Leontius of Tripoli

A Greek officer on the Phoenician coast

The transmitted Passion presents Leontius as Greek by descent — the Greek notices say of Hellas, and one branch of the tradition names Aegina — who rose in the imperial service by merit rather than birth and was posted to Tripoli, the Phoenician port set between Byblos and Orthosia at the foot of Mount Lebanon. He held a command; the Greek texts call him στρατηλάτης, the Slavonic books "military commander," and the Latin and Syriac versions agree that he was a man of rank in the garrison rather than a private soldier.

What the Passion dwells on is not his rank but his manner of holding it. He is described as a man of unusual physical courage who was also gentle in judgment, who kept nothing of his pay, and who spent what came to him on the poor, on widows and on orphans — the classic marks by which a hagiographer signals a soldier who has already, in effect, renounced the world. He made no secret of his faith. He spoke of Christ to the men under him and to the townspeople, and the Passion says that many at Tripoli left the temples on his account. It is this — a Christian officer visibly emptying the shrines of a great pagan port — that sets the machinery of the persecution moving.

Hadrian, and the arrest that failed

A senator named Hadrian was sent to Phoenicia with authority to compel sacrifice. Hearing of Leontius before he had even reached the city, he sent ahead the tribune Hypatius with a detachment, and among them the soldier Theodulus, to seize him and hold him for trial.

The arrest never happened as ordered. On the road Hypatius fell into a violent fever and lay dying; and in his sleep — the Passion is careful to say it was in a dream, not a waking vision — an angel stood over him and told him that if he wished to live he must say three times, he and his men with him, God of Leontius, help me. He said it, and rose up well. Theodulus, who had watched the fever break at the naming of a God he did not yet worship, was the first to be persuaded; and the whole party went on to Tripoli looking not for a prisoner but for a teacher.

They found Leontius, and he catechised them. At their baptism, the Passion relates, a cloud of light overshadowed the newly-illumined and a rain fell from it upon them — the tradition's way of saying that the sacrament was completed from heaven where no font and no presbyter were at hand. The episode is the theological centre of the whole account: the soldier sent to bind the martyr is loosed by him, and the water of baptism is supplied by the sky.

The trial and the three deaths

Hadrian, arriving and finding his own officers among the accused, tried them together. Promises came first — rank, money, the emperor's favour — and then the instruments. Hypatius was torn with the iron claws; Theodulus was beaten with rods; and when neither would sacrifice, both were taken outside and beheaded. Their entry is kept with his; see Hypatius and Theodulus.

Leontius was reserved for a longer death. He was hung up — the Greek texts say from a pillar, with a stone bound about his neck to drag the body down — and beaten with sinews and rods until he died under the blows, praying, so the account has it, for the city. The metrical synaxarion catches the whole passion in a single image: Ἄκμων τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Λεοντίου — the body of Leontius is an anvil, and the strokes that fall on it only shape and never break it. The couplet's second line ties the image to the calendar: on the eighteenth he died of the blows.

His body was thrown out beyond the walls and left; the Christians of Tripoli took it up by night and buried it near the city. One detail of the Passion is unusual enough to be worth recording: the notary of the court is said to have set down the charge, the interrogation and the sentence on tablets of tin, and these were laid in the grave with the martyr. Whatever its historical value, the claim tells us that the community at Tripoli believed itself to possess documentary proof of its martyr — a claim made by a shrine that had something to show.

The shrine at Tripoli, and Severus of Antioch

The cult is far better attested than the martyrdom. By the fifth century the martyrion of St Leontius at Tripoli was among the notable shrines of the Phoenician coast, and it is fixed in the record of Antiochian history by one event above all: in 488 the young Pisidian student Severus — later Patriarch of Antioch (512–518), the greatest theologian of the anti-Chalcedonian party and one of the most considerable preachers the see of Antioch has ever had — went down from Berytus, where he was reading law, and was baptised in the church of St Leontius at Tripoli, with his fellow-student Evagrius standing sponsor. The episode is told by Severus' friend and biographer Zacharias Scholasticus, and it means that one of the decisive baptisms of sixth-century Syrian Christianity was performed at this martyr's tomb.

The dedication travelled inland as well as along the coast. The great cathedral at Bosra, built in 512/513 in the Provincia Arabia, was dedicated to Sergius, Bacchus and Leontius — Leontius standing there beside the two soldier-martyrs of Rusafa as a third patron of the Christian soldiery of the Syrian frontier. Churches of his name are recorded elsewhere in Syria and in Egypt, and his Passion survives not only in Greek (the several recensions catalogued as BHG 986–988) but in Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Latin — a spread of versions that belongs to a genuinely popular eastern cult and not to a bookish one.

Tripoli itself has been a see of the Patriarchate of Antioch without interruption; the modern Metropolis of Tripoli, al-Koura and their Dependencies keeps June 18 as the memory of the martyr who suffered in its own streets, and among Antiochian Christians in the Levant and in the diaspora the name Leontius is carried in his honour.