Heliconis of Thessalonica

The Holy Martyr Heliconis of Thessalonica

Martyr · Virgin · d. 244, at Corinth

Commemorated 28 May — Martyrdom by beheading at Corinth

Heliconis was a Christian woman of Thessalonica who, in the middle of the third century, went of her own accord to Corinth during a persecution and preached openly in the city against the worship of idols. Arrested and brought before the governor, she endured a long and inventive series of torments — the furnace, the flaying of her scalp, the burning of her head and breasts — and then, feigning consent to sacrifice, had herself led in procession to the temple, where she was left alone and broke every idol in it. Beaten and imprisoned, she was healed in the night by a vision of Christ with the Archangels Michael and Gabriel; thrown to three lions, she was not touched by them; and at last she was beheaded, in the year given by the tradition as 244. She is one of the boldest of the women martyrs of the Greek synaxarion, and among the very few whose passion is built around a deliberate, premeditated destruction of a pagan sanctuary.

Thessalonica and Corinth

The passion gives Heliconis no family and no age; she appears already a Christian and already at the height of her purpose. Her city is Thessalonica, the metropolis of Macedonia, and the Greek and Slavonic titles both attach her to it — Ἑλικωνὶς ἡ ἐν Θεσσαλονίκῃ. But she did not suffer there. The narrative has her arrive at Corinth, across the Aegean and down through Greece, precisely because a persecution of Christians was in progress in that city: she went to it, not away from it. Corinth in the third century was the capital of the province of Achaia and one of the most thoroughly pagan cities of the Greek world — the seat of the Isthmian games, of the cult of Aphrodite on Acrocorinth, and of the temples of the forum — and it is against those temples that her whole struggle is directed.

Nothing in the passion suggests she was seeking martyrdom passively. She came, the notice says, and urged the pagans to leave off serving senseless idols and to worship instead the one God, the Maker of all. She preached in public, as a woman, in a Roman provincial capital under persecution; the arrest followed at once.

Before the governor

The judge is named Perinus in the transmitted text (the form varies: Περῖνος, Perennis). He tried first persuasion and honours and then threats, and got nothing; the passion is emphatic that both the flattery and the intimidation failed on the same ground — she would not sacrifice.

The tortures follow in the manner of the later Greek passions, escalating in cruelty and punctuated by deliverances:

She was thrown into a heated furnace, and came out unharmed, an angel having cooled the flames.
Taking her for a sorceress — the standard pagan reading of a Christian miracle, and one the passion returns to three times — the governor devised worse: they tore the skin from her head, and burned her head and her breasts with fire.
The torture was then halted, and the governor changed his approach entirely: he offered her honours and the office of priestess if she would sacrifice.

The destruction of the idols

Here the passion does something unusual. Heliconis appeared to consent. The pagan priests and a crowd of citizens conducted her to the temple in triumph, with trumpets and drums; and at her own request they left her alone inside to make her offering. Alone among the gods of Corinth, she threw down and shattered them all.

When the priests came in and saw what had been done, they cried out for the death of "the sorceress." She was beaten, and thrown into prison, where she lay five days. There Christ the Saviour appeared to her with the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, and healed her of every wound — the vision that the service for the day makes the centre of her praise.

Martyrdom

She was condemned to the beasts. Three starving lions were loosed into the arena; they came to her quietly and lay down at her feet. The crowd shouted again for her death as a sorceress — and at that the lions leapt out of the arena into the seats, and the people fled. The governor, out of expedients, ordered her beheaded.

She went to the execution, the passion says, with joy, and heard as she went a voice calling her to the dwellings of heaven. Her body was taken up and buried reverently by the Christians of Corinth. The year transmitted for her contest is 244.

Feast and commemoration

May 28 (church date; New Calendar civil May 28, Old Calendar civil June 10), always within the Pentecostarion. She is kept universally — the Greek Menaion and Great Synaxaristes give her third place in the day, after Eutychius of Melitene and the martyrs Crescens, Paul and Dioscorides; the Slavonic books and the OCA list her fourth; Bulgarian usage keeps her under the title of Corinth. She is served from the common of a woman martyr; no proper akolouthia survives, though the day's canon material refers to her prison-vision. There is no recorded shrine of her relics at Corinth.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a woman martyr)

Thy lamb Heliconis, O Jesus, cries out with a great voice: Thee, my Bridegroom, do I love, and seeking Thee I contend; I am crucified with Thee and buried in Thy baptism; I suffer for Thy sake, that I may reign with Thee; I die for Thee, that I may live in Thee. Accept me as a spotless offering, sacrificed to Thee in love. By her intercessions, as Thou art merciful, save our souls.

Kontakion — Tone 2

Entering alone among the idols of Corinth, thou didst break them all in pieces, O bride of Christ; and the fire did not burn thee, and the lions lay down before thee. Wherefore, O Heliconis, healed in prison by the hands of thy Bridegroom and crowned by the sword, pray for those who honour thee.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Heliconis is painted as a woman martyr: young, the head covered with the maphorion, in a long tunic and mantle, holding the cross of her confession upright in the right hand and often the martyr's palm or a scroll. Her distinguishing scene, where a painter chooses to give her one, is the breaking of the idols: the saint alone in the temple among the toppled statues, with the priests entering behind her — an unusual subject, and the reason she occasionally appears in cycles concerned with the overthrow of paganism rather than in the ordinary ranks of virgin-martyrs. The furnace, the three lions couched at her feet, and the vision of Christ between Michael and Gabriel in the prison are the other episodes available to a narrative cycle.

No pre-1900 image of her has been located for this collection. Wikimedia Commons returns no results at all for the saint under the Greek (Ἑλικωνίς), Slavonic (Еликонида) or Latin (Heliconis) forms of her name; the searches that do match the string return entomological articles, a daughter of Thespius from Greek mythology, and unrelated Russian women of the same given name.

Disputed questions

"Of Thessalonica" or "of Corinth"? Both titles are in use and both are correct in their own sense: she was from Thessalonica and she suffered at Corinth. The Greek and Russian books call her of Thessalonica; Bulgarian usage calls her Еликонида Коринтска, "of Corinth," from the place of her passion. The two are the same woman and not a pair.
The date 244. The year falls in the reign of Philip the Arab (244–249) or at the very end of that of Gordian III, a period in which no general persecution is attested — Philip's reign is remembered rather for its toleration, and the Decian persecution does not begin until 250. Either the year is a scribal or calendrical approximation, or the "persecution of the Christians" at Corinth was a local action of the provincial governor rather than an imperial edict, which is entirely possible in the third century. The entry keeps the transmitted year and records the difficulty.
The character of the passion. The text is a late and rhetorical composition, not a court record: the sequence of furnace, mutilation, feigned apostasy, prison-vision and tame lions is drawn from the common stock of the Greek martyr-passions, and the governor's name is not otherwise attested for Achaia. What is distinctive, and may well be the historical core, is the iconoclastic act itself — a Christian woman destroying the images in a temple she had been invited to serve — since it is precisely the offence that would compel a capital sentence where mere confession might not.
The prison-vision and Helladius. The service for Helladius the hieromartyr, commemorated on this same day, contains the same motif: Christ visiting the martyr in prison and healing the wounds. Whether one notice has borrowed from the other, or both draw on a shared formula, the coincidence should be noticed rather than pressed.
No confusion of persons is likely, the name being rare: Ἑλικωνίς is borne by no other saint of the calendar. The Latin martyrologies occasionally print Helconis.