Agapius and his Companions
The Holy Martyrs Agapius, Plesius, Timolaus, Romulus, the two Dionysii and the two Alexandri, at Caesarea in Palestine
Martyr · d. c. 303, at Caesarea in Palestine
Commemorated 15 March — Martyrdom by beheading at Caesarea under the governor Urbanus
Agapius and his companions (†c. 303) were a band of young men of Palestine — Agapius, Plesius, Timolaus, Romulus, two named Dionysius and two named Alexander, eight in all — who gave themselves up to martyrdom at Caesarea in Palestine during the Great Persecution of Diocletian. Their martyrdom is not a synaxarion legend but a scene witnessed and recorded by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Martyrs of Palestine: at a public spectacle in which Christians were being thrown to the beasts, six of them stepped forward with their own hands bound before the governor Urbanus, declaring themselves Christians and demanding to share the martyrs' lot; imprisoned, they were joined by Agapius — already a confessor hardened by earlier torments — and by another Dionysius who had ministered to them. All eight were beheaded together on one day. The Church keeps their memory on March 15, honouring in them a martyrdom sought rather than merely endured.
The witness of Eusebius
Almost uniquely among the martyrs of the fixed calendar, these young men are known not from a later passion but from a contemporary eyewitness. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea and the father of Church history, lived in the city where they died and set down what he saw in his short book On the Martyrs of Palestine, the record of the Great Persecution as it fell upon his own province between 303 and 311. Their story stands in its third chapter, dated to the persecution's second year, when the governor Urbanus presided at Caesarea.
The occasion was a public spectacle of the games, at which — as the imperial edicts required — Christians who would not sacrifice were being given to the wild beasts for the entertainment of the crowd. Into that arena of terror, Eusebius relates, a company of young men deliberately walked. Six of them, having first bound their own hands as a sign that they came not as accused but as volunteers, presented themselves before the tribunal of Urbanus and cried out that they were Christians, unafraid of the beasts, and asked to be condemned with their brethren. Eusebius names them and their origins: Timolaus, a native of Pontus; Dionysius, from Tripolis in Phoenicia; Romulus, a subdeacon of the church of Diospolis (Lydda); Paesis and Alexander, both Egyptians; and a second Alexander, from Gaza.
The eight martyrs
The governor, astonished at their boldness and hoping the resolve was a passing heat, had the six thrown into prison rather than granting the death they sought. Some days later two more were added to their number. Agapius — a Christian of Gaza who had already, in an earlier round of the persecution, confessed Christ under repeated tortures and was famed in the city for his constancy — was cast in with them; and with him Dionysius, an Egyptian who had been supplying their needs in prison and was seized for that service of love. So the six became eight, gathered from Pontus, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt and Gaza — a small image of the whole persecuted Church, drawn from every province and every rank, subdeacon and layman, native and stranger, together.
After their imprisonment Urbanus at last gave sentence, and all eight were beheaded on a single day at Caesarea. Eusebius fixes the day precisely: the twenty-fourth of the month Dystrus, "the ninth before the Kalends of April" — that is, 24 March by the Roman reckoning. The Byzantine synaxaria, gathering their memory into the fixed year, keep them on March 15; the difference is one of liturgical arrangement, not of the historical fact, which Eusebius dates and places beyond dispute.
The martyrdom sought
What the tradition dwells on, and what Eusebius himself found remarkable enough to record with a note of wonder, is that these were not martyrs merely caught by the persecution but martyrs who ran to meet it. The self-binding of their own hands, the stepping forward at the games, the demand to be condemned — Eusebius calls it an "ambition for the terrible things" that the persecutors most dreaded to inflict. The Church has always held such voluntary self-offering in a certain reverent caution: the martyr is not to court death presumptuously, and the canons would later counsel against provoking the sword. Yet in these young men the tradition sees not presumption but the overflow of a love that could not bear to stand safe while the brethren died, and a faith so sure of the crown that it reached for it with open hands. Their leader Agapius, the seasoned confessor, set the seal on the company: what the younger men offered in the ardour of a single hour, he had already proved through a long endurance of torments, and he went to the block as one long since given away.
Feast and commemoration
March 15 (church date; New Calendar civil March 15; Old Calendar civil March 28), kept across the Byzantine-rite calendars — Greek, Slavic and Antiochian — as the memory of "the holy martyr Agapius and those with him." The Greek synaxaria list the company under Agapius's name with his seven companions; the OCA calendar names them at length (Agapius, Publius, Timolaus, Romulus, the two Dionysii and the two Alexandri), and the Slavic calendar keeps the same on the Old-Calendar civil March 28. The historical day of execution recorded by Eusebius — March 24 — is not the liturgical day; the synaxaria fix the commemoration on March 15. The feast falls within Great Lent, so that on a weekday no proper Liturgy is served and the martyrs' memory is kept with the Lenten office; where a Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts or a Saturday Liturgy falls on the day, the martyrs are commemorated in it.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their courageous contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The martyrs are depicted, where they are shown at all, in the standard type of a company of youthful martyrs — a row of beardless young men in the tunic and mantle of late antiquity, each holding the martyr's cross, their leader Agapius sometimes set a little apart as the elder confessor; or in the narrative scene of their common beheading at Caesarea. Because their commemoration falls in March, they are absent from the great illustrated menologia of the first half of the year (the Menologion of Basil II ends at February), and no pre-modern image proper to the company has been identified and verified for storage; a suitable public-domain icon is wanting.
Disputed questions
- Publius, Plesius, or Paesis. The martyr the OCA calendar calls Publius and the Greek synaxaria call Plesios (Πλήσιος) is the Paesis (Πάσις) of Eusebius — the Egyptian named among the first six. The three forms are transmission-variants of one name; the same man is meant.
- The count of the company. The synaxaria usually style the feast "Agapius and his seven companions," giving eight martyrs in all; the naming of the pairs (two Dionysii, two Alexandri) preserves Eusebius's roll exactly, though some later lists blur the doublets or drop a name. The eight of Eusebius are followed here.
- Not to be confused with the other Agapius of Caesarea, a young martyr of the same city and the same persecution whom Eusebius describes (in a later chapter of the Martyrs of Palestine) as thrown to a bear in the arena and then cast into the sea, and whom the calendars keep on August 19 and November 20 — a distinct saint of a distinct martyrdom, though the identity of the Agapii of Eusebius' narrative is not a closed question and the August 19 entry sets out the argument; nor with Agapius, bishop of Caesarea, the predecessor of Eusebius in that see, who was not a martyr; nor with the venerable Agapius of Vatopedi (March 1), the Athonite monk of a far later age.