Laodicius the Jailer
The Holy Martyr Laodicius, keeper of the prison at Trajanopolis
Martyr · d. c. 177
Commemorated 13 May — Beheaded after confessing Christ at the miracle of Saint Glyceria
Laodicius was the keeper of the prison at Trajanopolis in Thrace during the imprisonment of the virgin-martyr Glyceria, about the year 177. Set to watch a door sealed with the governor's own ring, he found his prisoner alive and her wounds healed, and — believing himself ruined and about to take his own life — was stopped by the saint, catechised by her, and brought to faith in Christ. He put on the chains he had used to bind her, confessed Christ before the tribunal as the true God, and was beheaded with the sword. The Christians took up his body secretly and buried it. His whole story is a single episode of another saint's passion, and the Church keeps him on Glyceria's day.
The keeper of the prison
Everything transmitted of Laodicius belongs to the passion of Saint Glyceria, and the Greek synaxaristes gives him only a few lines: he was δεσμοφύλαξ, the warder, of the prison at Trajanopolis of Thrace at the time when the martyr Glyceria was shut up in it. He was a pagan and a public servant, and his office was to hold her fast until the governor Sabinus should call for her.
The sealed door
Glyceria had been hung up and the skin torn from her head, and was then thrown into the cell and the door sealed with the governor's ring, so that no Christian might bring her food and no one might claim she had been treated leniently. When the seal was broken on the appointed day, Laodicius found her not dying but whole: her wounds closed, her body unwasted, having been fed — the passion says — by an angel. His first thought was not wonder but terror. Concluding that the prisoner in his charge had somehow been substituted or had escaped, and knowing what the law did to a warder who lost a condemned prisoner, he was on the point of killing himself. It was Glyceria who held him back and told him plainly what had happened.
Confession and beheading
The change in him was immediate and total. He is said to have taken up the very fetters with which he had bound the saint and put them on himself, and to have gone with her before the tribunal, where he declared to Sabinus and to the crowd what he had seen with his own eyes in the prison, and confessed Christ as the true God. He was condemned at once, and being newly chosen of God and not yet baptised with water, he was baptised in his own blood: he was beheaded with the sword. Christians took up his remains secretly and buried them with reverence. He is thus one of that considerable company of executioners, guards and onlookers whom the Church honours as martyrs made in the moment of another's martyrdom.
Feast and commemoration
May 13 (church date; New Calendar civil May 13, Old Calendar civil May 26), the day of Glyceria, whose passion is his own. The Greek and Slavic synaxaria both list him separately, immediately after her; the Menaion's proper service for the day is Glyceria's, and Laodicius is commemorated within it. He has no service of his own, and where a hymn is needed the common of a martyr is sung with his name.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Laodicius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
Laodicius has no established iconographic type of his own. Where he is shown at all it is within the narrative cycle of Saint Glyceria's passion: a middle-aged man in the short belted tunic and cloak of a servant of the courts, sometimes with the keys or the fetters of his office, standing at the opened prison door with his hands raised in astonishment, or kneeling before the martyr. In a lone portrait he would be painted as a martyr in tunic and mantle holding the cross. His feast falls in May, so the Menologion of Basil II — which covers only September to February — contains nothing for him, and no pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Laodicius has no independent passion, no relics-tradition and no proper hymnody: he is named in the passion of Glyceria and in the synaxarion notice derived from it, and nothing more is transmitted — not his age, his family, nor the place of his burial. This entry is therefore deliberately short; the record is thin, and it is not supplemented here.
- His name appears in the manuscripts and calendars as Laodicius, Laodikios and (rarely) Laodicus; there is no evidence that the name is connected with the city of Laodicea.
- Some English calendars call him simply "the jailer of Saint Glyceria," and a few omit him altogether, folding his commemoration into hers.