Heliodorus and Dosa of Persia
The Holy Martyrs Heliodorus and Dosa, who suffered in Persia
Martyr · d. c. 380, in Persia under Shapur II
Commemorated 20 August — Martyrdom in Persia under Shapur II
Heliodorus and Dosa are two of the numberless martyrs of the Church of Persia under Shapur II, commemorated together on August 20. The synaxaria transmit their names, the country of their passion and the reign under which they suffered, and nothing more; the year given is 380. They belong to the forty-year persecution which is, by a great margin, the largest sustained killing of Christians in the ancient world, and which the Byzantine calendar remembers in a long series of such brief paired and grouped notices scattered through the year.
The record
The whole transmitted notice is that Heliodorus and Dosa — the second name also written Dausa — suffered for Christ in Persia, in the reign of the Sasanian king Shapur II, and that the year was 380. No acts, no place, no judge, no manner of death has come down with them, and none is supplied here.
The persecution to which they belong
What can honestly be said of them is what is known of the persecution that took them. Christianity had spread through Mesopotamia and the Persian heartland for two centuries under a Zoroastrian monarchy that had, on the whole, left it alone. The change came after Constantine's conversion made the Roman emperor the declared protector of Christians everywhere, including those of a rival empire: from that moment the Church in Persia was suspect not as a religion but as a fifth column. The persecution opened about 339–340 with a punitive double poll-tax laid on the Christians alone and the demand that the catholicos Simeon bar Sabba'e collect it; his refusal — he would not be made the king's tax-gatherer against his own flock — brought his execution with a great company of clergy, and thereafter the killing ran on, in waves, for forty years.
Its scale is unlike anything in the Roman persecutions. The Syriac martyrologies and the Acts of the Persian Martyrs count victims in the thousands and in some recensions far higher; whole villages, whole clergies, and long files of Christian captives deported from the Roman frontier cities during Shapur's campaigns were put to death for refusing to worship the sun and the elements. Bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated virgins and laypeople of every rank appear in the lists, frequently in pairs and small groups exactly like this one, and often with the same sparse notice: two names, the country, the king.
The persecution ended only with Shapur's own death. It is this that raises the one chronological difficulty in the notice: Shapur II died in 379, and a martyrdom "under Shapur in 380" is therefore a year late on the received chronology. Either the date is approximate — as most dates in these notices are — or the martyrs fell in the last months of the reign and the year has been rounded forward. The entry records the date as transmitted and the difficulty with it.
Feast and commemoration
August 20 (church date; New Calendar civil August 20, Old Calendar civil September 2), within the Afterfeast of the Dormition. The pair is carried in the Greek synaxaria and by the OCA; the Russian calendar for the day (September 2 New Style), consulted live, does not list them. No proper office is appointed; the day is sung with the Dormition afterfeast and the Prophet Samuel, and the martyrs are commemorated at the sixth ode and in the synaxarion reading.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs Heliodorus and Dosa, O Lord, in their contest received imperishable crowns from thee our God; for having thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble arrogance of the demons: by their prayers save thou our souls.
Iconography
The Persian martyrs are painted in the general Byzantine manner of martyr-pairs — two figures standing frontally, in the long tunic and cloak of the eastern laity, each holding the cross of confession — and the menologia distinguish them from Roman martyrs chiefly by dress, giving them the belted eastern coat and sometimes the soft cap of Persia. Where a persecution scene is included, the fire-altar of the Zoroastrian cult before which they refused to bow stands in the background.
No storable image has been located. No pre-1900 icon or miniature identifiable as these two martyrs was found in a live search; the Menologion of Basil II, which does illustrate many of the Persian martyrs, covers only September to February and cannot supply an August commemoration.
Disputed questions
- The date. The synaxarion's "380" cannot be reconciled exactly with the death of Shapur II in 379. The discrepancy is noted, not resolved.
- The name Dosa. The Greek Δοσᾶς stands behind the Slavic Доса and the English Dosa; the form Dausa also occurs, and it is the ordinary Greek transcription of a Syriac name borne by more than one figure among the Persian martyrs. Whether the Dosa of August 20 is to be identified with any of the Syriac-named martyrs of the same period is a question the Greek notice does not raise and this entry does not attempt to answer on the strength of a name alone.
- Not to be confused with Heliodorus of Magydos, the martyr of Pamphylia. The Persian martyr of August 20 shares only the name.