Cosmas and Damian of Arabia

The Arabian unmercenaries

The pair commemorated on October 17 were, the synaxaria say, Arabs by race — the Greek distich for the day fixes both facts in one line: "Arabs by race, and by the sword, I know these divine champions, the Unmercenaries." Brothers by blood, they learned the physician's art and practised it in the manner the Church came to call anargyroi, "silverless": taking no payment from any patient, asking of those they healed only faith in Christ, in whose name the cures were worked. Unlike the pair of Mesopotamia, whose lives were passed in one region of Asia Minor, the Arabian brothers are remembered as itinerants, travelling through cities and villages, healing the sick and preaching Christ to those their skill had opened to the word.

Martyrdom

Their journeys brought them into Cilicia, and there — the traditional date is about 287, in the reign of Diocletian and Maximian — the pagans seized the holy physicians and led them before the governor (hegemon) Lysias at Aegae. Questioned, they confessed Christ and refused the sacrifice; neither promises nor threats moved them. Lysias ordered them brutally beaten, and then cast into the sea; but they were brought out of the deep unharmed — the accounts say by an angel of God — and the governor, proof against the miracle, condemned them to the sword. With them were beheaded three other Christians, whom the synaxaria name their brothers: Leontius, Anthimus and Eutropius. The five received their crowns together, and the calendar commemorates the five together, the two physicians at the head of the company. The Greek verses give each his flower: at Leontius's beheading "the lion-ant of error perished," and Anthimus and Eutropius, "cut down, blossom brightly and most gloriously" — the pun on Anthimus's name (ἄνθος, flower) that the synaxarist could not resist.

The three pairs of Cosmas and Damian

The Byzantine calendar venerates three distinct pairs of unmercenary brother-physicians named Cosmas and Damian, and the confusion among them is the oldest and most instructive identity-problem in the whole company of the unmercenaries. The received Greek and Slavic tradition distinguishes:

1. Of Mesopotamia (Asia Minor) — November 1: sons of the pious Theodota, who practised in Asia Minor and died in peace; their relics at Thereman.
2. Of Rome — July 1: Roman physicians who healed under Carinus (c. 284) and were stoned to death on a mountain, the tradition says, by an envious former teacher.
3. Of Arabia — October 17: the pair of this entry, beheaded in Cilicia under Lysias with their three brothers.

The Western church, by contrast, has always known a single pair (feast formerly September 27, now September 26 in the Roman books), whose passio — Cilicia, Lysias, the sea, the beheading at Aegae — is in substance the story the East tells of the Arabian pair, while the great Western cultus (the Roman basilica of Cosmas and Damian, the Justinianic churches) drew on the same original veneration that the East attaches to the November pair. Hagiographical scholarship since the Bollandists has generally concluded that one original pair of saints, whose cult radiated from Cyrrhus in Syria where their basilica stood, was tripled in the Byzantine tradition by three divergent recensions of their legend — a Cilician martyrdom-passio, a Roman adaptation, and a peaceful-repose account — each of which then received its own feast and biography. The Church's calendars, however, commemorate three pairs, each with its own day, hymnography and iconographic tradition, and this collection follows the calendars: one file per commemorated pair, with this note recorded in each. Wikidata (Q76486) and most Western reference works merge all three into a single entity; the identifier is recorded here with that caution.