Marcellus of Apamea
The Holy Hieromartyr Marcellus, Bishop of Apamea in Syria
Hieromartyr · Bishop · b. on Cyprus, early 4th century — d. c. 389, near Aulon in the territory of Apamea
Commemorated 14 August — Martyrdom by fire at the destruction of a temple in the Apamene
Marcellus, bishop of Apamea on the Orontes in Syria Secunda, is the hierarch whom the historian Theodoret of Cyrrhus remembered as the model of the bishops who dismantled the temples of Syria in the reign of Theodosius the Great. Born on Cyprus of a distinguished family and holding high civil office there, he left wife, children and rank about the year 375 for the monastic life in Syria, and was chosen bishop by the people of Apamea while visiting the city on business. Armed with an imperial rescript, he threw down the great temple of Zeus at Apamea — the tradition adds that when fire would not take hold of the props beneath its columns, he served the blessing of water and had the beams sprinkled, and they burned at once. About 389, standing at a distance while soldiers demolished another temple near Aulon, he was seized by the pagans of the place and thrown into the fire. When his sons prepared to avenge him, a council of the province forbade them, ruling that such a death was matter for thanksgiving, not for revenge.
Cyprus: the magistrate
Marcellus was a Cypriot, born of illustrious parents in the first half of the fourth century and given the full literary education of his class. The sources agree that he held a high civil office on the island — the Greek notice says that the administration of Cyprus was entrusted to him — and that his conduct in it astonished those who watched him: he governed with a justice, mildness and integrity that men were not accustomed to expect, and he was as noted for his eloquence as for the purity of his life. He was married and had sons.
The renunciation and the see of Apamea
About the year 375 Marcellus left his family and his position and withdrew into Syria to live as a monk. The break was decisive but not brutal: his sons survived him and appear again at the end of his story, and the tradition does not present the separation as an abandonment but as the ordinary fourth-century renunciation, entered upon with his household's knowledge.
He was afterwards ordained priest. The occasion of his elevation to the episcopate was, in the account the calendars preserve, almost accidental: the people of Apamea — the great city of the Orontes valley, metropolis of Syria Secunda — had called him to the city on some practical matter, and when he came they acclaimed him and elected him their bishop. As bishop he was, in the words of the notice, "correct and just," constantly among the troubles of his flock, building many churches; and he became a zealot for the faith at exactly the moment when the imperial law turned decisively against the old religion.
The temple of Zeus at Apamea
The central episode of his life is told by Theodoret of Cyrrhus in his Ecclesiastical History, and through Theodoret it entered the synaxaria. Under Theodosius the Great (379–395) the temples were being closed and, where the emperor's officers permitted, pulled down. Apamea possessed one of the most famous sanctuaries of the East, a temple of Zeus of enormous size, built of squared stone with columns so vast that the demolition men declared it could not be brought down: the fabric was too solid for hammers, and the prefect of the East, who had come in person with soldiers and gladiators, gave it up and left the city.
Marcellus did not. He obtained the emperor's authorisation, and a workman came forward with a plan: to undermine three of the huge columns and prop them with olive wood while the stone was cut away, then to fire the props so that the columns should fall and bring down the roof with them. The excavation was made and the timber laid, but the fire would not take: three times the wood was kindled and three times it went out, as though the demon of the place were quenching it. Word was brought to the bishop, who was at prayer; he called for water, served over it the lesser blessing of the waters, and gave it to his deacon with orders that it be carried in faith and poured upon the timbers, with the prayer that the God who made fire and water might overrule them both. The water was sprinkled, the fire took hold instantly, the props burned through, the columns went down, and the whole temple collapsed inward upon itself. The Greek notice compresses the story to its point: he threw holy water upon the temple, and the house of Zeus caught fire and vanished.
Encouraged by this, Marcellus went on through the territory of Apamea throwing down the shrines of the countryside and raising churches in their place.
Martyrdom
The end came, by the received reckoning, about the year 389. Soldiers were demolishing a temple near a place the sources call Aulon, in the Apamene, and the aged bishop — being lame, Theodoret notes, and unfit for fighting — had posted himself at a distance from the work, where he could neither help nor hinder, and was praying. Pagans of the district, seeing the guard occupied at the temple and the bishop alone and unprotected, fell upon him, seized him, and flung him into the fire, where he died. So the hierarch who had burned the temples was himself consumed, and the Church numbers him among the hieromartyrs.
The sequel is the most remarkable part of the account. The killers were identified. The bishop's sons came, intending to prosecute the vengeance that Roman law allowed them, and the province was ready for reprisals. A synod of the bishops of the region met and forbade it: it was not lawful, they judged, to avenge such a death; a man who had been counted worthy to die in that manner had received a gift, and his family owed God thanksgiving for it rather than blood from his enemies. The sons submitted. Theodoret records the decision with evident approval, and it is one of the earliest recorded instances of a church council restraining a legitimate legal vengeance on the ground of the martyr's crown.
Feast and commemoration
Marcellus is commemorated on August 14 (church date; New Calendar civil August 14, Old Calendar civil August 27), the last day of the Dormition fast and the Forefeast of the Dormition, on which day the sung office is that of the forefeast and the hierarch is commemorated from the Menaion. He is kept in Greek, Slavic and Antiochian usage alike. His memory has a particular weight in the Antiochian tradition, since Apamea was one of the great metropolitan sees of the patriarchate of Antioch and his story belongs to the Christianisation of the Orontes valley; the ruins of the city, with its mile-long colonnaded street, still mark the place of his episcopate.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Marcellus: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Marcellus is painted as an elderly hierarch in phelonion and omophorion, blessing and holding the Gospel, the white beard rounded and short; as a hieromartyr he may carry the cross of the martyrs in his right hand instead of blessing. The narrative type proper to him — rare, and found chiefly in menologion cycles and in modern Syrian and Cypriot work — sets him before the falling columns of the temple of Zeus, or shows him cast into the flames while the temple burns behind him, the two fires of his life being the same fire.
No storable image has been secured. The only candidate located on Wikimedia Commons is a modern painted icon of the saint uploaded from an Orthodox Church in America page and tagged "public domain" by the uploader; since the underlying work is a modern iconographer's copyrighted painting and the uploader is not its author, the tag cannot free it, and it has been rejected under the project's constitution
Disputed questions
- Date of the martyrdom. The calendars fix the memory on August 14 but do not everywhere agree on the year; c. 389 is the usual reckoning, within the campaign of temple-destruction that followed the legislation of Theodosius and is bracketed by the fall of the Serapeum at Alexandria in 391. Some notices place the death simply "in the reign of Theodosius the Great."
- Aulon. The place of the martyrdom is variously written Aulon or Aulona and is a locality of the Apamene otherwise unidentified; nothing further is transmitted of it.
- Not to be confused with the several other saints of the name: the Roman pope Marcellus of Rome, the abbot Marcellus of the Akoimetoi, or the martyrs Marcellus and Anthony and Marcellus and Codratus. Marcellus of Apamea is distinguished by his see and by the manner of his death.