Antiochus the Physician of Sebaste
The Holy Martyr Antiochus the Physician, of Sebaste in Cappadocia
Martyr · Unmercenary · d. c. 302, at Sebaste in Cappadocia
Commemorated 16 July — Beheading at Sebaste, with the executioner Cyriacus
Antiochus was a physician of Sebaste in Cappadocia and, by the tradition of the synaxaria, the brother of the Martyr Plato of Ancyra, from whom he learned the faith. He practised his art without fee, treating the sick of the cities of Cappadocia and Galatia and preaching the Gospel as he went, until he was arrested in the persecution of Diocletian by the governor Adrianos and refused to sacrifice. Cast into a cauldron of boiling water he was unhurt; wild beasts loosed on him lay down at his feet; and at his prayer, the account says, the idols of the place fell to dust. He was at last beheaded — and with him Cyriacus, one of the executioners, who confessed Christ at the sight and received the sword beside the man he had been sent to kill. The two were buried together. His memory is July 16.
A physician of Sebaste
Antiochus was a native of Sebaste (Sebasteia, modern Sivas) in Cappadocia — the city of the Forty Martyrs, and a place whose Christian population was large enough that the imperial officers of the Great Persecution reckoned with it as a body. He was trained as a physician, and it is under that title, ὁ ἰατρός, that the calendars name him.
The tradition makes him the brother of Plato, the young martyr of Ancyra whose memory the Church keeps on November 18, and reports that Antiochus was brought to Christ by his brother's teaching. The kinship is transmitted in the synaxaria and is not independently documented: the two suffered in different cities, Plato at Ancyra in Galatia and Antiochus at Sebaste, and no other source connects them. The entry for Plato records the same tradition from the other side.
Healing without payment
What the notices agree in emphasising is that Antiochus took nothing for his healing. He travelled among the cities and villages of Cappadocia and of Galatian Cappadocia, giving his skill freely to whoever needed it, and using the access that a physician has to sick men's houses to preach Christ. In this he belongs with the unmercenaries — the ἀνάργυροι, the company of Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, Panteleimon and Hermolaus, the physicians of the Church who took the Lord's freely ye have received, freely give as the rule of a trade. Unlike most of them, he is remembered as a healer of bodies who was also, in the strict sense, an evangelist: the treatment and the preaching went together, and it was the preaching that brought him before a magistrate.
Trial and tortures
He was arrested while travelling, on the order of the governor the Greek notices name Adrianos, and required to sacrifice to the gods. He refused, confessing that he was a Christian and that his healing was not his own.
The passion, in the form the synaxaria and the Slavonic calendars transmit it, then piles up the ordeals that the Church's memory associates with this martyr. He was thrown into a cauldron of boiling water and came out unharmed. Wild beasts were loosed upon him in the arena and would not touch him; the account says that they lay down peaceably at his feet. Through his prayers, it is added, many miracles were worked and the idols crumbled into dust — the standard sign, in these narratives, that the demonic power behind the civic cult has been broken by the presence of a saint.
The conversion of the executioner, and the beheading
When the tortures failed, the sentence fell back on the sword. Here the passion turns on a detail that is its most characteristic and most humanly credible: Cyriacus, one of the men detailed to carry out the execution, had watched the whole of it, and at the last confessed himself a Christian and refused to strike. He was condemned on the spot. The two were beheaded together, and the Christians buried the martyr and his executioner side by side — an arrangement the synaxarion records without comment and which the Church has always found eloquent. The martyrdom is placed in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 302; the Slavonic calendars date it only to the fourth century.
Feast and commemoration
July 16 (church date; New Calendar civil July 16, Old Calendar civil July 29). Antiochus is kept on this day throughout the Byzantine rite — Greek, Antiochian, Slavonic and Romanian — as the second of the day's martyrs, after Athenogenes of Pedachthoe and his ten disciples. He has no proper office; the synaxarion notice is read and the common of a martyr is sung. In some local usage he is invoked with the unmercenary physicians at the blessing of oil for the sick.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Antiochus, O Lord, in his contest received the crown of incorruption from Thee our God; for having Thy strength he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons: by his prayers save Thou our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Taking no payment for thy healing, thou didst give freely what thou hadst freely received, O wise Antiochus, and didst preach Christ to them thou madest whole; wherefore the fire and the beasts could not touch thee, and thine own slayer was taken captive to the faith. Entreat for us who honour thy memory.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Antiochus is painted as a layman of middle years in tunic and mantle, dark-bearded, carrying in one hand the martyr's cross and in the other the attribute of his trade — the small medicine-box or narthex of the unmercenaries, sometimes with a spoon or lancet, exactly as Cosmas, Damian and Panteleimon are shown. Narrative scenes give him in the cauldron of boiling water, standing upright with hands raised in prayer, or among the beasts couched at his feet; and, less often, the scene of the double beheading with Cyriacus, the two martyrs kneeling together. He may be shown paired with his brother Plato of Ancyra, the two young men side by side with crosses in their hands.
No pre-1900 image of this martyr identified by inscription has been located for this entry; searches of the digitised Byzantine menologia and of Wikimedia Commons return nothing under his name, and the Menologion of Basil II — the usual first resort for a minor martyr — covers only September to February and so does not reach July.
Disputed questions
- The brotherhood with Plato of Ancyra. Both entries rest on the same synaxarion note. Nothing else links the two martyrs: they died in different provinces, under different magistrates, and their passions are transmitted separately. The corpus records the kinship as a received tradition, not as an established fact.
- Not to be confused with Antiochus the Monk of the Lavra of Saint Sabbas, the seventh-century author of the Pandects, nor with any of the Seleucid kings of the name, nor with the Antiochus who appears as a companion of other martyrs in the calendars of Sebaste; the martyr of this day is always distinguished by his trade, the physician.
- The name of the governor. The Greek synaxaristis names Adrianos; the Slavonic notice, and the English calendars derived from it, give no name at all. Neither is independently attested for Sebaste in this period.