Agathangelus
The Holy Martyr Agathangelus
Martyr · d. c. 312, at Ancyra
Commemorated 23 January — Martyrdom at Ancyra, with Clement
Agathangelus (†c. 312) was the young companion and fellow-martyr of Clement of Ancyra. A native of Rome, he was moved by the constancy of the imprisoned bishop of Ancyra — some accounts make him one of a company of Roman confessors, spared when his companions were put to the sword — and attached himself to Clement to share his chains and his death. From that point the two are inseparable in the tradition: taken, tortured, and at last beheaded together at Ancyra, on the day the Church keeps them both, January 23. His name, "good messenger" (agath-angelos), is dwelt on by the hymnographers, who set the youthful disciple beside the aged hierarch as his "fellow-contestant."
Agathangelus belongs entirely to the passion of Clement of Ancyra, in whose long and much-elaborated Martyrdom he appears. He was, the account says, a young man of Rome who came to know Clement in the course of the bishop's protracted ordeal under the persecution of Diocletian and his successors. One strand of the tradition makes him a Christian already, one of a group of confessors at Rome from whom he alone was, for a time, held back from execution; another simply presents him as a young convert won by the sight of the bishop's endurance. In either case he chose, deliberately, to bind himself to Clement — to be arrested, chained, and tortured with him — rather than escape the death that was overtaking the Christians.
Thereafter the two share one story. Through the round of tribunals and torments that fills the last years of Clement's passion, Agathangelus is at the bishop's side, enduring the same scourgings, burnings, and mutilations and, like Clement, surviving them to be tortured again. At the last, back at Ancyra, the two were beheaded together by soldiers, about the year 312, and buried by Clement's foster-mother Sophia. The Church has never separated them: Agathangelus is commemorated in the office of Clement, and the proper hymns of the day name him as the bishop's companion in the contest.
Because his memory is wholly bound to Clement's, Agathangelus has no independent biography, no separate feast, and no proper hymns of his own; the honest record is the short one given here, and the fuller narrative — the twenty-eight years, the circuit of cities, the tortures, and the martyrs' end — is told in the entry for Clement of Ancyra.
Feast and commemoration
Agathangelus is kept universally on January 23 (church date; Old Calendar civil February 5), together with Clement of Ancyra, in whose office he is commemorated. He has no separate feast.
Iconography
Agathangelus is depicted as a young man, beardless or lightly bearded, in the tunic and cloak of a layman and holding the martyr's cross, most often beside Clement of Ancyra — the youthful disciple set against the vested bishop, the two martyrs together. The stored image is the miniature of the Menologion of Basil II (Constantinople, 985): the beheading of Agathangelus, the executioner's sword falling on the red-cloaked martyr amid the slain of the Ancyra persecution — the manuscript's scene for the January commemoration. The paired portrait type with the vested bishop is described under Clement of Ancyra, whose entry stores a 16th-century hierarch portrait.