

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• Zenais of Caesarea

  Zenais — the name also appears as Zenaida — was born at Caesarea in Palestine in the year 284, and is remembered in the Byzantine books for two things only: that she was given the gift of working miracles, and that she ended her life by a martyr's death. Her surname in the Greek synaxaria is ἡ Θαυματουργός, "the Wonderworker," and the Menaion's couplet for her turns on the one fact transmitted about her: that she poured out wonders both in her life and after her end. Her cult was real and reasonably wide — the Synaxarion of Constantinople records a synaxis in her honour in the capital on June 6, and she is entered in a ninth-century calendar of Naples — but no passion of hers survives, and the Greek day-books say frankly that they have no details of her life. She is commemorated on June 7.

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British Isles and Ireland

• St. Colman, bishop of Dromore (6th C)
• St. Meriadoc the Wonderworker, archbishop (7th C)

Readings

Troparia & kontakia