Marinus, Martha, Audifax and Abbacum
The Holy Martyrs Marinus and Martha his wife, with their sons Audifax and Abbacum, and those with them at Rome
Martyr · d. c. 269
Commemorated 6 July — Martyrdom at Rome under Claudius II
Marinus was a nobleman of Persia who, with his wife Martha and their two sons Audifax and Abbacum, distributed his goods to the poor and came on pilgrimage to Rome to pray at the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul. They arrived under Claudius II (268–270), in the thick of a persecution, and spent themselves in serving the confessors: they carried food and comfort into the prisons, and gathered and buried the bodies of the slain — by one account two hundred and sixty Christians killed together on the Salarian Way. For this the family was taken. Marinus and the two sons were beheaded, and Martha was drowned. With them are commemorated Cyrinus, Valentine the presbyter and Asterius.
The pilgrimage from Persia
The passion presents Marinus as a man of rank among the Persians, wealthy and a Christian, who determined with his wife Martha to leave everything and go to the city of the Apostles. Their two sons, whose names come down in the peculiar forms Audifax and Abbacum (the second being the prophet's name Habakkuk), were grown men and went with them. They sold or gave away their property before setting out, so that they arrived in Rome as pilgrims and not as persons of consequence.
They came at the worst possible moment. The emperor Claudius II was on the throne, and the Roman Church was under a violent local persecution: the clergy in hiding, the faithful arrested in numbers, executions carried out summarily outside the walls. The family attached themselves to the community around the bishop — the account names Callistus, who was holding the services secretly — and threw themselves into the works of mercy that persecution makes necessary.
Service to the confessors
Their work was of two kinds. The first was visiting the prisons: bringing food and money to those held for the faith, washing their wounds, and standing by them, which under the law of the time made the visitor liable to the same charge. It was in prison that they came to know Cyrinus, a Christian awaiting death, and the presbyter Valentine, who while confined converted Asterius — in the Roman tradition an officer of the household whose blind daughter he healed, and who was baptized with all his house.
The second work was burial. Roman practice left the bodies of the executed to lie, and the recovery and honourable burial of martyrs' remains was, for the third-century Church, both a duty and a crime. Marinus and his family took up this office along the roads out of the city. The great instance recorded is a mass execution on the Salarian Way — the tradition speaks of two hundred and sixty Christians put to death together by the emperor's order — whose bodies the family collected and buried; among them was Cyrinus, whose corpse they drew out of the Tiber, into which it had been thrown.
Martyrdom
They were denounced and arrested. Brought before the authorities and refusing to sacrifice, they were beaten and tortured; the passion adds the customary catalogue of torments and the customary miracle of endurance. The sentence divided the family: Marinus, Audifax and Abbacum were led out and beheaded, and their bodies burned; Martha was taken to a place of water — the Latin acts name a pool outside the city, the Greek simply says a river — and drowned. Valentine the presbyter and Asterius were beheaded in the same persecution and are commemorated with them. The year usually given is 269.
Christians recovered what remained and buried them outside Rome; their relics were later translated into the city, and are venerated in the church of St John the Hut-Dweller (San Giovanni Calibita) and in that of the martyr Paraskeve.
Feast and commemoration
July 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 19) in the Byzantine calendars — Greek, Slavonic, Antiochian and OCA alike — where the family heads the list of the Roman martyrs of the day under the principal commemoration of St Sisoes the Great. In the Roman calendar their day is January 19. They have no proper office in the Menaion.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
The four are shown as a family group: Marinus a bearded man in the tunic and mantle of a layman of rank, Martha veiled in the maphorion beside him, and the two sons behind or between them as beardless or lightly bearded youths — each holding the martyr's cross. The narrative scenes proper to them are the burial of the martyrs (the family lifting bodies from the roadside by night, or drawing a corpse from the river) and the double execution, the men under the sword and Martha thrust into the water. In Western art they are sometimes given the pilgrim's staff, in memory of the journey from Persia. No pre-1900 icon of this company has been located for this repository.
Disputed questions
- Two calendars, one family. In the West this family is kept on January 19 as Marius, Martha, Audifax and Abachum, martyrs on the Via Cornelia at the thirteenth milestone; the Byzantine synaxaria place them on July 6. The divergence is one of commemoration, not of identity.
- Marinus or Marius? The Latin acts give the husband's name as Marius, the Greek as Marinos; the confusion of the two forms is old, and has occasionally produced the misapprehension that Martha's husband was a woman's namesake or that "Maria" should be read.
- Valentine. The presbyter Valentine martyred at Rome under Claudius, who appears in this passion, is the Valentine of the celebrated Roman acts, kept in the West on February 14 and distinguished there — not always convincingly — from Valentine bishop of Interamna. The Byzantine calendar commemorates him here as a companion of Marinus's company, and separately on July 30 in the Interamna form, which is where his entry stands. No separate entry is made for him in this collection at July 6; the identification is unsettled.
- Historicity. The acts are late and legendary in their present shape, and the figure of 260 martyrs on the Salarian Way is a round number of the kind such texts favour. That a Persian Christian family perished at Rome for burying the dead is entirely credible for the reign of Claudius; the detail is not independently attested.