Isaurus, Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus
The Holy Martyrs Isaurus the Deacon, and Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus, who suffered at Apollonia of Macedonia
Martyr · Deacon · d. c. 283
Commemorated 17 June — Beheading at Apollonia of Macedonia
Six martyrs of the third century who carry the printed service of June 17 in the Greek Menaion — the day's chief commemoration in Greek use, though the Slavonic books put them second. The company is led by Isaurus, a deacon of Athens, who with five companions crossed into Macedonia and came to Apollonia, where they lodged in a cave outside the city and went in to preach. Arrested and refusing to sacrifice, three of them — Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus — were beheaded first, and Isaurus, Basil and Innocent after them, about the year 283, in the persecution under Numerian. The Menaion's own notice of them is a single bare line of names: the narrative comes from the fuller passion preserved in the Greek synaxaristic collections.
An Athenian deacon and his companions
Isaurus is remembered as a deacon of the church of Athens — the one office and the one city that the tradition attaches firmly to any of the six. With him are named five companions: Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus. The mixture of the names is itself informative: two are plainly Greek (Basil, Hermias), three plainly Latin (Innocentius, Felix, Peregrinus), and Isauros is a provincial ethnic — "the Isaurian," a man of the wild highlands of southern Asia Minor, or descended from them. It is the ordinary onomastic mixture of a Balkan-Greek Christian community under the later third-century empire, not the tidy Greek roll a later invention would have produced.
Apollonia of Macedonia
The six went north out of Attica into Macedonia, and came to Apollonia — the city on the Via Egnatia, in the Chalcidic hinterland, on the road that carried the apostolic preaching itself between Philippi and Thessalonica (Acts 17:1). Whether they went as missionaries, or as refugees from a persecution at Athens, the passion does not say, and the two motives were rarely separable in that generation.
Outside the city they lodged in a cave, and from it went in to the Christians of Apollonia and preached openly. The preaching is what destroyed them: they were denounced, and taken.
The passion
Brought before the magistrate and commanded to sacrifice, all six confessed Christ. The passion divides them into two groups and two executions — the first, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus, were tortured and then beheaded; Isaurus, Basil and Innocent were kept, examined again, pressed with the promise of office and the threat of the sword, and, standing firm, were beheaded after them. The company is therefore not a single mass execution but a martyrdom in two stages, which is why the Greek books sometimes list the names in the order of the first group and sometimes in the order of the second, and why the six are never divided into two commemorations.
The date given is about 283–284, that is under Numerian, in the last of the sporadic persecutions before the general one of Diocletian — a period in which the local magistrate, rather than an imperial edict, was usually the immediate cause of a martyrdom.
Feast and commemoration
June 17 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 30). In the Greek books the six martyrs head the day and carry its printed office, with Manuel, Sabel and Ismael and Hypatius of Rufinianae commemorated after them; in the Slavonic books, and in Russian and Antiochian usage, the Persian brothers head the day and these six follow. The inversion is a genuine and long-standing divergence of the calendars, not an error in either. The feast falls within the window of the Apostles' Fast in most years, though not in all — the fast has no fixed beginning.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs Isaurus, Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias and Peregrinus, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
The six are painted as a company, in the manner of the martyr-groups of the menologia: a rank of standing figures in tunic and mantle, each holding the martyr's cross, their names written above the heads. Isaurus is distinguished as a deacon — the sticharion and the orarion over the left shoulder, and in the developed type a censer or a small casket in the hand — which sets him apart from his five lay companions and is the single reliable mark of identity in the group. Where the passion is illustrated, the two beheadings are shown as two scenes, three martyrs in each.
No pre-1900 image of these martyrs has been located for this collection: a search of Wikimedia Commons for Isaurus and his companions returns nothing, and the Menologion of Basil II — the first-resort source for minor saints — covers only September to February and so cannot serve a June commemoration.
Disputed questions
- The bareness of the record. The Menaion's synaxarion for June 17 gives only: Τῇ ΙΖ' τοῦ αὐτοῦ μηνός, μνήμη τῆς ἀθλήσεως τοῦ Ἁγίου Μάρτυρος Ἰσαύρου, καὶ τῶν σὺν αὐτῷ Βασιλείου, Ἰννοκεντίου, Φήλικος, Ἑρμείου καὶ Περεγρίνου — "the contest of the holy martyr Isaurus, and of those with him." No city, no emperor, no manner of death. Every element of the narrative above — Athens, the diaconate, Apollonia, the cave, the two executions, Numerian — comes from the fuller passion transmitted in the Greek synaxaristic collections and not from the liturgical notice. The corpus records the distinction rather than smoothing it over: the martyrdom of a company under Isaurus is anciently and firmly kept, and the circumstances rest on a later and less controllable witness.
- Order and spelling of the names. The lists vary between Ἑρμείας / Ἑρμείου (Hermias, Hermeas, Hermes) and between the orders "Isaurus, Basil, Innocent, Felix, Hermias, Peregrinus" (Slavonic and English usage) and "Isaurus, Basil, Innocent, Hermias, Felix, Peregrinus" (the Greek service book). Nothing turns on it.
- Not to be confused with the martyr Hermias of Comana (May 31), nor with the Peregrinus who suffered with Irenaeus and Irene; both names are common in the martyrologies and the day-lists have run them together.