Asclas of Egypt
The Holy Martyr Asclas of Great Hermopolis in the Thebaid
Martyr · d. c. 287
Commemorated 20 May — Drowned in the Nile near Antinoe under the governor Arrian
Asclas (†c. 287) was a Christian of Great Hermopolis in Middle Egypt who suffered in the persecution of Diocletian under the governor Arrian of Antinoe. Hung up and torn with iron rakes until his flesh fell from him, he answered that he was still glorifying his God; and when the governor set out by boat across the Nile to continue the torments at Antinoe, the martyr prayed and the vessel stood still in mid-stream, unmoved by the oars, until Arrian had written with his own hand an acknowledgement of the one true God. Even that sign did not convert him: he had Asclas burned with torches and then drowned in the river with a stone about his neck. The martyr had told the Christians to look for his body after three days; they found it as he had said, and buried him.
Hermopolis in the Thebaid
The passion places his birth and home at Hermopolis Magna — Egyptian Khmun, the modern el-Ashmunein, on the west bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt, the ancient cult-centre of Thoth whom the Greeks called Hermes, and in Roman administration the metropolis of the Hermopolite nome. It was one of the great cities of the Thebaid and, by the later third century, a place with a substantial Church. Nothing else of his background, family, trade, or age is transmitted, and no honest account of him can supply it: this is a passion, not a life, and its whole subject is a few days at the end.
Before Arrian
The magistrate is Arrian (Arianus), governor of the Thebaid, who in the Coptic and Greek passions of the Diocletianic persecution is the standing antagonist of the Egyptian martyrs — the judge before whom Philemon and Apollonius of Antinoe and a long roll of others were tried — and who, in the passion of that company, is himself converted at the flute-player's martyrdom and dies a martyr with four of his bodyguards, so that the Church commemorates him on December 14. Whether the Arrian of Asclas's passion is to be reconciled with that conversion, or whether the hagiographers of the Thebaid used one governor's name for a whole phase of the persecution, is discussed under Disputed questions below. His seat was at Antinoe (Antinoopolis), across the river from Hermopolis.
Asclas was brought before him, confessed himself a Christian, and refused to sacrifice. The sentence was the standard one for obduracy: he was hung up and raked with iron combs, so that, in the words of the account, pieces of his flesh fell to the ground. He remained conscious and answered the governor that he had not stopped and would not stop glorifying his God and Saviour — which is the substance of what the tradition preserves of his speech.
The boat halted in the Nile
Arrian determined to finish the business at Antinoe and embarked to cross the Nile, taking the prisoner with him. Here the passion turns on a single prayer. Asclas asked God that the governor's boat should not move until Arrian had confessed the true God.
The vessel stopped in the middle of the river. The rowers could not shift it; the current would not carry it. The account is careful about how the deadlock broke, and the care is the interesting part: Arrian did not repent and did not confess. He wrote out the martyr's sentence, and in writing it named the God whom Asclas served as the one true God — a formal admission extracted under duress, in a document of condemnation. At that the boat moved on. It is a miracle with a sting in it: the governor's own written words became the testimony he refused to give.
Martyrdom in the river
At Antinoe he ordered the martyr burned with torches, and then passed the sentence he had written: drowning in the Nile, with a stone tied about his neck.
Before he was thrown in, Asclas gave the Christians standing by an instruction that belongs to the oldest layer of the martyr-cults: they were to come back for his body after three days. The detail preserves both a practical concern for burial — the river would carry the corpse away, and a martyr's relics were the community's treasure — and, in the number, the pattern of the Lord's own three days. On the third day the Christians found the body and buried it with honour. The martyrdom is placed about the year 287, in the reign of Diocletian (284–305).
Feast and commemoration
May 20 (church date; New Calendar civil May 20, Old Calendar civil June 2). He is carried on the Greek day-list, in the Slavonic menologia, and by the Orthodox Church in America, always as a simple commemoration and without a proper service; the day falls inside the Pentecostarion, whose propers ordinarily prevail. His memory belongs to the great body of Egyptian martyrs of the Thebaid whose passions were compiled at Antinoe, and it is in the Coptic tradition — outside the Byzantine calendar — that this material is most fully preserved.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Asclas, O Lord, in his contest received the crown of incorruption 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.
Iconography
Asclas is painted as a layman-martyr — beardless or with a short dark beard, in tunic and mantle, holding the cross — with no attribute distinguishing him from the general run of Egyptian martyrs. Where his passion is illustrated, two scenes carry it: the river with the boat held motionless and the governor writing in it, and the martyr sinking with the stone at his neck. The first of these is unusual enough in the repertory to be a reliable identification when it occurs. No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection, and a Wikimedia Commons search under his name and its variants returns nothing usable; the Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for minor saints of the fixed year, contains only September to February and can hold nothing for May.
Disputed questions
- Hermopolis or Antinoe? Both cities belong to the account, and the calendars name him from either: he was a native of Great Hermopolis and was put to death near Antinoe across the river, which is where his tomb would have been. OrthodoxWiki styles him "of the Thebaid," which covers both.
- The date. "About 287" is the received figure and is compatible with the reign given (Diocletian, 284–305), but the great Egyptian persecution belongs rather to 303–311; a martyrdom in 287 would fall in the earlier and more sporadic phase. The tension is in the sources and is not resolved here.
- The name. Asklas is a genuine and attested Greek-Egyptian name of the papyri (a hypocoristic of the Asklepios-compounds); the variant Asclas / Asclades in Latin lists is the same person. He is not to be confused with the several Asclepiades and Asclepiodotus of the martyrologies.
- Arrian's conversion. In the passion of Philemon, Apollonius and Arrian (December 14, c. 305) the governor of the Thebaid is brought to faith by the martyrdom of the flute-player Philemon and is himself martyred with four of his protectores. Here he is unmoved even by the halting of his boat. The two accounts can be harmonised chronologically — Asclas about 287, the Antinoe company about 305, so a later conversion is at least possible, and the extracted written admission in the boat reads almost like a first stage of it. But it is equally likely that "Arrian" functions in the Egyptian passions as the type-name of the persecuting governor. The repository records the tension and does not resolve it.