Aphrodisius and Companions of Scythopolis
The Holy Martyrs Aphrodisius, Misdas, Macrobius, Valerian, Leontius, Antoninus and their companions, who suffered at Scythopolis
Martyr · d. early 4th century, at Scythopolis in Palestine
Commemorated 4 May — Stoned and clubbed to death after overturning the pagan altars
A company of martyrs of Scythopolis in Palestine, headed by Aphrodisius and including Misdas, Macrobius, Valerian, Leontius and Antoninus, who in the early fourth century presented themselves uninvited before the governor of the province, rebuked him to his face for his cruelty to the Christians, and then overturned the altars of the idols. The pagans of the city fell on them with stones and clubs and killed them all. Christians recovered the bodies, buried them with honour, and raised a church over the tomb; at Constantinople their memory was kept in the shrine of James the Less within the great church of the Theotokos in the Chalkoprateia. They are commemorated on May 4.
Scythopolis
Scythopolis — the Greek city on the site of the biblical Beth Shean, in the Jezreel valley where it opens toward the Jordan — was in this period the metropolis of the Roman province of Palaestina Secunda and one of the cities of the Decapolis: populous, Hellenised, heavily pagan in its public cult, and the seat of a governor's tribunal. It was also, as Eusebius records, one of the places where the great persecution was pressed with severity, and where Christians were brought from other cities to be tried. The synaxarion's report that these martyrs came before "the governor of the region" and reproached him for his treatment of Christians presupposes exactly that setting: a tribunal in the middle of a public persecution, in a city where the assize was held.
The confession and the altars
What the notice records of these martyrs is a single act, and it is not the ordinary martyr's act of endurance under arrest but a deliberate provocation. They were not sought out; they came of their own accord before the governor, and they came to speak — to rebuke him openly for the cruelty with which he was treating the Christians. Then, having said what they came to say, they went out and threw down the altars of the idols.
Both halves of this belong to a recognisable and rare type in the martyr literature: the voluntary confessor, who forces the issue rather than waiting for it, and the iconoclast of paganism, who attacks the cult itself. The Church's attitude to such acts was never simple — canonical writers of the period warned against inviting martyrdom, and the destruction of altars was precisely the charge under which the authorities could show that Christians were enemies of public order. That the synaxarion records the deed without apology, and honours these men as martyrs, is a sign of how the memory was received: they were remembered as men whose zeal was accepted.
The martyrdom
The response was not judicial. The idolaters of the city, enraged by the destruction of their altars, did not wait for a sentence: they attacked the confessors on the spot with stones and with clubs, and beat and stoned them all to death. It is a lynching rather than an execution, and the notice makes no attempt to dress it as anything else — there is no interrogation, no succession of tortures, no dialogue with a judge; the whole passion is compressed into the mob and the stones.
The number who died is not fixed. The Greek notices name six — Aphrodisius, Misdas (also Mistas), Macrobius, Valerian, Leontius, Antoninus — and add "and those with them"; the English lists following OrthodoxWiki give "and sixty others." The date is given only as the early fourth century, which places the martyrdom within the persecution of Diocletian and Maximinus in Palestine.
Burial and cultus
The Christians of Scythopolis gathered the bodies, buried them with honour, and afterwards built a church over the tomb — the ordinary sequence for a company of local martyrs, and the mechanism by which such a memory survived at all. The synaxarion adds a detail of Constantinopolitan practice that is worth recording because it is the reason these obscure Palestinian martyrs entered the universal calendar: their synaxis was celebrated in the oratory of James the Less (James the Brother of the Lord) within the venerable church of the Theotokos in the Chalkoprateia — the "coppersmiths' quarter" church near Hagia Sophia, one of the great Marian shrines of the capital. A company kept liturgically at Constantinople is a company the Synaxarion of Constantinople records, and from there it passed to every Byzantine calendar.
Feast and commemoration
May 4 (church date; New Calendar civil May 4, Old Calendar civil May 17). The commemoration is Greek in transmission — it stands in the Greek synaxaria for the day and in the English lists that follow them — and it does not appear in the printed Slavic Menaion or on the OCA day-page for May 4. In the Byzantine capital, as the notice itself records, the company was kept at the shrine of James within the Chalkoprateia church of the Theotokos. In Palestine they belong to the local company of the martyrs of Scythopolis. No proper service is transmitted; the common of many martyrs is sung.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of many 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.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Unbidden ye stood before the judge and rebuked his cruelty, and casting down the altars of the demons ye were crushed with stones and staves; wherefore, O Aphrodisius and thy godly company, ye have exchanged a brief violence for an unending crown.
Iconography
The company is painted according to the standard convention for a martyric choros: a row of figures of varied age, the elder in front and the younger behind, in tunic and mantle, each holding the martyr's cross, the whole group inscribed with a collective title and the leading name — ΟΙ ΑΓΙΟΙ ΜΑΡΤΥΡΕΣ ΑΦΡΟΔΙΣΙΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΣΥΝ ΑΥΤΩ. Where the individual names are given they are written above each head, and Aphrodisius stands at the head as the first-named.
The narrative scene proper to them is the stoning: the confessors standing or fallen in the foreground with hands raised, and a crowd of townsmen — not soldiers, which is the point — casting stones and swinging clubs; a toppled altar with its idol broken beside it is the attribute that identifies the company, since it names both what they did and why they died. The two elements together, the mob and the overturned altar, distinguish this group from the many anonymous companies of the menologion rows.
No pre-1900 image of them has been identified for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, which supplies miniatures for companies of this kind, does not extend to May.
Disputed questions
- The names and their number. The Greek list gives six names; the English lists give five of them in a different order (Aphrodisius, Leontius, Anthony, Valerian, Macrobius) with "sixty others," dropping Misdas and rendering Antoninus as Anthony. Misdas is also transmitted as Mistas, and Valerian as Valerianus. Following the repository's practice for group commemorations, the transmitted names are given here with their variance noted and are not asserted as a definitive roll; the "sixty" is a round number of the sort that attaches easily to a mob-martyrdom and has no independent support in the Greek notices.
- Scythopolis in Palestine, not Syria. The Greek notice, and lists depending on it, sometimes place Scythopolis "in Syria" — accurate in the loose sense that the city lay in the Roman East and in some periods within a Syrian administrative orbit, but misleading. It is Beth Shean in Palestine, and the martyrs are Palestinian.
- The date. No year is transmitted. "Early fourth century" is the conventional placement and points to the great persecution; a minority of lists put the company under earlier persecutions, without evidence.
- The name Aphrodisius. Two other martyrs of the name occur in the calendars — a companion of the martyrs of Cilicia, and one commemorated with the martyrs of Ancyra — and the name should not be allowed to merge them. Only the Scythopolis company belongs to May 4. Not to be confused, in particular, with Aphrodisius of Cilicia, commemorated on June 21 with Julian of Tarsus: that Aphrodisius has neither passion nor companions nor date, only a name and the province of Cilicia, and is a different saint on a different day.
- Not to be confused, further, with the Seventy Martyrs of Scythopolis, an anonymous company kept in the Greek books on June 28 in the same city. The resemblance is real — a numbered group of martyrs at Scythopolis, undated, of the same period — and some derivative lists have merged the two; the Greek synaxarion keeps them on separate days, and so does this collection. Whether they are ultimately two memories of one event cannot be determined from the surviving notices.