Euplus the Martyr
The Holy Martyr Euplus, who was sewn into an ox hide and left in the sun
Martyr · d. no year transmitted
Commemorated 30 May — Wrapped in an ox hide and exposed to the sun
Euplus is a martyr of the Greek synaxarion of May 30, known from a single line which records one thing about him beyond his name: he was wrapped or sewn into an ox hide and left exposed to the sun until he died. Neither the place, the reign, the year, the judge nor the burial is transmitted. The punishment named, however, is a real and documented one of the Roman East, and it is the whole of what survives of this martyr's passion.
The ox hide and the sun
The Greek notice states that Euplus suffered by being enclosed in the hide of an ox and set out in the sun. This is not a vague or symbolic detail. It describes a specific and horrible mode of execution attested in the eastern provinces and in the Persian persecutions alike: the condemned man was sewn into a raw, green hide and exposed to the heat, and as the hide dried it contracted and crushed and suffocated him, while the sun did the rest. It was a punishment of choice where the authorities wished a death that was slow, public and required no executioner to stand over it — and where a fresh hide was to hand, which in practice meant a place of sacrifice.
Beyond this, the notice reports nothing. No persecuting emperor is named, no city, and no companion; there is no interrogation, no dialogue with a judge, and no account of the recovery of the body. Euplus belongs, with Natalius of the same day, to that large class of Byzantine calendar saints whose whole transmitted memory is a name and a manner of death.
The name
Εὔπλος is a Greek nautical name — from eu- and pleō, "sailing well," "of the fair voyage" — of exactly the kind borne by the maritime populations of Sicily, Cilicia and the Aegean coasts. The name's other bearer in the calendar is a Sicilian, which is a consideration in the identity question below without settling it.
Feast and commemoration
May 30 (church date; New Calendar civil May 30, Old Calendar civil June 12). The commemoration is Greek in transmission — it stands in the Greek synaxaria for the day and in the English lists that depend on them — and is absent from the Slavonic, Russian and American calendars, which give May 30 to Isaac of Dalmatia. No proper service is appointed; where Euplus is commemorated liturgically the common of a single martyr is sung with his name.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (from the common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Euplus, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No distinct iconography of this Euplus exists, and images found under the name belong almost without exception to the deacon Euplus of Catania, who is painted as a deacon — beardless or young-bearded, in the sticharion and orarion, holding a censer or, characteristically, the book of the Gospels for which he was arrested — and whose images must not be used for the martyr of May 30. Where a menologion rank includes the martyr of this day he would be shown by the calendar's default formula for an unspecified martyr, in tunic and mantle with the cross in the right hand and the inscription Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΕΥΠΛΟΣ. The narrative scene his notice implies — a man bound in a hide and laid out under the sun — is not, so far as is known, painted anywhere.
No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection; candidates found under the name were rejected as belonging to the Sicilian deacon, and the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
- Not the deacon of Catania. The much better-known Euplus (Euplius) of Catania in Sicily is commemorated on August 11: a deacon arrested for carrying the book of the Gospels, tried before the governor Calvisianus in the Great Persecution, tortured and beheaded, with a genuine and early Latin and Greek passion behind him. That martyr is not this one. The manner of death differs entirely, the day differs, and the Greek synaxaria carry both notices independently. Given the rarity of the name, an ultimate relationship between the two entries — the same martyr doubled, and the mode of death in one branch borrowed from another passion — cannot be excluded and has been suspected; but no source consulted asserts it, and the repository keeps them apart as the calendar does. The August 11 entry has since been written and the two notices cross-checked; the distinction stands.
- A name and a punishment only. This entry supplies no place, persecution or century. The repository's policy is an honest short life for a saint known from one synaxarion line, and the century field is omitted because no date whatever is transmitted; he indexes under the unknown century.
- The spelling. The English lists give Euplius and Efplos, both renderings of Εὔπλος; the Latin form of the Sicilian deacon's name, Euplius, has probably influenced the English form used for this martyr.