Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus
The Holy Martyrs Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus of Nicomedia
Martyr · d. c. 303
Commemorated 21 April — Martyrdom at Nicomedia under Diocletian
Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus were officials of the court of Diocletian — pagans by upbringing and by office — who were converted by what they saw at the trial of the Great Martyr George: his endurance under torture, the wonders worked through him, and his refusal to be broken. Having believed, they declared themselves Christians before the emperor and reproached him for his impiety and cruelty, and were condemned. Quadratus was beheaded; Isaac and Apollos were left to die of hunger in prison, about the year 303. The Church commemorates the three together on April 21, two days before the feast of the martyr whose witness converted them.
The record of these three martyrs is short, and belongs entirely to the great cycle of the passion of George of Lydda (Apr 23). That passion, in its developed Byzantine form, gathers around the Great Martyr a series of subsidiary conversions — the empress Alexandra, the magician Athanasius, soldiers and courtiers — each of whom is drawn to Christ by the spectacle of George's constancy and is martyred in consequence. Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus belong to that company, and the synaxaria transmit them in a few lines.
They were, the account says, men of Diocletian's own court, present in an official capacity at the interrogation of George at Nicomedia, the eastern capital where the persecution of 303 opened. What they had been brought to watch as a demonstration of imperial power convinced them of the opposite: that the God in whose name the young officer withstood the wheel, the lime-pit, and the iron boots was the true God. Their conversion was not private. They confessed Christ publicly, and — the detail the synaxaria preserve as the ground of their sentence — they rebuked the emperor to his face for his godlessness and for the blood he was shedding.
Sentence followed at once. Quadratus, whose name the Greek books give as Κοδρᾶτος, was beheaded with the sword. Isaac and Apollos were shut up in prison and deprived of food, and died there of starvation — a death by slow attrition rather than by the executioner, and one which the martyrologies treat as no less a martyrdom. The year is given as 303, at the beginning of the last and greatest persecution.
Nothing further is transmitted: no relics, no shrine, no translation, no proper hymnography. Their memory survives because it is attached to George's, and it survives in the calendar of the whole Byzantine rite.
Feast and commemoration
April 21 (church date; New Calendar civil April 21, Old Calendar civil May 4). The commemoration is universal in the Byzantine rite but of the simplest rank: the day's propers belong to the hieromartyr Januarius of Benevento and to Theodore of Perge, and these three are read at the synaxarion and served, where served at all, from the common of many martyrs. Their placement two days before April 23, the feast of the Great Martyr George, is not accidental: the calendar keeps them in the orbit of the passion to which they belong, as it does the several other converts of that cycle. They appear in the Slavonic and Greek books alike, and in the Antiochian Archdiocese's listing for the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of many martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received from Thee, our God, the crowns of incorruption; for having Thy strength, they cast down their persecutors and broke the feeble arrogance of the demons. By their supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The three are written as martyrs of the courtly type: mature men in the chlamys and patterned tunic of imperial officials, or in the short military tunic where the tradition makes them soldiers, each holding the cross of the martyrs; Quadratus may be distinguished by the sword, Isaac and Apollos by the prison and the emaciation of their hunger. Their proper place, however, is not in single panels but in the cycle of the Great Martyr George: in extended vita-icons of George, with scenes framing the central figure, the conversion and death of the courtiers who believed at his trial appear among the compartments, and it is there that these martyrs are most often to be found. They also occupy their line in the monthly menaion icons for April, under the twenty-first day.
No pre-1900 image of these three martyrs, alone or as a group, has been identified for this repository; the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February.
Disputed questions
- The date. The synaxaria place their contest in 303; some books give the reign of Diocletian without a year (284–305). Because the Nicomedian phase of the persecution and the passion of George are both dated to 303, that year is the natural one.
- Their office. "Officials at the court of Diocletian" is as far as the sources go. Whether they were soldiers of the imperial guard, civil functionaries, or courtiers cannot be determined; some retellings make them soldiers, on the analogy of the other converts in George's passion.
- The names. Apollos also appears as Apollo and Apollonius; Quadratus is the Latin form of the Greek Kodratos. They are not to be confused with the apostolic Quadratus of Athens (Sep 21) or Quadratus of Corinth (Mar 10), nor with the Apostle Apollos of the Seventy named by St Paul, nor with any of the ascetic Isaacs of this corpus.
- Dependence on the passion of George. The historical value of the whole cycle of conversions in George's passion is doubtful, since the surviving acts of George are late and much embroidered. What the calendar preserves may be the memory of genuine Nicomedian martyrs of 303 later attached to the Great Martyr's story; the Church commemorates them as it has received them.