Forty Martyrs of Sebaste

Sebaste, the legions, and the persecution of Licinius

Sebaste (Sebastea, the modern Sivas) in Armenia Minor was, like the neighbouring Cappadocia, a nursery of martyrs; a generation before the Forty it had already given the Church Eustratius and his companions, the Five Martyrs of Sebaste, and it would keep the memory of Blaise its bishop and of the martyr Severian, who trained the Forty for their contest. The region was heavily garrisoned, and its churches counted many soldiers among the faithful — for the frontier legions of the East had been Christianised in numbers long before the peace of the Church.

The setting of the martyrdom is the brief but sharp persecution launched by Licinius. In 313 Licinius had joined Constantine in the Edict of Milan that granted the Christians peace; but as the two Augusti drifted toward the civil war that would end in Licinius's defeat (324), Licinius, ruler of the East and increasingly the champion of the old gods against his Christian rival, turned against the faith in his own dominions. He purged Christians from the army and the court and, in the provinces, revived the sacrifice-test. It was in this setting, about the winter of 320, that a company of soldiers stationed at Sebaste — the tradition names them men of the Twelfth Legion, the "Fulminata" or Thundering Legion, an old unit long associated in Christian memory with the "rain miracle" under Marcus Aurelius — were commanded to prove their loyalty by sacrificing to the idols, and refused as one body.

The officers charged with the province are named in the acts as the dux Lysias and the governor Agricolaus (Agricola) — the same pair of names that recurs across the Armenian martyr-acts of the period. Before them the forty soldiers confessed themselves Christians and soldiers of Christ before Caesar. Threats, then flattery — promotion, the emperor's favour — were tried and failed; the martyrs answered that they would not exchange the imperishable for the perishable, and were cast into prison to await sentence.

The night on the ice

The sentence devised for them was calculated to break the will rather than the body outright, and to make apostasy easy at every moment. On a bitter winter night the forty were stripped naked and driven out onto the surface of a frozen lake (or pond) beside the city, there to stand exposed to the killing cold until morning. On the shore, in full view, a bath-house was heated and left open and steaming: any man who could bear no more had only to leave the ice and step into the warm water — and, by that act, to renounce Christ. The cruelty was in the choice held out all night long, a hand's breadth away.

Through the dark the martyrs stood together and kept up one another's courage, praying — in words the hymnography loves to repeat — that the cold might not carry off any of their number before the crown, that all forty might arrive together: "Sharp is the winter, but sweet is Paradise; painful the ice, but delightful the enjoyment. Let us not turn aside, O fellow-soldiers; let us endure a little, that we may be crowned. Forty have entered the contest; let forty be crowned; let not one be wanting from the number." As the night deepened one man's resolve failed: unable to endure, he broke from the company and ran for the bath — but the shock of the sudden heat upon his frozen body killed him on the very threshold, so that he lost both his life and his crown, a warning the homilists dwell on. Thirty-nine remained.

Then came the wonder that completes the story. The guards set to watch the lake had lit fires and taken turns sleeping; one of them, a soldier named Aglaius (Aglaïos), lying awake, saw a great light over the lake and thirty-nine radiant crowns descending from heaven, one hovering above each of the standing men — thirty-nine, not forty, the fortieth wanting because of the deserter. Understanding what he saw, and moved past all fear, Aglaius roused his fellow guards, cast off his own clothes, cried out "I too am a Christian!", and ran onto the ice to take the empty place and complete the number. So the company of forty was made whole again — a pagan executioner exchanged for the fallen confessor — and forty crowns came down.

The morning, and the mother of Meliton

At daybreak the martyrs were found still alive, though frozen past standing, and the governor ordered them dispatched. Their legs were broken with hammers (crurifragium), and their bodies gathered up to be burned on a pyre and the ashes flung into the river, that the Christians should have no relics to venerate.

Here the tradition sets its most tender and most famous scene. The youngest of the company, Meliton, a mere youth, was still breathing when the executioners came to load the bodies onto the carts for the fire; thinking that so young a man might yet be saved if his mother pleaded with him, they left him lying on the ground. But his mother stood by, and she would not have it. Refusing to let her son be separated from his brothers in the contest, or to see him live only to fall away, she took up his broken body in her own arms and carried him after the carts to the pyre, urging him onward to the crown — "Go, my child, go with thy companions; be not left behind from the forty; do not deprive me of the glory of being mother of a martyr." He died as she bore him, or upon the fire beside the rest, and so the forty went together into death as they had stood together in life. The image of the mother carrying her martyred son to the flame is one of the most cherished in Orthodox hagiography and passes straight into the day's hymns.

