Babylas of Sicily, Timothy and Agapius
The Holy Martyrs Babylas of Sicily and his Disciples Timothy and Agapius
Martyr · d. 3rd century, in Sicily
Commemorated 24 January — Martyrdom by the sword in Sicily
Babylas of Sicily, with his two disciples Timothy and Agapius, were third-century martyrs. According to the synaxarion, Babylas — born to a wealthy family and raised a Christian — forsook the world for the ascetic life and drew to himself the two young disciples, with whom he crossed to the island of Sicily and preached Christ, converting many of the pagans there. The governor of the island, enraged at their success, had the three arrested and cruelly tortured; enduring all with patience, they were at last beheaded, and though their bodies were cast into a fire, the flames, the tradition says, did not consume them. They are commemorated together on January 24. This Babylas is a distinct saint from the great hieromartyr Babylas, bishop of Antioch, martyred a generation earlier.
The record of Babylas of Sicily is a short synaxarion notice, and no more should be claimed for it than it gives. He is said to have come of a rich family and to have been reared by his parents in the Christian faith; while still young he renounced the world and its wealth and took up the life of a hermit and ascetic, and to him were joined two disciples, Timothy and Agapius, whom he formed in the same discipline. Together the three left their homeland — the notice places their origin about Rome — and passed over to Sicily, where they laboured as missionaries among the pagans of the island and brought many to baptism.
Their preaching provoked the anger of the island's governor, who had the three seized and put to torture to make them renounce Christ and sacrifice to the gods. They bore their sufferings with steadfastness, confessing the faith to the end, and were condemned to death and beheaded by the sword. The tradition adds that their bodies were thrown into a fire, but that the flames left them untouched, so that the faithful were able to recover and bury their relics. The day of their martyrdom is kept on January 24.
Feast and commemoration
January 24 (church date; New Calendar civil January 24, Old Calendar civil February 6), a commemoration of the Byzantine rite, kept on the day of the two Xenias and the other saints of January 24. The three martyrs share the one commemoration.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Thy holy martyrs Babylas, Timothy, and Agapius, O Lord, through their sufferings have received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessed of Thy might, they cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of the demons. By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The three are depicted as martyrs — Babylas the elder as a bearded ascetic, Timothy and Agapius as his younger disciples — bearing the cross of martyrdom; the narrative image is their beheading and the fire that would not consume them. No securely identified pre-modern image of Babylas of Sicily is known (the surviving Byzantine miniatures of a "Babylas" belong to the bishop of Antioch), and no image is stored here; the entry notes the icon as wanting.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with the hieromartyr Babylas of Antioch (†c. 253), bishop of Antioch and martyr under Decius, kept on September 4 with the three young martyrs and their mother — a far more celebrated saint of the same name and century, with whom this ascetic-missionary Babylas of Sicily is easily confused; nor with Babylas "the teacher" of Nicomedia and his child-pupils. The Byzantine miniatures that survive under the name "Babylas" depict the bishop of Antioch, not the martyr of Sicily.
- The details of the Life are transmitted only by the synaxarion, and the origin "on the outskirts of Rome" together with the mission to Sicily are given as the tradition hands them down.