Anthusa the Younger

The Holy Martyr Anthusa the Younger, drowned in a well

Martyr

Commemorated 27 August — Martyrdom by drowning in a well

Anthusa "the Younger" or "the New" is a martyr of whom the calendars preserve one fact: she was drowned in a well for the faith of Christ, having been sewn up (the western martyrologies add) in a sack. Neither her country nor her century is recorded with any certainty; a Persian origin is asserted in the western tradition and nowhere in the Greek. She is called the Younger to distinguish her from the third-century Anthusa of Seleucia, and she is commemorated on August 27.

What the record contains

The Greek synaxaria give her in a single line — Ἡ ἁγία μάρτυς Ἀνθοῦσα, ἡ ἐν φρέατι τελειωθεῖσα, the holy martyr Anthusa, perfected in a well — and the Roman Martyrology, which took her over from the Greek, adds only the sack and the epithet the Younger. The OCA calendar carries her name for August 27 with the frank note that no information is available.

That is the whole of it, and the honest form of this entry is a short one. What can be said is what the notice implies: she was put to death by drowning, a method of execution used against Christians in several persecutions — in the Roman provinces as a summary penalty, and in Sasanian Persia, where the western tradition places her, in the great persecutions of the fourth and fifth centuries. Being sewn into a sack before drowning was a specifically Roman aggravation of the penalty (the poena cullei, prescribed for parricides), and its appearance here may be a real transmitted detail or a later scribe's supplement drawn from that legal vocabulary.

Feast and commemoration

August 27 (church date; New Calendar civil August 27, Old Calendar civil September 9). She is a bare commemoration on a day dominated by Poemen the Great, carried in the Greek synaxaria, the Slavic menologies and the OCA calendar, and in the Roman Martyrology on the same day. There is no proper office and no shrine.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 3 (common of a woman martyr)

Thy lamb Anthusa, O Jesus, cries out with a loud voice: Thee, my Bridegroom, do I love, and seeking Thee I contend; I am crucified and buried with Thee in Thy baptism, and I suffer for Thy sake that I may reign with Thee, and I die for Thee that I may live in Thee. Accept me as a spotless sacrifice, offered to Thee in love. By her prayers, O merciful One, save our souls.

Iconography

Anthusa the Younger has no established type. Where a menaion icon distinguishes her at all she is a young woman-martyr of the ordinary form: in tunic and maphorion, red or crimson for martyrdom, holding the small cross of the martyrs in her right hand and with the left open before her. The one detail that would individuate her — the well, or the mouth of a cistern — belongs to the martyrdom scene rather than to a standing portrait, and no image of it has been located.

No pre-1900 icon identifiable as this Anthusa has been found. She falls on an August day, so the Menologion of Basil II, which covers only September to February, cannot supply one; and any image inscribed simply Η ΑΓΙΑ ΑΝΘΟΥΣΑ would in all probability be one of the better-known saints of the name.

Disputed questions

Country and century. The Latin martyrologies and the modern Latin hagiographical dictionaries call her a Persian; the Greek notice does not, and gives no date. Because the epithet the New in Byzantine calendars usually distinguishes a later saint from an earlier one of the same name, she is presumably later than Anthusa of Seleucia (†c. 298) — but "later" could mean the fourth century or the eighth. No century is asserted in this entry, and she is indexed under saints whose era the sources do not fix.
Not to be confused with Anthusa of Seleucia (feast August 22, †c. 298), the virgin of Cilicia baptised by the hieromartyr Athanasius of Tarsus, whose servants Charisimus and Neophytus were martyred with her — a distinct saint five days earlier in the same month, and the one from whom the epithet the Younger distinguishes this Anthusa.
Not to be confused with Anthusa of Mantinea (feast July 27, †759), the abbess and confessor of Paphlagonia under the iconoclast Constantine V, nor with Anthusa the daughter of that emperor, nor with Anthusa the mother of St John Chrysostom — the name was common, and the calendars carry at least four women who bear it.