Marcian of Iconium
The Holy Martyr Marcian of Iconium
Martyr · d. 258
Commemorated 13 July — Beheading in Cappadocia under the governor Perennius
Marcian was a young Christian of Iconium — the city of Lycaonia where Paul and Barnabas preached and where the Church had stood since the apostolic generation — who preached Christ so openly that the pagans of the city, unwilling to make a martyr at home, sent him away into Cappadocia. There the governor Perennius tried first persuasion and then threats to make him deny the faith; Marcian answered by denouncing the governor's own worship of idols, was tortured savagely, and was at last beheaded while at prayer, in the year 258. His memory is kept on July 13.
Iconium
Iconium — modern Konya, on the Anatolian plateau at the edge of the Lycaonian plain — was among the oldest Christian centres of Asia Minor. Paul and Barnabas came there on the first journey and preached in the synagogue, and it is the city of the Acts of Paul and Thecla. By the middle of the third century it had a substantial Christian population, a bishop, and enough weight to hold the council over baptism of heretics that Firmilian of Caesarea reports; and it also had, as the Anatolian cities did, a strong civic paganism that resented the growth of the Church.
Marcian is described as young and as a preacher — that is, not a cleric but one of those laymen whose open confession the passions of this period regularly single out. What he did was speak: in the streets and at the temples he argued against the gods, and he made converts. The notice says that the pagans of the city were enraged and that they sent him away into Cappadocia. This is an unusual and, on the face of it, a credible detail. Nothing in the legendary repertoire requires it, and it corresponds to a real practice of the Roman provinces, where a troublesome provincial might be deported to another jurisdiction to be dealt with by a governor with no local complications — and, in this case, where the accusers of a popular young man could be rid of him without a riot at home.
Cappadocia and the martyrdom
In Cappadocia — the great inland province north-east of Lycaonia, whose capital was Caesarea Mazaca — he was brought before the governor Perennius. The passion gives the interrogation the shape it usually has, but with a marked emphasis on the governor's attempt at persuasion before he resorted to force: flattery of the young man's evident quality, promises, and then threats. Marcian would not be moved, and turned the argument back, reproaching Perennius to his face for bowing to things made with hands and for calling gods what were the works of craftsmen. The governor, humiliated in his own court, ordered him tortured.
The tortures did not break him. He was condemned, and the notice records the one detail which fixed him in the memory of the calendars: he was beheaded while he was praying — the sword falling as the words were still in his mouth. The year given is 258.
That date matters. 258 is the year of the second and severer edict of Valerian, the persecution in which Cyprian of Carthage, Sixtus of Rome and Laurence the deacon died: an empire-wide action aimed first at the clergy and the notable, and executed with unusual administrative thoroughness in the eastern provinces. A young layman deported from Lycaonia to Cappadocia and beheaded in that year sits precisely in the historical frame the notice implies.
Feast and commemoration
July 13 (church date; New Calendar civil July 13; Old Calendar civil July 26), in Greek, Slavonic, Antiochian and OCA usage, kept last among the named saints of the day after the Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel, Stephen of Mar Sabbas, Julian of Le Mans and Serapion. The Russian books name him мч. Маркиана Иконийского, preserving the epithet. He has no proper office and is served from the common of a martyr; where the day's rank permits, only the troparion and kontakion of the martyrs are taken.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Marcian, O Lord, in his struggle received an incorruptible crown from thee our God; for possessed of thy strength he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble boldness of the demons. By his prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
Marcian is written as a young martyr — beardless or with the first growth of a beard, the hair dark and short — in the tunic and cloak of a layman, holding the martyr's cross in his right hand and often the palm; he is of the same type as the young soldier-martyrs but without arms or armour, since nothing makes him a soldier. His scene, where a scene is given, is the beheading, and the peculiarity of his notice is regularly shown: the martyr kneeling with his hands raised in prayer as the executioner lifts the sword, which is how the "beheaded while praying" of the synaxarion is put into paint.
No pre-1900 icon of Marcian of Iconium has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, which would ordinarily supply a minor martyr of this class, covers only September to February and cannot be used for July; the July menaion tablets on Wikimedia Commons carry no crop of him; and images circulating under the bare name "Marcian" belong to the notaries of Constantinople or to the bishop of Syracuse. He is entered in the the list of icons still being sought list; nothing has been stored, because storing a same-named other would defeat the purpose of the disambiguation set out above.
Disputed questions
- "Lycian" Iconium. Several modern notices, the OCA's among them, describe Marcian as a native of Lycian Iconium. This is a slip of transmission: Iconium lay in Lycaonia, an inland region of the Anatolian plateau, not in Lycia, the coastal province of the south-west. The two names are constantly confused in later manuscripts. There is no Iconium in Lycia.
- Perennius. No governor of Cappadocia of this name is independently attested for 258. The name is Roman and plausible — a Perennis was praetorian prefect under Commodus, and the name recurs — but the passion is the only witness, and it is recorded here as transmitted, not as prosopography.
- Not to be confused with the several other martyrs and saints of the name: Marcian and Martyrius, the notaries of Constantinople (†355); Marcian of Cyrrhus, the Syrian ascetic; Marcian of Syracuse, the apostolic bishop; Marcian the Oikonomos, the priest and steward of the Great Church; and the company of Marcian, Nicander and their companions. The similarity of names on the Byzantine calendar makes Marcian one of the traps of the synaxaria, and the epithet of Iconium should always be carried with his name.