Damon
The Holy Hieromartyr Damon
Hieromartyr · Priest
Commemorated 28 August — Commemoration; known only from two stichera in a Sinai manuscript
Damon is a hieromartyr known from a single manuscript. He is absent from the Synaxarion of Constantinople and from the printed Menaia; the only witness to his commemoration is Sinai Codex 631, which preserves two stichera appointed to him under August 28. That is the whole of the record: a name, an order — he is styled hieromartyr, and so was a priest or bishop who died for the faith — a day, and two liturgical verses copied in a Palestinian monastery. He is entered here because the Greek calendars keep him, and because the corpus of this collection records what the Church commemorates rather than only what it can narrate.
The evidence
Nothing is transmitted. The Greek calendars that list Damon say so explicitly: he is unknown to the synaxaristes and to the Menaia. His name is preserved because a scribe of the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai, copying a service-book now catalogued as Codex Sinaiticus Graecus 631, included under the twenty-eighth of August two stichera — short hymns for "Lord, I have cried" — addressed to a hieromartyr Damon. Such survivals are not rare in the Sinai and Athos collections: the Palestinian and Sinaitic books preserve a stratum of local commemorations older or more provincial than the Constantinopolitan synaxarion, and a number of saints are known from them alone.
What may be inferred is only what the title carries. Hieromartyr is used of a bishop or priest put to death for the faith; the term places him, on the ordinary pattern, in one of the persecutions before Constantine, though a later date cannot be excluded, and the manuscript itself gives no century. His province is unknown. The name Δάμων is good classical Greek — the Greek calendars note its derivation from daēmōn, "the knowing one," and it was borne by the Pythagorean of the proverb about friendship — which suggests a Greek-speaking milieu and nothing more.
On entries of this kind
The Church's calendar contains a considerable number of such names: commemorations that survived the loss of their passions, kept because a service-book preserved a hymn or a synaxarion a line. The tradition does not treat them as doubtful for being obscure; it treats the obscurity as the ordinary fate of most of the martyrs, of whom the great majority were never written down at all. This entry therefore records the man and the evidence for him without supplying a life.
Feast and commemoration
August 28 (church date; New Calendar civil August 28; Old Calendar civil September 10). The commemoration is Greek and marginal: it appears in the modern Greek calendars, which take it from the Sinai manuscript, and not in the Slavic or Antiochian books. No office is served; the day belongs to Moses the Ethiopian.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Damon: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No image or personal type of Damon is known, and none is to be expected: he has no passion, no attributes and no cultus beyond the manuscript notice. Were he painted, it would be in the general type of the hieromartyr — a bearded figure in phelonion and omophorion if a bishop, or in the priestly phelonion with the Gospel-book, blessing, and carrying the martyr's cross — identified by inscription alone.
No icon exists to store, and none is sought.