Alphius, Philadelphus and Cyprian of Lentini
The Holy Martyrs Alphius, Philadelphus and Cyprian, brothers, with Onesimus, Erasmus and fourteen others
Martyr · d. 251, at Lentini in Sicily and at Rome
Commemorated 10 May — Martyrdom of the three brothers at Lentini and of their companions at Rome
Three brothers of a noble Italian house — Alphius, Philadelphus and Cyprian (called Cyrinus in the Latin books and Kyprinos in the Greek) — were, with a company of some twenty in all, put to death in the persecution of Decius, about the year 251. Sons of a governor named Vitalius from the Salentine country of southern Italy, they were catechised and baptised by the presbyter Onesimus, denounced, and sent as prisoners first to Rome and then, by way of Puteoli, into Sicily, where the governor Tertullus tried them at Lentini (the ancient Leontini). There Alphius had his tongue cut out and was beheaded, Philadelphus was roasted upon a red-hot gridiron, and Cyprian was fried in a great pan. Onesimus their teacher was crushed under a heavy stone at Rome, and Erasmus with fourteen others was beheaded there. The three brothers became the patrons of Lentini and of a wide belt of eastern Sicily, and their relics, long lost, were recovered at Lentini in 1517.
The brothers and their teacher
The Greek synaxarion calls the three αὐτάδελφοι, brothers by the same parents, and makes them sons of a man of rank, the "governor Vitalius" — the Latin passion names their mother Benedicta and their home as Vaste (Basta) in the Terra d'Otranto, the heel of Italy. The family was pagan; the brothers were brought to Christ and baptised by a presbyter named Onesimus, who is remembered with them on this day and who is not the apostle Onesimus of Philemon's household (February 15).
Once baptised they did not keep the faith to themselves. Their preaching in a time of edicts made them conspicuous, and they were informed against to the authorities in the reign of Decius (249–251), the first emperor to persecute the Church by a general and systematic requirement of sacrifice. The passion names the official who arrested them variously; the company was put in irons and sent up to Rome.
Rome, Puteoli, and Sicily
At Rome the company was examined, and there the first blood was shed. The presbyter Onesimus, as the author of the brothers' conversion, was killed by having a great stone laid upon his breast until he was crushed; Erasmus and fourteen others of the company were beheaded. The three brothers themselves, being of a governor's family and therefore a more delicate matter, were not executed at Rome but sent away — first to Puteoli (Pozzuoli) on the bay of Naples, where the governor Diomedes examined them and passed them on, and then across to Sicily, to the governor Tertullus, who held the final process at Lentini.
The Sicilian trial was long, and the passion dwells upon the brothers' answers and upon the crowds that were converted by them; the notice preserved in the Greek books, however, is concerned chiefly with the three deaths, each of a different kind:
- Alphius, the eldest, had his tongue cut out — the punishment of a bold confessor — and was then beheaded.
- Philadelphus was burned alive upon a red-hot iron gridiron.
- Cyprian (Cyrinus) was fried in a great pan set over the fire.
The year given is 251, the last of Decius's reign.
Relics, and the cult in Sicily
The bodies were buried at Lentini and the memory of the three brothers took deep root in eastern Sicily; but the place of the relics was lost in the long disorders of the island, and it was only in 1517 that they were recovered at Lentini and found incorrupt. The cathedral of Lentini is dedicated jointly to Santa Maria La Cava and to the three martyr brothers, and their sanctuary there is the centre of the cult. The town of Sant'Alfio on the eastern slope of Etna bears the eldest brother's name; the great pilgrimage of Trecastagni, in which barefoot devotees run the road in the brothers' honour, is one of the largest popular feasts of Sicily; and Alphius is invoked across the Val di Noto.
Their intercession also touches another Sicilian saint of this corpus. The mother of Euthalia of Sicily (March 2), Eutropia of Leontini, was healed of a long flow of blood after she sought the aid of "the holy martyrs of Lentini" — these three — and was baptised with her daughter in consequence; so that the passion of Euthalia is, in its own telling, a fruit of their cultus a few years after their death.
Feast and commemoration
May 10 (church date; New Calendar civil May 10, Old Calendar civil May 23). The day belongs liturgically to Simon the Zealot, whose office is sung; the martyrs have a synaxarion notice with its distich and are commemorated from the common of several martyrs. Their feast is kept with great solemnity in Sicily — at Lentini, at Sant'Alfio and at Trecastagni — where the popular observance falls on the same day and the Roman Martyrology keeps them on May 10 also, one of the relatively few days on which the Eastern and Western calendars coincide exactly for a company of martyrs.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.
Synaxarion
Philadelphus, brother-loving, by the sword found with his brothers the divine crown.
Iconography
The three brothers are painted together, as a company of young lay martyrs: beardless or lightly bearded youths of the same age and bearing, in tunic and mantle — in Sicilian tradition richly dressed, as sons of a governor — each holding the martyr's cross and a palm. Where their passion is depicted, each brother carries his own instrument: for Alphius the pincers or the severed tongue and the sword, for Philadelphus the gridiron, for Cyprian the pan or cauldron. In Sicily the dominant images are not icons in the Byzantine sense but the processional simulacra of Lentini and Trecastagni, carried in the popular feast; these are of the seventeenth century and later, and are sculptural rather than painted.
No pre-1900 Byzantine icon of the three brothers has been identified for this collection, and the Sicilian material available is either modern or photographic; the entry is therefore written without a stored image.
Disputed questions
- The third brother's name. He is Κυπρῖνος (Cyprinus) in the Greek Menaion, Cyprian in the Slavonic and Russian books and in the Orthodox Church in America's calendar, and Cyrinus in the Latin passion and in Sicilian usage (Cirino). The variants are one name imperfectly transmitted; he is in no case the great Cyprian of Carthage, who died in a different persecution nine years later, nor Cyprian the former sorcerer of October 2.
- Decius or Licinius? The Greek synaxaristes and the Western passion agree on Decius (249–251) and on the year 251. The Orthodox Church in America's entry for the day names Licinius instead, which cannot be reconciled with the transmitted date — Licinius reigned 308–324 — and appears to be an error of the English retelling rather than a rival tradition. The date 251 is retained here and the discrepancy recorded.
- Two notices, one company. The Greek books of May 10 carry the martyrs in two separate notices: "the holy martyrs Alphius, Philadelphus and Cyprinus," and "the holy martyrs Erasmus, Onesimus and the fourteen with them." They belong to one passion and one company, and are kept in one entry here; the Slavonic and OCA calendars likewise run them together as "Philadelphus, Cyprian, Alphius, Onesimus, Erasmus and fourteen others." The number of the whole company is given as twenty.
- Not to be confused with the hieromartyr Erasmus of Formia, kept only six days earlier on May 4, nor with Erasmus of the Kiev Caves (February 24). The Erasmus of this company is a lay member of the Sicilian brothers' following, beheaded at Rome, with no separate feast.
- Place of the martyrdom of the companions. The account followed here, with the Orthodox Church in America, puts the deaths of Onesimus and of Erasmus and the fourteen at Rome and only the three brothers' deaths at Lentini; some retellings bring the whole company to Sicily and martyr them all there. The two-stage account explains why the Greek books give the companions a notice of their own.