Acacius the Centurion
The Holy Martyr Acacius the Centurion, who suffered at Byzantium
Martyr · d. 303, at Byzantium
Commemorated 7 May — Beheading at Byzantium
Acacius was a Cappadocian officer of the Roman army — a centurion of the company called the Martesian — who confessed Christ before his own tribune at the opening of the Great Persecution, was tortured through a long series of hearings at Perinthus in Thrace, and was at last beheaded at Byzantium about the year 303. His grave in the small town that would within a generation become Constantinople made him one of the city's earliest martyrs: a church was raised over his relics in the reign of Constantine the Great, and he remained a familiar name in the capital's own devotion. In the West, where his passion travelled with his relics to Calabria, he is Saint Achatius or Agathius, counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers.
The soldier of Cappadocia
Acacius was a Greek of Cappadocia, and by profession a soldier. The passion gives his rank as centurion (ἑκατόνταρχος) and names his unit the Martesian company, serving in Thrace under a tribune called Firmus. He was already a Christian when the persecution of Diocletian and his colleagues began, and he had made no secret of it among his own men.
The crisis came in the ordinary military way. Firmus, acting on the imperial edict, put his soldiers to the question about their religion, and Acacius stepped forward and answered plainly that he was a Christian and had received the faith from his forefathers. Reasoned with, threatened, and finally beaten, he held to the same answer; the tribune, unable to break him, sent him in chains to a higher authority. The persecution is that of the years from 303 under Diocletian and Maximian, continued in the East by Maximian Galerius, and the sources differ as to which emperor's name should stand over the trial: the Greek accounts commonly speak of Maximian, the Roman tradition of Diocletian, and neither detail changes the substance.
The trial and the tortures
Acacius was brought before an officer whom the accounts call Bibianus (Vivianus), and the interrogations that follow are the standard of the genre and also, in places, unusually vivid. Pressed to sacrifice, he answered that his strength was Christ, at which he was beaten about the face and his teeth broken; scourged, hung up, and racked, he continued to confess. He was kept long in prison, in chains and in filth, and the passion relates that in the darkness he was strengthened by a voice and a light from heaven and that his wounds were healed, so that his guards found him whole. Twice more he was brought out and examined.
At length he was sent across to Byzantium for judgment, and there the prefect Flaccinus, weary of a case that would not resolve, ordered him beheaded without further delay. He was put to death by the sword, about the year 303.
Relics and cultus
The Christians of Byzantium buried him, and after the peace of the Church the memory of the martyr who had suffered on the Bosphorus was given a home in the city that Constantine built there. Under Constantine the Great a church of Saint Acacius was raised over his relics; it stood among the older sanctuaries of Constantinople, and later Byzantine topography knows it under the epithet "at the Walnut Tree" (ἐν τῇ Καρύᾳ). The martyr accordingly appears in the capital's own synaxarial tradition with a fullness unusual for a soldier-martyr of his rank.
About the year 630, in the age of Persian and then Arab invasion, his relics were carried west to Squillace in Calabria, near the site of Cassiodorus' monastery of Vivarium, where he became the patron Sant'Agazio (locally San Agario), venerated at a spring; an arm relic was taken to Guardavalle in 1584. Through Calabria and southern Italy his name passed into the wider Latin West, where the calendars call him Achatius or Agathius and where he was enrolled among the Fourteen Holy Helpers — the company of auxiliary saints invoked in particular necessities — and was invoked, in memory of the blows to his head and teeth, against headache. In the East he is invoked by those beset by temptations of the flesh, on the strength of the endurance shown in his passion.
Feast and commemoration
7 May (church date; Old Calendar civil 20 May). The day's chief commemoration in the Byzantine books is the Sign of the Cross which appeared over Jerusalem in 351, and the martyr is joined to it: the Greek Menaion appoints the proper office of the Cross and the martyr is served from the common, which is why no proper apolytikion of Acacius is transmitted in the ordinary books. He is kept on the same day in Greek, Slavonic and Latin usage alike, an unusual agreement for a martyr of his obscurity, and is one of the small number of saints whose cultus is native to Constantinople itself.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Acacius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Acacius is painted as a soldier-martyr: a young or middle-aged man, short-bearded or beardless, in military dress — tunic, cuirass and cloak fastened at the shoulder — and holding the martyr's cross, sometimes with a sword sheathed at his side or a shield set by him. As with the other officer-martyrs he may alternatively be shown in the plain mantle of the confessor, holding the cross alone; where the scene of his passion is given, it is his beheading, and in Western painting he is often distinguished by a bunch of thorns held in the hand or bound about the brow — a Latin attribute drawn from the tortures rather than from the Greek tradition — as in the sixteenth-century Toledo panel of his martyrdom. In Calabria, where his relics rest, he appears in armour with standard and shield as the patron of Squillace. No pre-1900 image identifiable specifically as this Acacius has been located for storage in this collection; candidates found under the name belong either to the Bishop of Melitene or to the Ararat company, and are kept distinct per the identity question above.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the several other saints of the name. Acacius the Confessor, Bishop of Melitene (†c. 251, feasts 31 March, 17 April, 15 September), was a hierarch who survived his sufferings; Acacius of Sinai was a monastic of the ladder of obedience; and the Acacius whom the Western calendars set at the head of the Ten Thousand Martyrs of Mount Ararat is a wholly separate — and largely legendary — figure, with whom the centurion of Byzantium has often been merged in late Latin devotion precisely because both were remembered as soldiers.
- The date. The Byzantine synaxaria keep him on 7 May. Older Latin martyrologies placed him on 8 May, and the Roman books later moved him to 7 May to agree with the Greek. Some Western sources also report a commemoration of the translation of his relics on 16 January; this is not found on the Byzantine calendars consulted for this entry and is recorded here only as a report.
- The unit. The name of his company, transmitted in Greek as Μαρτησίων and in Latin sources as the Martesian or Martensian cohort, has no secure identification in the surviving army lists; the passion is the only witness to it.