Astius of Dyrrachium
The Holy Hieromartyr Astius, Bishop of Dyrrachium
Hieromartyr · Bishop · d. c. 98–117
Commemorated 4 June — Martyrdom by crucifixion at Dyrrachium
Astius was bishop of Dyrrachium — the great Adriatic port at the western end of the Via Egnatia, the modern Durrës in Albania — in the reign of Trajan (98–117), and was crucified for Christ outside his own city. The passion relates that he was forewarned of his suffering in a dream; that he was beaten with leaden rods and with oxhide whips and would not deny Christ; and that his tormentors then smeared his body with honey and hung him on a cross, so that he died under the stings of wasps and flies in the sun. Christians took his body down and buried it with reverence. He is the protomartyr and patron of the church of Durrës and one of the earliest named saints of the Illyrian coast, commemorated on June 4.
The see of Dyrrachium
Dyrrachium — Greek Ἐπίδαμνος, then Δυρράχιον, Latin Dyrrachium — was the harbour at which travellers from Italy landed to take the Via Egnatia east toward Thessalonica and Constantinople, and it was consequently one of the earliest Christian centres of the Illyrian provinces. The Apostle Paul's mission had reached Illyricum (Rom. 15:19), and the tradition of the Albanian coast reckons its church apostolic. Astius stands at the head of the transmitted episcopal list of the city as its hieromartyr: the first bishop of whom anything is told.
The persecution under which he suffered is that of Trajan — the same reign in which Ignatius of Antioch and Simeon of Jerusalem were put to death, and in which the correspondence of Pliny with the emperor shows the ordinary mechanism of provincial process against Christians already in place. The account names no governor; it presents the arrest as the working out of what the bishop had already been shown.
The dream and the arrest
The passion opens with a vision: Astius saw in sleep a foreboding of the suffering and death that awaited him for Christ, and understood it. The motif is a fixed one in the acts of the martyrs, and its function here is to make the confession that follows a deliberate acceptance rather than an accident — the bishop goes to his arrest knowing.
Seized, he was pressed to renounce Christ, and refused. He was beaten savagely: the account specifies two instruments, rods of lead (the plumbatae, whips or rods weighted with lead, a standard Roman punishment that broke the flesh without killing quickly) and whips of oxhide. Neither moved him.
Crucifixion, honey and the insects
The manner of his death is the detail by which he is remembered, and it is unusual enough to be worth stating precisely: his tormentors smeared his body with honey and then crucified him, leaving him hanging in the summer sun so that the honey drew wasps, hornets and flies to his open wounds, and he died of the stinging and of the cross together. The cruelty is of a recognisable Roman kind — an aggravation designed to prolong and to humiliate — and it fixes his iconography.
He died on the cross. The Christians of Dyrrachium, the account concludes, took his body and buried it with reverence; the passion does not name the place, and no later translation is transmitted in the Byzantine sources.
Veneration
Astius is kept in the Synaxarion of Constantinople and passes from there into the Greek and Slavonic calendars for June 4, always with the same brief passion. In Albania he is Saint Asti, protomartyr of Durrës and one of the patrons of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania, whose cathedral city he is; his memory has been prominent in the revival of that Church since 1991. The Byzantine notices attach to him a group of companions in some manuscripts — sailors or fellow-confessors who suffered at Dyrrachium — but the transmission of their names is unstable and this collection does not assert a roll.
Feast and commemoration
June 4 (church date; New Calendar civil June 4, Old Calendar civil June 17), kept with Saint Metrophanes of Constantinople. His rank in the universal calendar is that of a simple commemoration with the common of a hieromartyr; in the Church of Albania, whose protomartyr he is, the day is kept with far greater solemnity, and Durrës honours him as its first bishop and patron. The Byzantine books style his see "Dyrrachium in Macedonia," using the older and wider sense of the provincial name; geographically the city belongs to Illyricum and to the ecclesiastical province of New Epirus.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, thou didst find in action the ascent to contemplation, O God-inspired one; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst contend for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Astius: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Astius is painted as a bishop and as a martyr: middle-aged to elderly, in phelonion and omophorion, holding the Gospel or a scroll and blessing, with the martyr's cross in his hand. His passion supplies him with an unmistakable scene, and where the martyrdom is shown he is represented hanging on a cross, stripped and bound or nailed, with the insects — wasps and flies — indicated as small dark forms about his body, and sometimes with the vessel of honey and the leaded scourges held by his tormentors below. Modern Albanian iconography of Saint Asti of Durrës, produced since the restoration of that Church, favours the frontal hierarch type with the city and its harbour behind him.
No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection. He is not among the saints of the illustrated menologia available to us, and the Menologion of Basil II, the ordinary first resort for a minor saint of the fixed year, covers only September to February and so cannot serve for a June commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Date. The passion places him under Trajan (98–117), which is the dating the synaxaria and the jurisdictional lives follow, and which is here recorded. Some Western martyrologies and modern Albanian accounts prefer a later persecution — the reign of Trajan being unusually early for a bishop of the Illyrian coast to be so circumstantially documented — and place him in the second half of the second century or later. No evidence decides it.
- The companions. Certain manuscripts of the synaxaria commemorate with Astius a group of martyrs of Dyrrachium (variously counted, and in some traditions identified with Italian Christians who came ashore there); the names differ from manuscript to manuscript, and the Greek and Russian day-lists for June 4 name Astius alone.
- Name. Ἄστιος appears as Astius, Asteius, Astios; the Albanian form is Asti. He is not the Asterius of any other day.