Alexander and Asterius of Aegae
The Holy Martyrs Alexander and Asterius, the executioners who confessed Christ
Martyr · d. 284
Commemorated 20 May — Beheaded in Cilicia after confessing Christ at the torture of Thalelaeus
Alexander and Asterius were the two men of the prefect's service in Cilicia who were ordered to bore through the knees of the young physician Thalelaeus the Unmercenary and hang him head downward, and who found when the work was done that they had pierced a block of wood and left the martyr untouched. Understanding what had been shown them, they threw down their tools, confessed Christ before the prefect Theodore, and were beheaded in the year 284 — the first fruits of the martyrdom they had been sent to inflict. The Greek synaxaria give them a notice of their own on May 20, immediately after Thalelaeus, with whom they are always commemorated.
The executioners of Thalelaeus
Nothing is transmitted of their origins, families, or ages. They enter the record as subordinates — the men who did the physical work of a provincial magistrate's court — in the persecution under Numerian (283–284), at Aegae in Cilicia, under the prefect Theodore. Their names are Greek and unremarkable; that the tradition preserved them at all is a consequence of what they did in the space of a single afternoon.
Theodore had before him a Christian of about eighteen, a medical student named Thalelaeus who treated the poor without charging them and would not sacrifice. The sentence was calculated to be both agonising and humiliating: the knees were to be bored through with augers, a rope threaded through the bone, and the young man suspended upside down from a tree. Alexander and Asterius were given the augers.
The sign, and their confession
The passion relates that they bored, and that what the augers went through was wood, while Thalelaeus stood whole. The two accounts of how this happened — that the men's eyes were held, or that the martyr's limbs were made proof against the iron — are both current in the sources, and the difference is of no consequence to what followed.
Alexander and Asterius did not report a failure or ask for a second attempt. They recognised the event as an act of God, and — with the martyr they had been about to maim standing in front of them — confessed themselves Christians on the spot, before the magistrate who had just given them their orders. There was no catechesis, no interval, and no possibility of a reprieve. Theodore, who by every account of this passion was a man easily enraged, had them beheaded at once.
They are therefore martyrs in the fullest and barest sense: they died for a confession made minutes after they came to it, and their whole biography is one act of obedience to what they had seen. The Church has always regarded them, in the pattern of the executioner-converts and of the soldiers converted at the passions of the great martyrs, as baptised in their own blood, since there was no time for the font.
Feast and commemoration
May 20 (church date; New Calendar civil May 20, Old Calendar civil June 2), kept with Thalelaeus the Unmercenary. They have no proper service; where the day's commemoration is sung at all — May 20 always falls inside the Pentecostarion, and the movable propers ordinarily prevail — they are named in the verses of the martyr and honoured with the common of martyrs.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs Alexander and Asterius, O Lord, in their contest received the crowns of incorruption from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
They are shown as two soldiers or servants of the court in short tunics, beardless or young, each holding the martyr's cross, and are almost never painted apart from Thalelaeus: the standard composition of the day sets the youthful physician between them. Where the passion itself is illustrated, they appear bending over a billet of wood with augers in their hands, the instrument of the miracle that converted them — the one attribute peculiar to these two saints in the whole repertory. No pre-1900 image of them has been located for this repository; searches of Wikimedia Commons under their names, alone and together with Thalelaeus, return nothing.
Disputed questions
- The place is given as Aegae in Cilicia by the Orthodox Church in America and much of the Greek tradition, and as Anazarbus by other lists; the same uncertainty attaches to Thalelaeus, and is discussed in his entry.
- Whether they warrant a notice of their own is a question the calendars answer both ways. The Slavonic menologia and the OCA fold them into the Thalelaeus notice as "his companions"; the Greek synaxaristes lists Ἅγιοι Ἀλέξανδρος καὶ Ἀστέριος as a separate entry of the day. This repository follows the Greek practice and gives them their own file, cross-linked with Thalelaeus in both directions.
- The name Asterius is borne by a considerable number of unrelated martyrs (of Caesarea, of Cilicia in other persecutions, the companion of Claudius and Neon at Aegae on October 29); the coincidence of Aegae in that last case is worth flagging, but the martyrs of October 29 suffered under Diocletian and Lysias and are certainly distinct from these two.