Cantidius, Cantidian and Sibel
The Holy Martyrs Cantidius and Cantidian, brothers, and Sibel the Egyptian
Martyr
Commemorated 5 August — Martyrdom in Egypt — the brothers stoned, Sibel shot with arrows
Three martyrs of Egypt, commemorated together on August 5 and known only from the bare notice of the synaxaria. Cantidius and Cantidian were brothers, put to death by stoning; Sibel — the Greek books call him Σόλεβ, Solev the Egyptian, and the Slavonic tradition Sibelius or Sobel — was shot with arrows. Nothing further is transmitted: no city, no magistrate, no year, no dialogue. They are placed in the fourth century, and they stand in the calendar as what the great majority of the martyrs in fact were — Christians of no distinction who would not deny Christ, whose names survived and whose stories did not.
What is transmitted
The whole of the received account is contained in a single sentence of the synaxarion: that Cantidius and Cantidian were brothers who lived in Egypt, that they were stoned to death for confessing Christ, and that Sibel, an Egyptian, was killed with arrows. The Greek listings for the day separate the two commemorations — the brothers Καττίδιος and Καττιδιανός in one notice, Σόλεβ ὁ Αἰγύπτιος in another — while the Slavonic and the Orthodox Church in America's calendars carry all three together, which is how they are kept here.
The two manners of death are the only concrete detail, and they are worth a word. Stoning is a communal killing: a crowd does it, not an executioner, which suggests a lynching or a popular tumult rather than a formal trial and sentence. Archery is a soldier's method, used for men handed over to a garrison. If the notice preserves anything real, it preserves that the three did not die together or in the same way, and were joined in the calendar afterwards because they were remembered on the same day in the same province.
The Egyptian martyrs
Egypt in the fourth century — that is, in the persecution of Diocletian and Maximinus Daia, which fell there with a savagery unequalled anywhere else in the empire — produced martyrs in such numbers that the Coptic Church dates its era from the accession of Diocletian and calls it the Era of the Martyrs. Eusebius, who was an eyewitness in the Thebaid, describes executions of ten, twenty, sixty and a hundred in a day, until the swords were blunted and the executioners exhausted. The overwhelming majority of those dead are anonymous. A commemoration such as this one — three names, two manners of death, no year — is a fragment of that immense and largely unrecorded slaughter, preserved because some local church wrote three names in its diptychs on the fifth of August and the entry was afterwards copied into the Great Church's synaxarion.
Feast and commemoration
August 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 18), the forefeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition fast. The day's service is the forefeast's, and these martyrs are commemorated by the synaxarion notice at Matins alone; no proper office is appointed for them anywhere in the received books. The Coptic Church, whose martyrology preserves a great many Egyptian names not found in the Byzantine synaxaria, has not been securely correlated with this commemoration.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
No developed iconography of these martyrs exists. Where they are painted at all, in menologion sequences for August 5, they follow the type of their manner of death: the two brothers side by side as young laymen in tunic and mantle, holding crosses, with the stones at their feet or in the hands of their killers; Sibel likewise a young layman, pierced with arrows, in the manner in which the East paints all the archery-martyrs. Nothing distinguishes them from the general company of martyrs, and their identification in any surviving image would depend entirely on the inscription.
No pre-1900 image of them has been located for this reference.
Disputed questions
- Their date. The fourth century is the traditional placing, which in practice means the Diocletianic persecution and its Egyptian sequel under Maximinus Daia (303–313). No year is given in any source, and the century is therefore recorded here as the tradition's estimate rather than as an attested fact.
- The name of the third martyr. Greek Σόλεβ; the Slavonic and English calendars give Sibel, Sibelius, Sobel, Soleb. The variety indicates a name transmitted through Coptic and mangled in transliteration; the form used here follows the common English usage of the Eastern calendars, with the others recorded as alternates.
- Whether the three belong together. The Greek tradition keeps the brothers and Sibel as two commemorations of the same day. They are given one file here, following the Slavonic and Antiochian usage which lists all three as a single company, and because neither notice has any independent cultus, proper hymn, or separate synaxarion life.