Capito and Hymenaeus
The Holy Martyrs Capito and Hymenaeus
Martyr
Commemorated 24 July — Martyrdom by the sword
Capito and Hymenaeus are a pair of martyrs whom the Synaxarion of Constantinople enters under July 24, after the great martyr Christina of Tyre and alongside the martyr Hermogenes, and of whom nothing has come down but their names and the manner of their death: they were beheaded. No city, no emperor, no persecutor, no year and no relics are recorded. They are kept in Greek usage only, and are absent from the Slavonic books and the OCA calendar for the day. This entry records what is transmitted and does not invent what is not.
What the synaxarion transmits
The notice belongs to the class of bare commemorations that make up a large part of the Constantinopolitan synaxarion: a name — here two — a verb of martyrdom, and a distich of two iambic lines composed for the calendar rather than drawn from any passion. For Capito and Hymenaeus the verb is the commonest of all, τελειοῦνται ξίφει, "they are perfected by the sword," which in the language of the synaxaria means beheading. Nothing else is transmitted: not their country, not their status, not the persecution under which they suffered. That they are commemorated together indicates only that they died together, or that they were transmitted together, which in this literature is not always the same thing.
The names themselves are the sole material for inference, and they will not bear much weight. Capito (Καπίτων) is a Latin cognomen, common in the Greek East among provincials holding Roman citizenship, and is borne by at least two other saints of the calendar — a bishop among the hieromartyrs of Cherson (March 7), and a martyr of Egypt commemorated with Alexander and others. Hymenaeus (Ὑμέναιος) is Greek, from the marriage-god Hymen, and is a slave or freedman's name in the inscriptions; it is the name of the Ephesian Hymenaeus whom St Paul names among those who made shipwreck of the faith (1 Tim. 1:20; 2 Tim. 2:17) — a coincidence of nomenclature only, and no connection of any kind is to be supposed between the two.
The absence of a passion is itself informative. It means their memory reached the calendar of the Great Church by way of a local commemoration whose written acts had already been lost, or had never existed — the ordinary fate of the martyrs of the smaller cities, who were remembered at their tombs long after their stories had gone.
Feast and commemoration
July 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 6), in the Greek Menaion, where the day belongs to the great martyr Christina of Tyre and these martyrs follow as a bare notice with no proper hymnography. They are not in the Slavonic books, not on the OCA day-page, and not in Antiochian usage.
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 broke also the feeble insolence of demons. By their prayers, O Christ our God, save our souls.
Iconography
No proper iconography of Capito and Hymenaeus exists, and none is to be expected: saints transmitted without a passion are painted, where they are painted at all, only in the menologion cycles that run through a whole month of commemorations, where each martyr is given a small standing figure or a bust in a roundel and is identified by the inscription beside him alone. In such a cycle they would appear as two men in the ordinary dress of the lay martyr — tunic and mantle, one perhaps bearded and the other young, since the pairing of an elder and a younger is the painter's usual way of distinguishing two figures who are otherwise alike — each holding the small cross of the martyr in the right hand. The Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for images of such saints, covers only September to February and cannot serve for a July commemoration.
No storable image has been located; they are listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Two martyrs or three? Several modern lists — OrthodoxWiki among them — print the entry as "Martyrs Capito, Hymenaeus and Hermogenes," joining to this pair the martyr Hermogenes who is commemorated on the same day. The Greek synaxarion carries them as separate notices with different manners of death (the sword for these two; the drawing of the teeth for Hermogenes), and the same lists that give the group of three also give "Martyr Hermogenes" separately a few lines later, which suggests a conflation rather than a distinct tradition. This collection follows the synaxarion and keeps them apart, with cross-references in both entries. Whether all three suffered together cannot be determined.
- Whether Capito is the martyr of Cherson. He is not. The bishop Capito of the hieromartyrs of Cherson is commemorated on March 7 with his fellow-bishops, has a full and distinctive dossier, and died in the Crimea in the fourth century. The names coincide and nothing else does.
- Nor is he the Capito of August 12. The martyr Capito commemorated with Pamphilus on August 12, likewise beheaded and likewise without acts, is a separate synaxarion entry with a different companion and a different Constantinopolitan shrine (ta Olybriou). The resemblance between the two notices is one of formula — two names and "perfected by the sword" — and not of person; no manuscript merges them, and this collection keeps them distinct.