Agathonike of Carthage

The Holy Virgin-Martyr Agathonike, who suffered at Carthage

Virgin · Martyr

Commemorated 10 August — Commemoration of the virgin-martyr of Carthage

Agathonike is a virgin-martyr of Carthage commemorated on August 10 in the Greek calendar, of whom nothing whatever is transmitted but the name, the epithet παρθενομάρτυς, and the city. The Greek synaxaristes says so in as many words — we have no details of the life of Saint Agathonike — and adds only the etymology of the name, from ἀγαθός and νίκη, "good victory." She is entered here at her proper day because the calendar carries her, with an honest statement of the emptiness of the record and a note on the several better-known saints with whom she is liable to be confused.

The record

Carthage, the metropolis of Roman Africa, was one of the great martyr-cities of the ancient Church: the home of Perpetua and Felicitas, of the Scillitan martyrs, of Cyprian the bishop and of the very large company of the Decian and Valerianic persecutions and of the Vandal period after them. A virgin-martyr of that city is entirely credible in itself; but the African acts that survive are Latin, and the name Agathonike is Greek, which suggests that this notice reached the Byzantine books not from the African archive but through a Greek source that supplied — or guessed — the city. The synaxarion transmits no reign, no persecutor, no manner of death, and no year. Nothing is added here.

Feast and commemoration

August 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 23), within the Dormition Fast (August 1–14) and the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. This is a Greek commemoration only: the Menaion and modern Greek calendars carry it, the Slavic books and the Orthodox Church in America do not list her for the day, whose office belongs to Laurence the Archdeacon. Where she is sung, it is at the common of a virgin-martyr.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a virgin-martyr)

Thine ewe-lamb, O Jesus, crieth out with a great voice: For Thee, my Bridegroom, I long, and seeking Thee I contend, and I am crucified and buried together with Thy baptism; I suffer for Thy sake, that I may reign with Thee; I die for Thee, that I may live with Thee. As an unblemished sacrifice receive her who with longing hath been slain for Thee. By her intercessions, since Thou art merciful, save our souls.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Having no life, Agathonike has no icon-type of her own. The Byzantine painters give a virgin-martyr the standard figure: a young woman, half-length or standing, in the maphorion over a long tunic, holding a small cross in the right hand and with the left open before the breast, sometimes with the white veil of the consecrated virgin beneath the mantle; the identification rests wholly on the inscription — here Η ΑΓΙΑ ΑΓΑΘΟΝΙΚΗ. Because that inscription is shared with the much more frequently painted Agathonica of Pergamum of October 13, any candidate image would have to be dated and placed by its context before it could be assigned to this saint. No image has been stored for that reason. The Menologion of Basil II, which would ordinarily be the first place to look, covers only September to February.

Disputed questions

Not to be confused with the far better attested Agathonica, the sister (in some recensions the wife) of Papylus, who threw herself into the fire at Pergamum with Carpus and Papylus and is kept on October 13. Her acta are among the oldest and most moving of all martyr-acts, and her name is the one a reader is most likely to have met; the two women share only the name. The Pergamene Agathonica is Asian, second-century, and perfected by fire; this Agathonike is African and undated.
The epithet. Παρθενομάρτυς — virgin-martyr — is the sole indication of her state, and it is the ground on which this entry carries the type virgin in addition to martyr. It should be read as the calendar's classification rather than as a biographical datum.
Carthage or elsewhere? The Greek notice reads ἡ ἐν Καρχηδόνι. Since nothing else in the notice is African, the place cannot be checked against anything, and the possibility of a confusion with one of the several other cities called Carthage — or with the Spanish Carthago Nova — cannot be excluded, though nothing positively suggests it.
Date. None transmitted; the entry accordingly carries no century and is indexed among the saints of undetermined date.