Diomedes and Laurence
The Holy Martyrs Diomedes and Laurence
Martyr
Commemorated 28 August — Martyrdom by arrows, bound to a plane tree
Diomedes and Laurence are two martyrs of whom the Church has kept the day, the manner of death, and nothing else. The Synaxarion of Constantinople enters them under August 28 with a single line — that they were bound to a plane tree and shot to death with arrows — and the two-line epigram that stands over the notice, which turns on the sound of the arrows striking wood. No passion, no province, no persecutor and no date has come down. They are commemorated in the Greek books beside Moses the Ethiopian, and are among the many companies whose witness the Church holds without knowing anything of their circumstances.
What the synaxarion says
The entry is one of the shortest in the August volume. It records that the holy martyrs Diomedes and Laurence were tied to a plane tree (πλάτανος) and were killed with arrows; and it prefixes, as the synaxaria do, an elegiac couplet composed for the day:
Διττοῖς ἀθληταῖς προσδεθεῖσι πλατάνῳ, / Ταθέντα τόξα, πλατάνων κενοὶ ψόφοι.
which may be rendered: To the two contestants bound upon the plane tree, the bows drawn against them were but the hollow rattling of plane-leaves. The conceit — the Greek plays on plátanos, the tree, and on the sound of the shafts in its branches — is the sort of thing the tenth-century compilers of the Synaxarion of Constantinople wrote to head a notice for which they had no narrative; and its existence, rather than any surviving passion, is what preserved the two names.
What is not known
Neither martyr can be placed. The persecution is unnamed and the century unstated, though a company shot with arrows and left tied to a tree belongs naturally to the pre-Constantinian persecutions and most probably to the third or early fourth century; nothing in the notice requires that dating, and this entry does not assert it. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, who reprinted the notice in the Great Synaxaristes, adds nothing to it, and the later Greek collections repeat him. The Slavic books carry the pair without expansion, and the Russian calendars usually list them simply as "the martyrs Diomedes and Laurence."
The etymological notes that the Greek calendars append — Diomedes from Dios and mēdos, "counselled of Zeus," and Laurentios from the Latin laurea, the laurel — are the compilers' own and carry no historical information about the men.
Not to be confused with
The name Diomedes is common in the martyrologies, and three commemorations fall within a fortnight of each other in August:
- Diomedes of Tarsus, the unmercenary physician martyred at Nicaea about 298, whose feast is August 16 — much the best known of the name, and the one usually meant when a Byzantine text says simply "Saint Diomedes."
- Diodorus, Didymus and Diomedes of Laodicea, a company of Syrian martyrs.
- The Diomedes of this entry, of whom nothing is known but the plane tree.
Laurence likewise: this martyr is not Laurence of Rome, the archdeacon of Pope Sixtus II martyred on the gridiron in 258 and kept on August 10, nor any of the Russian Laurences of the Kiev Caves and of Kaluga.
Feast and commemoration
August 28 (church date; New Calendar civil August 28; Old Calendar civil September 10). The commemoration is Greek in origin and is carried in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, the Great Synaxaristes, and the modern Greek calendars; the Slavic books keep it, and the Antiochian calendar does not give it a separate notice. No office is appointed: on a day dominated by Moses the Ethiopian, and standing on the eve of the strict fast of the Beheading of the Forerunner, the two martyrs are commemorated at the synaxarion reading at matins and, where they are sung at all, under the common of martyrs.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
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 God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Bound to the tree ye were made a target for the archers, O Diomedes and Laurence, and the arrows that pierced you opened to you the gates of heaven; wherefore, though the record of your contest is lost to us, the Church still names you, and asks your prayers.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No settled personal type exists for either martyr. They are painted, where they appear at all, in the general manner of the martyrs of the menologia: two young or middle-aged men in tunic and cloak, each holding the martyr's cross, identified only by the inscription of their names. Where an artist illustrates the day rather than the persons, the scene of the passion is available and unmistakable: two men bound back to back or side by side to the trunk of a plane tree, with archers drawing on them — a composition close to the familiar type of the martyrdom of Sebastian, and doubtless assimilated to it where it occurs. Nothing is known of their ages, dress or station, and no icon painter has more to go on than the single line of the synaxarion.
No pre-1900 icon of these martyrs has been located; none may exist.