Marcellus and Codratus

The Holy Martyrs Marcellus and Codratus

Martyr

Commemorated 22 May — Marcellus made to drink molten lead; Codratus torn apart by horses

Marcellus and Codratus are two martyrs of the Byzantine synaxaria commemorated on May 22, of whom nothing is transmitted but their names and the manner of their deaths: Marcellus was made to swallow molten lead, and Codratus — the Greek notices name him Kodros — was torn to pieces by horses, dragged over the ground until he died. The synaxarion gives each a single line of verse and no more: that Marcellus drank the boiling lead as easily as a man drinks water, and that Codratus, having run his course as a horseman runs it, lifted his hands and received the crown. Their place, their century, and the persecution under which they suffered are not recorded.

What the record contains

The two martyrs belong to that large class of the Byzantine calendar for whom the Synaxarion of Constantinople preserves a name, a mode of death, and a couplet of verse — and nothing else. There is no passion, no city, no consular date, no governor named. What the notices give is this:

Marcellus (Μάρκελλος) was condemned to drink molten lead — a punishment the synaxaria attribute to a handful of martyrs, poured into the mouth of a confessor who would not be silenced. The distich for him turns on the martyr's indifference to the torment: he took the boiling metal as though it were a draught of water.
Codratus (Κόδρος, also written Κοδράτος) was dragged to death by horses, his body torn as the animals were driven. His distich draws on the language of the hippodrome — the course run, the goal reached, the hands lifted for the crown — the same athletic figure the Byzantine hymnographers apply to every martyr, but here literalised by the instrument of his death.

The two are transmitted together in the day's list, and are kept together here as a single commemoration on the group principle of the project's constitution: neither has an independent office, proper hymns, or separate cultus, and neither is known apart from the other's notice. Because no date is transmitted, the entry is indexed among the saints of undetermined century.

The manner of their deaths

Both punishments are attested in Roman practice and both recur in the martyrologies. Molten lead or pitch poured down the throat is recorded of several martyrs of the third and early fourth centuries; it was a magistrate's answer to a confessor whose speech could not be stopped, and the hagiographers habitually record that the martyr received it without flinching — the point of Marcellus's distich. Dragging behind horses was a soldier's execution and a spectacle punishment, inflicted on the condemned in the arena or on the road outside a city; it is the death also of St Hippolytus in the Roman tradition, and of a number of Eastern martyrs. Neither detail localises the martyrs or dates them; both are what the synaxarion chose to remember of them, and this entry does not invent a setting the record does not give.

Feast and commemoration

May 22 (church date; New Calendar civil May 22, Old Calendar civil June 4). The two martyrs have no proper office; their names are read at the synaxarion of Matins after the day's principal commemorations — the Second Ecumenical Council and Basiliscus of Comana — and the common of martyrs serves where their memory is kept liturgically. The commemoration is carried by the Greek synaxaria; it is absent from the Slavonic menaion for the day and from Antiochian parish calendars, so that in practice the cult is Greek, though the notices belong to the common Byzantine synaxarion.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)

Thy martyrs Marcellus and Codratus, O Lord, have received from Thee, our God, incorruptible crowns for the contest they endured; for, having Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and broke in pieces the powerless insolence of the demons. At their supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.

Iconography

Neither martyr has a received individual type. In the menologia they would be painted as the day's martyrs are painted: two men, one bearded and one young or beardless, standing in tunic and mantle, each with the cross of confession in the right hand and the left raised open in prayer. Where a painter chose to narrate their passions, the instruments would identify them: for Marcellus, the crucible or ladle of molten metal held to his mouth; for Codratus, the horses and the cord, the martyr bound and dragged along the ground — a composition that the Byzantine painters used for the dragged martyrs, with the body foreshortened beneath the horses' hooves and the soul received above.

No storable image has been located. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for the minor saints of the fixed year, contains miniatures only for September to February and so has none for May 22. A search of Wikimedia Commons under both names, and under the Greek and Slavonic forms, produced nothing depicting these martyrs; images of the better-known Quadratus of Corinth and Marcellus of the Akoimetoi were rejected as misattributions that would confuse four distinct saints. The entry is listed as wanting an icon.

Disputed questions

Codrus or Codratus? The Greek synaxaristis heads the notice Ἅγιος Κόδρος (Codrus) and adds that he is also called Κοδράτος (Codratus); Slavonic and Latin lists give Codratus or Quadratus. The two forms are the same martyr, and the form Codratus is used here because it is the one the English calendars carry.
Not to be confused with the several better-attested martyrs named Quadratus / Codratus in the calendar: Quadratus of Corinth (March 10, with his companions of Achaia), Quadratus of Nicomedia (March 7 / May 7), and Quadratus of Athens (September 21, the apologist and bishop). None of these is the Codratus of May 22, whose only transmitted attribute is the manner of his death.
Not to be confused, likewise, with the other Marcelli of the calendar: Marcellus and Anthony (March 1, martyred by fire), Marcellus of the Akoimetoi (December 29, abbot of the Sleepless Ones), and Marcellus of Rome, the pope (June 7 in the Byzantine calendars; January 16 in the Latin). The March 1 Marcellus is the most easily confused, being likewise a bare synaxarion martyr with a companion; the two are distinguished by the mode of death — fire on March 1, molten lead on May 22 — and by nothing else, so the distinction rests on the notices alone.
Whether the two suffered together is not stated. They are listed on the same day and in the same breath, with different punishments, which may mean a common martyrdom under one magistrate or simply two notices that the calendar has drawn to one date. The transmitted record does not decide it.