Artemius of Antioch

Origins and rise under Constantine and Constantius

Artemius belonged to the senior military and administrative class of the fourth century, and both the hagiographic tradition and the secular historians agree that he was a man of the first rank. The Passio names him among the officers of Constantine the Great and has him present at the emperor's vision of the Cross; whatever the weight of that detail, his career is firmly attested under Constantine's son Constantius II (337–361), whom he served with distinction and who advanced him to be dux Aegypti — the military governor of Egypt, one of the great commands of the Eastern empire. In that office he was a powerful agent of imperial religious policy in Alexandria, the most turbulent see of the age.

The one act of his public life that the Church has fixed most gratefully in memory belongs to the year 357. The emperor Constantius, completing the adornment of his father's new capital, resolved to gather to the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople the bodies of the apostles; and it was Artemius who was charged with the translation — bringing the relics of the Apostle Andrew from Patras in Achaia and of the Apostle (and Evangelist) Luke from Thebes in Boeotia, which were laid up beneath the holy table of the church of the Holy Apostles, together with the relics of Timothy. This is among the earliest solemn translations of relics in Christian history, attested by Jerome and the church historians, and it links Artemius directly to the Antiochene evangelist Luke, whose repose the Church keeps two days before his own.

The confession under Julian

On the death of Constantius in 361 the throne passed to his cousin Julian — "the Apostate" — who, raised a Christian, had renounced Christ and bent the whole apparatus of the state to the revival of the old gods. Julian's persecution was subtler than Diocletian's and, where it came to blood, no less cruel: he stripped Christians of office, reopened the temples, and in the cities of the East pressed bishops and confessors to sacrifice. Passing through Antioch in 362 on his way to the Persian war, the emperor had two Christian bishops — the tradition names Eugenius and Macarius — put to torture for refusing to abjure the faith.

It was at this juncture that Artemius came to Antioch. Standing before the emperor, he denounced Julian to his face for his impiety and his cruelty to the Christians, and confessed Christ openly. Enraged that a man of such rank should defy him, Julian had him stripped of his dignities and subjected to a series of savage tortures which the Passio recounts at length — scourging, the laceration of his flesh, and the crushing of his body beneath a great stone, which the hymnography of his feast remembers when it sings of the martyr's "most enduring body" given over to torment. Through it all, the account says, he did not deny Christ nor sacrifice to the idols, but bore the anguish "as though another suffered," his eyes fixed on the reward to come. The tradition adds a vision in the prison: Christ, encompassed by angels, appearing to strengthen him and to promise him the crown. He also foretold to Julian the emperor's own imminent and violent death.

Martyrdom

Meeting only steadfastness, Julian at last ordered him beheaded. The synaxarion distich for the day plays on his name — Artemios, "the wholly excellent" — and on the manner of his end: "Wholly resplendent Artemius in his life, being beheaded, departed to the highest glory." Christians took up and buried his body. Within months the martyr's prophecy was fulfilled: Julian, drawn deep into the Persian desert near Ctesiphon and abandoned by a treacherous guide, was struck in battle by an unseen hand, and died — by the tradition preserved in Theodoret and others — with the cry, "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean." With the apostate dead and the Church again at peace, the relics of Artemius were translated with honour from Antioch to Constantinople.

The shrine at the Oxeia and the Miracles of Artemius

In Constantinople the relics of Artemius were enshrined in the church of Saint John the Baptist in the quarter called the Oxeia, and there grew up around them one of the most famous healing cults of the Byzantine capital. The saint became renowned above all for the cure of diseases of the genitals and of hernia and rupture — afflictions of which he is still invoked as patron — and pilgrims resorted to his shrine to keep vigil and to receive healing through the rite of incubation, sleeping in the church in hope of a dream-visitation of the saint.

Out of this cult came a remarkable document: the Miracles of Saint Artemius (Θαύματα τοῦ Ἁγίου Ἀρτεμίου), a collection of some forty-odd miracle accounts compiled at the shrine in the seventh century. Beyond their devotional purpose, the Miracles are a treasure for the social historian: they record the trades, households, ailments and daily anxieties of the ordinary people of seventh-century Constantinople — shipwrights, tavern-keepers, craftsmen and their families — with an incidental realism found almost nowhere else, and they document in passing the shared liturgical life of the Oxeia, where the vigils of Artemius were kept alongside those of the martyr Febronia of Nisibis (June 25), who had a chapel there.