Hesperus, Zoe, Cyriacus and Theodulus
The Holy Martyrs Hesperus and Zoe his wife, with their children Cyriacus and Theodulus, who suffered at Attalia
Martyr · d. c. 135, at Attalia in Pamphylia
Commemorated 2 May — Martyrdom in the furnace at Attalia under Hadrian
A whole household of slaves perfected together: Hesperus and his wife Zoe, with their two sons Cyriacus and Theodulus, servants of a rich pagan named Catullus at Attalia in Pamphylia, who suffered about the year 135, in the reign of Hadrian. They had been Christians from childhood and kept themselves from the meat and wine of the idol-sacrifices; when at a birthday feast in their master's house such food was sent down to the slaves, Zoe poured out the wine and threw away the flesh rather than be defiled. The sons were hung upon a tree and torn with iron claws while their parents stood by and encouraged them, and all four were then cast into a heated furnace, where they gave up their souls. Their bodies, the account says, were found untouched by the fire, and singing was heard over them. They are commemorated on May 2.
A Christian household in a pagan house
The passion places them at Attalia in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor — the port from which Paul and Barnabas had sailed home at the end of the first apostolic journey (Acts 14:25–26), and by the second century a city with a Christian community living under the ordinary pressures of provincial pagan life.
Hesperus and Zoe were husband and wife and slaves in the household of a wealthy citizen named Catullus, whose wife the accounts call Tetradia. They had two sons, Cyriacus and Theodulus, whom they raised in the faith; the synaxarion is explicit that all four had been Christians from childhood, and that the parents had taught the boys both the doctrine and the discipline of the Church — chiefly, in the circumstances they lived in, the discipline of refusing food that had been offered to idols. Slaves ate what their master's table sent them; and in a pagan house what the table sent was very often the meat of sacrifice. The family had contrived, quietly, to abstain.
Their master seems to have sent them at some period to work on a country estate away from the city, and it was on the household's return to Attalia, for the celebration of the birthday of Catullus's son, that the crisis came.
The refusal, and the furnace
At the feast, portions of the sacrificial meat and wine were sent from the master's table down to the slaves — an ordinary courtesy, and for these four an impossibility. Zoe acted for the household: she poured the wine out on the ground and threw away the meat, and would not let her sons touch it. It was she, too — the detail is preserved and is the moral centre of the account — who would not bless her sons to flee; they had wanted to escape the pagans' hands, and their mother judged that flight was not the answer, but confession.
The refusal was reported, and Catullus, enraged at the contempt shown to his gods and to his own table by his own property, ordered them tortured. The two brothers were taken first: stripped, hung up on a tree, and raked with iron hooks, while their father and mother were made to watch — and, watching, urged them to endure to the end and not to grieve for their bodies. Then all four together were thrown into a heated furnace, and in it they surrendered their souls to God.
The tradition adds two signs at the tomb of fire: the bodies were found whole and unconsumed when the furnace was opened, and angelic singing was heard over them, glorifying the confessors of the Lord. Christians took up the relics and buried them.
Feast and commemoration
May 2 (Old Calendar civil May 15). The four are a synaxarion commemoration of the second rank, without a proper canon in the printed Menaion, kept on the same day as the great feast of Athanasius of Alexandria; the Greek books commemorate them under the entry of the day's martyrs, and the Slavonic Prologue gives them a short life. They are honoured particularly as patrons of Christian households and of the family that confesses together — parents and children perfected in one martyrdom being a rarity even in the martyrologies.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength they cast down their persecutors and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
The four are painted as a family group: Hesperus a bearded man of middle age and Zoe in the veil and maphorion of a matron, each holding a cross, with the two sons — beardless youths in short tunics — standing between or before them, also with crosses. In menologion cycles the scene of the passion shows the furnace, the four figures standing in the flames unharmed with their hands raised in prayer, in the manner of the Three Youths in Babylon, which is the type their passion consciously recalls; a second scene shows the brothers hung from the tree and scourged while the parents look on. No pre-1900 image of these martyrs has been identified for this collection — the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for minor saints, covers only September to February and so contains no miniature for May 2.
Disputed questions
- The date. The synaxaria set the martyrdom under Hadrian (117–138), and about the year 135; other reckonings give 127 or 137. The reign is secure in the tradition, the year is not.
- The names. The father's name appears as Hesperus and, in Slavonic usage, as Esper; the elder son as Cyriacus (Kyriakos) and, in some Latin lists, as Cyriacus the younger. Because Zoe is by far the best-known name of the four, the group is often catalogued under hers alone — "Zoe of Attalia" — and it is she, not her husband, who carries the commemoration in many popular calendars.
- Not to be confused with the other martyrs named Zoe: Zoe of Rome, who suffered under Diocletian and is kept on December 18, and the penitent Zoe of Bethlehem (February 13). The Attalian Zoe is always named with her husband and sons.