Felicissimus and Agapitus
The Holy Martyrs Felicissimus and Agapitus, Deacons of Rome
Martyr · Deacon · d. 6 August 258, at Rome
Commemorated 10 August — Kept with Sixtus and Laurence; beheaded in the cemetery of Praetextatus, 6 August 258
Felicissimus and Agapitus were deacons of the Roman Church who were beheaded with their bishop Sixtus II in the cemetery of Praetextatus on the Via Appia on 6 August 258, at the beginning of the second and bloodier phase of Valerian's persecution. Their names stand in the Depositio martyrum of 354, the oldest calendar of the Roman Church, alongside that of Sixtus himself; they are therefore among the very small number of third-century martyrs about whom nothing has to be taken on trust. In the Byzantine and Slavic calendars they are carried over to August 10 and commemorated among "those with" Laurence the Archdeacon.
Two of the seven
Rome in the third century had seven deacons, one for each of the ecclesiastical regions into which the city's charitable administration was divided, and over them an archdeacon. Felicissimus and Agapitus were two of the seven; Laurence was the archdeacon. Their duties were not liturgical only: each managed the alms, the burial-clubs, the registers of widows and the care of the sick within his region, and each was therefore a public figure in his quarter and an obvious target once the state decided to move against the Church's property. Nothing else of their lives is transmitted — not their origins, their ages, nor the regions they served.
The sixth of August
Valerian's rescript of the summer of 258 directed that bishops, presbyters and deacons be executed as soon as identified. On 6 August the Roman clergy were assembled with Sixtus in the cemetery of Praetextatus, in defiance of the standing prohibition on the use of the Christian burial-grounds, and the soldiers took them there. Cyprian of Carthage, writing to Successus within weeks, reports that Sixtus was executed in the cemetery on the eighth day before the ides of August "and with him four deacons." The Depositio martyrum compiled a century later enters the day thus: VIII idus Aug. Xysti in Callisti et in Praetextati Agapiti et Felicissimi — Sixtus laid in the cemetery of Callistus, Agapitus and Felicissimus in that of Praetextatus, where they fell. They were beheaded.
Their bodies were buried where they died, and their tomb in the Praetextatus catacomb was a station of the Roman pilgrimage itineraries of the seventh century; relics were later moved to the church of St Sixtus and thence, in the Middle Ages, dispersed. The Roman passio of St Laurence, composed two or three centuries after the event, absorbed them into its narrative, where they appear as the deacons who suffer beside the pope in the catacomb while the archdeacon is left behind for a worse death.
Feast and commemoration
August 10 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 23), within the Dormition Fast and the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. They have no proper hymnography in the Greek Menaion, whose notice for the day names only Laurence, Xystus and Hippolytus; the fuller company — Sixtus, Felicissimus, Agapitus, Romanus and Hippolytus — is listed in the Slavic synaxaria and by the Orthodox Church in America under the heading "Martyr and Archdeacon Laurence, and those with him, of Rome." In the West their day is August 6, where the Depositio placed them, and their names were read at Rome in the proper of the day until the reform of the Latin calendar.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, 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
The two are painted as deacons, young or middle-aged, beardless or short-bearded, in the sticharion with the orarion over the left shoulder, holding the censer and the small domed artophorion, and bearing the martyr's cross — the type they share with Laurence and Stephen the Protomartyr. They occur almost only within scenes of the martyrdom of Sixtus in the Athonite menologion cycles, where they are the figures bowed beneath the executioner's sword beside their bishop, and are identified by the scene rather than by any personal attribute. No pre-1900 image of them alone has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Four deacons or two? Cyprian's letter says four died with Sixtus; the Depositio records two by name at Praetextatus. Later Roman tradition supplied a further four names — Januarius, Vincentius, Magnus and Stephanus — for the deacons of the cemetery, and the Latin martyrologies came to keep six in all. Whether the two lists are of one company variously transmitted, or of two distinct groups taken on the same day, cannot be determined; the Byzantine tradition names only Felicissimus and Agapitus.
- Not to be confused with the other Roman martyrs of these names: the Agapitus of Praeneste, a boy-martyr of the fourth century kept on August 18 in the West; nor with Agapitus of Synnada, nor Agapitus of the Kiev Caves, the unmercenary physician. A Felicissimus also appears among the martyrs of Todi and among the companions of St Symphorosa in the Western lists; the deacon of Rome is distinguished by his office and his day.
- Their day. They died on August 6 and are entered there in the Roman books; the Byzantine calendar keeps them on August 10 with Laurence, and this entry follows the Eastern usage.