Diodorus and Rhodopianus
The Holy Martyrs Diodorus and Rhodopianus the Deacons, of Aphrodisias in Caria
Martyr · Deacon · d. c. 302
Commemorated 29 April — The same commemoration as kept in Slavonic usage and by the OCA, 3 May — Martyrdom by stoning at Aphrodisias in Caria (Greek usage)
Diodorus and Rhodopianus were deacons of the church of Aphrodisias in Caria, on the south-western coastlands of Asia Minor, who were stoned to death by their own townspeople in the persecution of Diocletian, about the year 302. The synaxarion notice is short and gives no dialogue and no magistrate: the two were known in the city as Christians and as preachers of Christ among the pagans, were seized by the soldiery, endured insults and scourging, and were finally killed with stones — the mob's death rather than the executioner's, and one of the few martyrdoms by stoning in the Byzantine calendar after the age of the Apostles. The Greek books keep them on May 3 and the Slavonic books and the OCA on April 29; this entry, following the Greek placement, is primary on May 3 and secondary on April 29.
Aphrodisias in Caria
Aphrodisias — the city of Aphrodite, in the valley of the Morsynus in inland Caria — was in the third century one of the most prosperous and most conspicuously pagan cities of Asia Minor: a centre of marble sculpture whose workshops supplied the empire, with a great temple of Aphrodite at its heart and a civic identity bound up with her cult. It was also, by the end of the third century, the metropolis of the province of Caria and the seat of a Christian community with its own clergy. The collision the martyrs' notice records is exactly the one that city's history would predict: Christian clergy preaching openly in a town whose name, wealth and public religion were all the goddess's.
Deacons and preachers
Both men are named in the Greek synaxarion as deacons — the Greek titles the second of them ὁ Διάκονος, "the deacon," and the Slavonic and OCA notices give the office to both. The diaconate in a provincial city of that period carried the ordinary charge of the Church's charity and the reading and preaching under the bishop's direction, and it is as preachers that the martyrs' notice presents them: they were arrested, in the Slavonic formula, for spreading Christianity, that is for open evangelism among the pagans of the city rather than for the mere fact of their faith.
The stoning
The persecution is that of Diocletian (reigned 284–305); the Greek life fixes the year at 302, on the eve of the general edicts. Diodorus and Rhodopianus were seized by the soldiers of Aphrodisias and subjected to many insults and scourgings; when they would not renounce Christ they were stoned, and so gave up their souls.
The mode of death is the whole of what the tradition has preserved about them, and the Greek hymnographer made a play on it that has fixed the notice in the memory of the Greek books: the synaxarion distich turns on the name Ῥοδοπιανός — rose-named — and says that what the martyrs received from their attackers were not stones but roses, gifts rather than wounds. It is the kind of conceit that the epigrammatists of the synaxarion used when there was no narrative to versify, and its very existence is evidence of how little was transmitted.
The calendar divergence
Diodorus and Rhodopianus are a textbook case of a commemoration that has slipped a few days in one branch of the tradition. The Greek synaxaria and the Greek printed Menaia place them on 3 May; the Slavonic books, the Russian Lives of the Saints after Dimitry of Rostov, and the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America place them on 29 April. There is no suggestion anywhere of two different pairs of martyrs: the notice is verbally the same in both traditions — two deacons, Aphrodisias in Caria, Diocletian, stoning — and the divergence is a transmission accident of the sort common in the last third of April and the first days of May, where several commemorations sit one to five days apart between the Greek and Slavonic books.
This entry follows the Greek placement for the primary feast, because the Greek synaxarion notice with its distich is the fuller witness and because the Greek is the older placement in the printed tradition, and records April 29 as a secondary feast so that the entry is reachable from either day. Neither placement is asserted to be the correct one.
Feast and commemoration
May 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 16) in Greek usage, where the two deacons are listed in the synaxarion for the day among the company that includes Timothy and Maura and Peter of Argos; and April 29 (Old Calendar civil May 12) in Slavonic usage and in the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America, where they stand with the Nine Martyrs of Cyzicus and Memnon the Wonderworker.
No proper office is transmitted for them in either tradition. On both days they are commemorated at the sixth ode of the canon and in the synaxarion notice, and where their memory is kept liturgically the common of two martyrs supplies the hymns. Both days fall near the boundary of the Paschal cycle, so that in most years the commemoration is made within the Pentecostarion, with the Paschal hymns governing the service and the Menaion appended.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of two martyrs)
Thy martyrs Diodorus and Rhodopianus, 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.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Diodorus and Rhodopianus are painted, where they are painted at all, as a pair of young martyr-deacons: two standing figures in the sticharion and orarion of the diaconate — the orarion crossed over the left shoulder, in the Byzantine manner — holding a censer and a small pyxis in the deacon's fashion, or else the cross of martyrdom in the right hand. Where the narrative rather than the portrait is given, the scene is a stoning: the two martyrs kneeling, and townsmen with raised stones, a composition Byzantine painters otherwise reserve for the Protomartyr Stephen, whose type theirs naturally follows — young deacons killed with stones for preaching.
No image of them, of any date, has been located: they are absent from Wikimedia Commons under either name in Greek, Slavonic or English form (searched live, 2026-07-26), and the Menologion of Basil II, which would be the first place to look for a minor martyr of the fixed year, covers only September to February. They are therefore entered in the list of icons still being sought, and the description above is a reconstruction from the received type of a martyred deacon, not from a surviving image.
Disputed questions
- The day: see The calendar divergence above. Greek May 3; Slavonic and OCA April 29.
- The year. The Greek life gives 302; the OCA gives only "under the emperor Diocletian (284–305)." Nothing narrows it further, and the century of repose is entered as the fourth on the strength of the Greek date, which would place the martyrdom a year or two before the great edict of 303.
- Was Diodorus also a deacon? The Greek heading attaches ὁ Διάκονος to Rhodopianus alone, which may mean either that only the second was in orders or — more probably, since the Slavonic and English notices give the office to both — that the epithet distinguishes this Rhodopianus and is loosely governed by the pair. The point is not decidable.
- Not to be confused with Diodorus, Didymus and Diomedes of Laodicea, martyrs kept on September 11 — the confusion most likely to occur, since that Diodorus is also a martyr of a Carian or Phrygian city of Asia Minor in the same persecutions. The two are distinct: this Diodorus suffered at Aphrodisias with a single companion, the deacon Rhodopianus, by stoning; the other suffered at Laodicea with Didymus and Diomedes. Nor is either to be confused with the several other Diodori of the synaxaria — the martyr of Emesa, or Diodorus the companion of Rhodopianus's near-namesake in the Latin martyrologies. Rhodopianus has no namesake on the Orthodox calendar.