Aithalas of Persia
The Holy Martyr Aithalas of Persia
Martyr · Deacon · d. c. 380
Commemorated 1 September
Aithalas was a deacon of the Church in Persia who was put to death for Christ around the year 380, during the long persecution of Christians under the Sassanid king Shapur II and his successors. He is commemorated on September 1 among the martyrs of the Persian church, whose sufferings in the fourth century rivalled those of the early Church under Rome.
The surviving record of Aithalas is brief. The synaxaria commemorate him as a martyr of Persia in the later fourth century, a deacon who confessed Christ during the great persecution that the Sassanid crown waged against the Church of Persia for some forty years from the 340s — a persecution provoked by the suspicion that Christians, sharing the faith of the now-Christian Roman empire, were disloyal to the Persian state. The Persian martyrs of this era were commonly tortured to compel apostasy to Zoroastrianism and executed on refusal, and the concise synaxarion notices of Aithalas indicate that he endured such tortures before his death, placed around 380.
Feast and commemoration
September 1 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 14), among the commemorations opening the church year. He has no proper service; the common of martyrs is used where his memory is celebrated liturgically.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of martyrs)
Thy martyr, 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
No pre-modern icon of Aithalas of September 1 has been identified; he would be depicted as a deacon-martyr, in the sticharion with orarion, holding the martyr's cross. (The Menologion of Basil II miniature of the Persian martyrs Akepsimas, Joseph and Aithalas belongs to the November 3 company and is stored with that entry, kept distinct here per the identity question noted above.)
Disputed questions
- Identity. The Byzantine calendar also commemorates, on November 3, a deacon Aithalas martyred in Persia together with the bishop Akepsimas and the priest Joseph under Shapur II — the company Akepsimas, Joseph and Aithalas. Whether the Aithalas of September 1 is a distinct martyr of the same name and country — as the received calendar, keeping both feasts, implies — or a doubled commemoration of one man, cannot be settled from the surviving notices; the two entries in this collection are kept distinct, as the calendar keeps them, and this question is recorded in both. The name (Greek Ἀειθαλᾶς, "ever-flourishing") renders a Persian or Syriac name variously transmitted.