Charisimus and Neophytus
The Holy Martyrs Charisimus and Neophytus, the servants of the Venerable Anthusa
Martyr · d. c. 270–275
Commemorated 22 August — Beheaded after confessing Christ before the emperor
Charisimus and Neophytus were the two household servants who attended the young pagan noblewoman Anthusa on her flight from Seleucia to Tarsus, were baptised with her by the bishop Athanasius, and paid for it with their lives. When their mistress had been tonsured and sent into the desert and the bishop had been beheaded, the two young men were examined in their turn, confessed Christ openly before the emperor, and were beheaded — in the third century, probably under Aurelian (270–275). They are commemorated with Anthusa and Athanasius on August 22.
Servants of a runaway
Nothing is known of their birth, and the sources do not even say plainly whether they were slaves or free dependants; the Greek calls them ὑπηρέται, attendants of the household, and the Russian books слуги. They belonged to the establishment of Antoninus and Martyria at Seleucia, and were assigned to their daughter for the journey she said she was making to her old nurse. When the journey turned out to be a flight to a Christian bishop in another province, the two servants went the whole way with her.
That they were baptised with her, and by the same hands, is the substance of what the Church remembers about them. Neophytus's name — neophytos, "newly planted," the ordinary Greek word for the newly baptised — has struck every reader of the notice, and it is possible that it was given him at the font and displaced whatever he had been called before. Charisimos, "gracious" or "well-favoured," may equally be a baptismal name.
Confession and beheading
The account gives them the classic form of the martyr's death and no embellishment. After the bishop had been put to death for refusing to sacrifice, the two were brought before the emperor, confessed themselves Christians, and were beheaded with the sword. No tortures, no dialogue, no burial place and no relics are transmitted.
Their place in the calendar is a small but deliberate piece of the Church's memory: the mistress is remembered as venerable, having died in her bed after twenty-three years of asceticism, while the two servants who carried her bags are remembered as martyrs, having died by the sword within weeks of their baptism. The synaxarion notice keeps them in the same sentence.
Feast and commemoration
August 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 4), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. They are named in the Greek synaxarion within the notice of Anthusa — "and her two servants Charisimus and Neophytus" — and are listed separately in the Russian menologion as Мученики Харисим и Неофит. The OCA gathers all four saints of the episode under one heading. No proper office is appointed to them; the day belongs liturgically to the afterfeast and to Agathonicus of Nicomedia.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of two martyrs)
Thy martyrs Charisimus and Neophytus, 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, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
The two are painted as young men, beardless or with the first down of a beard, in the short tunic and mantle of servants rather than in the chlamys of noblemen, each holding the martyr's cross; they are almost never shown alone, but stand behind or beside the hierarch Athanasius and the veiled nun Anthusa in the menologion panels for August 22, and their youth is the painters' way of marking how short a time separated their baptism from their beheading. No pre-1900 image of them has been identified for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The date. The Russian menologion dates them, with Athanasius, to 270–275 (the reign of Aurelian); the Greek and OCA account sets the episode under Valerian (253–260). This entry follows the former and indexes them in the third century, which both datings share.
- Names or descriptions. Whether Neophytus and Charisimus are the men's own names or baptismal names cannot be settled from the record; the possibility is noted here because the calendar has a number of comparable cases.
- Not to be confused with Neophytus of Nicaea (January 21), the boy-martyr of Bithynia, with the Cypriot recluse Neophytos (January 24), or with the six martyrs Neophytus, Zeno and companions kept on August 11, eleven days before this feast.