The bodies were burned and the bones cast into the river. But the relics were not lost: the tradition tells that the bones, gathered downstream, shone in the water, and that the bishop of Sebaste (a Peter, not to be confused with Peter of Sebaste the brother of Basil) was shown in a vision where they lay, so that the Christians recovered them by night and kept them.

The Testament of the Forty

Among the treasures of the early Church that have come down from this martyrdom is the Testament of the Forty Martyrs (Testamentum XL martyrum), a document dictated by the martyrs in prison, before their contest, and preserved in Greek. In it the forty — many of them named — set down their common last will, directing above all that their relics not be divided but kept together in one place, at the village of Sarim near the town of Zela, in the care of named presbyters, and greeting by name their kinsmen and fellow Christians. The Testament is a rare first-person voice from the age of the martyrs, witnessing both to the reality of the company and to the early conviction that their bones were a shared inheritance of the whole Church, not to be scattered — a wish which, as it happened, the devotion of the faithful soon overrode.

The roster of names

The tradition transmits the names of all forty, and though the spellings vary across the Greek, Slavonic, and Latin recensions (and one or two names differ between manuscripts), the received roll is:

Cyrion (Quirio), Candidus, Domnus, Hesychius, Heraclius, Smaragdus, Eunoicus, Valens, Vivianus, Claudius, Priscus, Theodulus, Eutyches, John, Xanthias, Helianus, Sisinius, Angius, Aetius, Flavius, Acacius, Ecdicius, Lysimachus, Alexander, Elias, Gorgonius, Theophilus, Dometian, Gaius, Leontius, Athanasius, Cyril, Sacerdon, Nicholas, Valerius, Philoctimon, Severian, Chudion, Aglaius, and Meliton.

Cyrion (Quirio) and Candidus are named at the head as the two most learned and the spokesmen of the company; Meliton is the youngest, the son carried by his mother; and Aglaius is the convert guard who took the deserter's place, so that the man who completed the forty had begun the night as their executioner.

Relics and their dispersal

Contrary to the martyrs' own request that their bones be kept together, the relics of the Forty were soon dispersed as widely as those of any saints of the early Church — a measure of how quickly and how universally their cult spread. Within two generations their relics were at Caesarea in Cappadocia, where Basil the Great built a martyrium for them and preached on their feast; at Annisa in Pontus, where the mother of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, the righteous Emmelia, obtained a portion and was herself buried beside them; at Constantinople, where the empress Pulcheria built and enriched churches in their honour, and where the relics were the object of a celebrated discovery-narrative told by Sozomen; and in the West, at Brescia, where bishop Gaudentius enshrined relics brought from the East and preached upon them. From these centres the veneration of the Forty radiated through the whole Christian world, East and West, so that few companies of martyrs are so nearly universal.

Homilies and the literary legacy

The Forty were, from the fourth century, a favourite theme of the great preachers, and their martyrdom is unusually well attested in contemporary oratory:

• Basil the Great delivered a homily on the Forty Martyrs (Homily 19) at Caesarea on their feast, about the year 373 — the earliest and most influential encomium, source of much of the tradition's language, including the martyrs' cry on the ice and the reflection that a company of forty, unlike a single martyr, offers every city and household a share in its patronage.
• Gregory of Nyssa, Basil's brother, preached more than one homily In the Forty Martyrs (the manuscripts transmit two or three), in which he recalls that his own mother Emmelia possessed their relics and that he had venerated them from childhood at the family shrine — a personal witness that ties the Cappadocian family to the cult.
• Gregory the Theologian and, in the Syriac East, Ephrem the Syrian also composed encomia; Gaudentius of Brescia preached on them in the Latin West; and the Testament and the passion-acts circulated widely.

This density of fourth-century testimony — the Testament, and homilies by Basil, the two Gregories, Ephrem, and Gaudentius, all within a century of the event — makes the Forty one of the best-documented martyrdoms of the age.