Eleutherius and Leonidas

The Holy Martyrs Eleutherius and Leonidas, and the infants martyred with them

Martyr · Child Martyr

Commemorated 8 August — Martyrdom by fire

Eleutherius and Leonidas are two young martyrs of the Greek synaxarion, cast into the fire together with a number of infants for refusing to sacrifice to the idols. The record of them is a single line and a couplet in the Menaion for August 8; no passion, no place and no reign is transmitted, and the later notices which locate them at Constantinople do so without ancient warrant. They are kept, as the synaxarion keeps them, among the nameless multitude of those "perfected by fire."

The whole of what the Church transmits about these martyrs stands in the synaxarion of August 8: On the same day, the memory of the holy martyrs Eleutherius and Leonidas, perfected by fire. To it is attached the customary epigrammatic couplet, which supplies the only circumstance beyond the manner of death — that they refused to sacrifice:

For both these athletes, who would not sacrifice to error, the deceivers decree the flame as their punishment.

The Slavic notices, and after them the modern English calendars, add that they suffered "at a youthful age" and that many infants were burned with them, in one of the persecutions of the Christians. Nothing further is known: not the emperor, not the governor, not the year. The circumstance of children dying with them, if it is old, would place the scene in a general round-up of a Christian community rather than in a judicial proceeding against named individuals — but this is inference and is offered as no more.

Feast and commemoration

August 8 (church date; New Calendar civil August 8, Old Calendar civil August 21), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. They are the fourth commemoration of the Greek synaxarion for the day and are carried in the Slavic and OCA calendars as well. No proper office is appointed: they are commemorated at the sixth ode of the canon with the reading of the synaxarion, and where a hymn is sung it is the common of martyrs.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)

Thy martyrs Eleutherius and Leonidas and those with them, O Lord, in their contest received from Thee our God incorruptible crowns; 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

They are shown, as martyred youths are shown, beardless or with the first down of a beard, in tunic and short mantle, each holding the cross of martyrdom; their particular attribute is the fire, and where the passion is depicted rather than the persons they stand within or beside a furnace or a burning pyre, sometimes with the infants gathered about them — a composition close to that of the Three Youths in the furnace, from which Byzantine painters borrowed freely for scenes of burning. No individual icon of them has been located, and none is likely: the Menologion of Basil II, the ordinary first resort for minor saints, covers only September to February. A wanted icon is recorded.

Disputed questions

Where? Modern lists head the entry "of Constantinople." The Greek synaxarion gives no city. Since persecution of the kind described belongs to the centuries before Constantine, when Byzantium was still a provincial town, the attribution is best read as a later editorial convenience — the martyrs' relics or their commemoration having been kept in the capital — rather than as a statement about where they died.
When? No century is transmitted; the entry is indexed as of unknown date. Any ascription to a particular persecution is conjecture.
Not to be confused with the hieromartyr Eleutherius of Illyricum (December 15), bishop and martyr with his mother Anthia, nor with Leonidas of Corinth and his companions (April 16), drowned in the sea. The names are common and the pairing on this day is peculiar to August 8.