Drosis of Antioch

The account of Drosis belongs to the earliest Antiochene martyr-tradition. In the days of a fierce persecution — the received story names the reign of Trajan, and makes her a daughter of the emperor himself — the bodies of the Christian martyrs were left exposed and forbidden burial, that even in death they might be dishonoured and that any who reverenced them might be detected. Drosis, with a band of pious women (the tradition names five virgins who had been dedicated to God), went out secretly by night, took up the bodies of the slain, anointed them and gave them honourable burial. When this was discovered, the women were seized. According to the passion, the five companions were cast into a furnace of molten metal, in which they died; Drosis, reserved for a time in the hope that she might be turned from the faith, at last completed her own contest and received the martyr's crown.

Whatever the precise historical kernel beneath the elaborated passio — the imperial parentage in particular is the kind of detail that later hagiography loved to add — the antiquity of her cult is beyond doubt: John Chrysostom, preaching at Antioch in the later fourth century, devoted a whole homily to her, praising the courage of the woman who braved the fire and the wrath of kings out of love for the martyrs, and urging his hearers to imitate her hidden works of mercy. Her tomb was a place of veneration in the city.