Aphrodisius of Cilicia
The Holy Martyr Aphrodisius
Martyr
Commemorated 21 June — Commemorated with Julian of Tarsus among the martyrs of Cilicia
Aphrodisius is a martyr of Cilicia — of Tarsus, where the tradition that names a city at all places him — commemorated by the Greek books on June 21, the day of his fellow-Cilician Julian of Tarsus. His notice is one of the shortest in the calendar: a name, a rank, and a province. No passion, no date, no emperor, no manner of death and no companions have come down with him, and this entry does not supply what the record does not contain. He is honoured as one of the many whose names the Church of Cilicia kept when their histories were lost.
What is transmitted
The Greek Menaion for June 21 lists him bare: Ἀφροδισίου μάρτυρος — "of the martyr Aphrodisius" — between the notice of Julian of Tarsus, who carries the day's service, and that of Terence, bishop of Iconium. Where the lists say anything more, they say that he suffered in Cilicia, and specifically at Tarsus, the metropolis of the province and the city of the Apostle Paul. That is the whole of it.
The bare name is not an accident of transmission so much as the ordinary condition of the Cilician martyrology. Cilicia was among the most heavily persecuted provinces of the Great Persecution — the same shore gave the Church Julian of Tarsus, Boniface of Tarsus, Pelagia of Tarsus, Probus, Tarachus and Andronicus, and Sozon of Cilicia — and the churches of the region kept far more names in their diptychs than they kept passions. When the Constantinopolitan synaxarion was compiled, such names were carried over into the calendar with whatever fragment of identification survived, which in this case is the province and nothing else.
Because his commemoration falls on the day of a Cilician martyr whose passion is famous, it is natural to suppose Aphrodisius one of the company who suffered in the same persecution, and some later lists take the further step of associating him directly with Julian's contest. No early source supports the association, and it is recorded here as a plausible inference and not as a fact. His century is accordingly left unassigned in this entry, and he is indexed among the saints whose era the sources do not fix; if he belongs to the persecution under Diocletian and Maximian, as the Cilician setting suggests, he died about the year 305 — but the sources do not say so.
Feast and commemoration
June 21 (church date; New Calendar civil June 21, Old Calendar civil July 4). He is kept in the Greek books and in the OrthodoxWiki and English lists derived from them; the Slavonic calendar for the day omits him, and the OCA's day-page does not carry a notice for him. The day's service belongs to Julian of Tarsus, and Aphrodisius is commemorated at the synaxarion reading with the common of a martyr. June 21 falls inside the Apostles' Fast in most years, the fast having no fixed beginning but always ending on June 28.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Aphrodisius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from thee, our God; for possessing thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Nothing individual is prescribed for him, and nothing individual survives. He would be painted in the general type of a lay martyr — a man in tunic and mantle, bearded or beardless as the painter chose, holding the small cross of the martyrs in his right hand — and in a menologion sequence for June 21 he would stand beside Julian of Tarsus, whose scene of the sack cast into the sea dominates the day. No pre-1900 image inscribed Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΑΦΡΟΔΙΣΙΟΣ for the June 21 martyr has been identified; the images of the May 4 Aphrodisius of Scythopolis, where any exist, belong to a different saint and are deliberately not borrowed for this entry. The Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for minor saints, is of no help here: its surviving volume covers September to February only, and cannot depict a June commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Aphrodisius and his companions of Scythopolis, commemorated on May 4 — the martyr who with Misdas, Macrobius, Valerian, Leontius and Antoninus rebuked the governor of Palestine to his face, overturned the idol-altars, and was stoned and clubbed to death with his company in the early fourth century. That Aphrodisius has a passion, a city (Scythopolis, in Palestine) and companions; this one has none of the three, and belongs to a different province and a different day. The names are identical and the centuries probably overlap, which makes the pair a standing occasion of confusion in the indexes.
- Aphrodisius of Béziers, the Egyptian companion of the Holy Family venerated in Languedoc (April 28 in the Latin books), and the various Aphrodisii of the Roman martyrology, belong to the Western calendar and are not this saint.
- The name. Ἀφροδίσιος — "of Aphrodite" — is a common theophoric name of the pagan eastern Mediterranean, borne by Christians without embarrassment; its survival in the calendar is a reminder that the martyrs came out of the world they died refusing to worship.