Five Martyrs of Ascalon
The Holy Five Martyrs who suffered at Ascalon
Martyr
Commemorated 31 May — Martyrdom by being dragged on the ground at Ascalon
Five martyrs, whose names the tradition has not preserved, suffered at Ascalon on the coast of Palestine and were dragged along the ground until they died — the whole of what the synaxarion transmits of them, conveyed in a single verse which turns their death into an image of a bed made of the earth itself. Neither the reign, the year, nor the occasion of their martyrdom is recorded. They are kept on May 31 as one of the many small anonymous companies by which the fixed calendar holds open the memory of martyrs whose histories were lost while their number and their city were remembered.
Ascalon
Ascalon (Ἀσκάλων, the modern Ashkelon) was one of the five ancient cities of the Philistine pentapolis and, in the Roman and Byzantine periods, a prosperous port of the province of Palestine — a city of temples, of a famous cult of a local Aphrodite-Astarte, and of a mixed Greek, Syrian and Jewish population. It was sufficiently pagan in character to be a natural site of persecution, and Eusebius, who as bishop of Caesarea knew the coast intimately, records martyrs of the neighbouring Palestinian cities in his Martyrs of Palestine. The city's Christian community afterwards produced bishops who sat at the councils, and the place is remembered in the calendar in more than one notice.
What is transmitted
Of these five the synaxarion preserves three things and no more: that they were five, that they suffered at Ascalon, and the manner of their death — they were bound and dragged over the ground until life left them. This is a recognised Roman punishment, inflicted by fastening the condemned behind horses or oxen, or by drawing them over rough or thorn-strewn ground, and it appears in a number of Palestinian and Syrian passions.
The commemorative couplet attached to their notice makes a grim figure of it: that men dragged along the ground had the ground itself spread beneath them for a strange and alien bedding. The verse is the only literary trace of them, and it suggests that by the time the synaxaria were compiled nothing beyond the bare fact survived; the compiler had a number, a place and a manner of death, and made a distich of it rather than invent a passion.
Anonymous companies in the calendar
Entries of this kind — "the five martyrs at Ascalon," "the seven martyrs at Samosata," "the martyrs of Nicomedia" — are not defects in the calendar but a deliberate feature of it. The Church's memory of the persecutions was far larger than its records, and the synaxaria kept the numbers and the cities precisely so that the nameless would not fall out of the liturgical year altogether. No relics, church, or proper office attaches to this company, and nothing further should be asserted of them than the notice allows.
Feast and commemoration
May 31 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 13), the last day of the church month of May. The commemoration is transmitted in the Greek synaxaria and does not appear in the Slavonic and Russian calendars of the day. No proper service is appointed; where the memory is kept liturgically the office is sung from the common of two or more martyrs.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
O holy martyrs, who fought the good fight and received your crowns, intercede with the Lord that he may have mercy on our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Anonymous companies of this kind are painted in the menologia as a rank of identical martyr-figures — here five, in tunic and mantle, of varied ages, each holding the cross, gathered under a single inscription naming the number and the city rather than any name. Where the manner of death is illustrated, the painters show the martyrs bound and drawn behind horses. No pre-1900 icon of this company has been identified for this collection, and none is likely to exist as a distinct image: nameless groups are ordinarily absorbed into the general representations of "All the Martyrs."
Disputed questions
- Date and persecution. None is transmitted. The manner of death and the Palestinian setting would fit either the third-century persecutions or the Diocletianic; no dating is offered here, and this entry carries no century field, indexing instead among the saints of undetermined date.
- Names. No names are given in the Greek notice. Where a modern list supplies names for this company, they are borrowed from other Palestinian martyr groups and should not be trusted.
- Not the martyrs of Gaza or Caesarea. Palestine's coastal cities each contributed companies to the calendar, and modern lists occasionally merge them. This notice belongs to Ascalon alone.