Mark and Mokianus
The Holy Martyrs Mark and Mokianus
Martyr · d. 4th century
Commemorated 3 July — Beheaded under the eparch Maximus for refusing to sacrifice
Two martyrs of the fourth century, arrested as Christians and pressed by the eparch Maximus to sacrifice to the idols. They refused, confessed Christ, and were beheaded together. What the synaxarion remembers about them is not their trial but their families: as Mokianus walked to the place of execution his wife and children followed him weeping, and he turned and told them not to weep but to rejoice at the martyrdom God had counted him worthy of; and when Mark's head fell, his wife took it up in her hands with joy, as a precious treasure. The metrical couplet makes Mark the first to suffer — "Mark offered his neck to the blade, cutting the road of the passion for Mokianus."
The record
The notice is one of the shortest in the July synaxarion, and nothing outside it is known: no province is named, no year, and the eparch Maximus cannot be securely identified — the name is common among the provincial governors of the Diocletianic and Licinian persecutions, and the Slavonic tradition renders it Maximian, which may be a genuine variant or a scribal assimilation to the emperor's name. The dating to the fourth century is the calendar's, not the passion's, and rests on the persecutions of the century's first two decades.
The bare facts are these. The two were seized as Christians and brought to trial. They were commanded to offer sacrifice to the idols and refused, professing Christ. They were condemned and beheaded.
The wives and the children
What lifts the notice above a formula is that both men were married with families, and that both families are present at the execution — a circumstance the synaxarist plainly found remarkable, since it is the only thing he chose to record at length.
Mokianus was followed on the road to the place of execution by his wife and his children, weeping aloud. Martyr-passions ordinarily use such a scene for pathos or for a last temptation; here it is used for neither. Mokianus, the notice says, far from losing heart, turned and told his family not to weep but to rejoice, because God was counting him worthy of martyrdom. The consolation runs the opposite way from the usual: the man going to die comforts those who will live.
Mark's wife is given the harder and stranger action. When her husband had been beheaded she went forward and took up his severed head in her hands with joy, as one receiving a precious treasure. It is the gesture of the relic-keeper performed at the instant of death, before the blood is dry — the whole later theology of the martyr's relics compressed into a single act by a woman standing at the block.
Neither wife is named, and neither is commemorated.
Feast and commemoration
July 3 (church date; New Calendar civil July 3, Old Calendar civil July 16). The pair have no service of their own: the day belongs liturgically to Hyacinth the Cubicularius, and Mark and Mokianus are named in the synaxarion reading at Orthros and in the dismissal only. Kept in Greek and Slavonic usage alike.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received the crowns of incorruption from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and broke the feeble insolence of demons. By their supplications, O Christ our God, save our souls.
Synaxarion
Mark offered his neck to the blade, cutting the road of the passion for Mokianus.
Iconography
There is no independent iconographic type for these two. In menologion cycles for July they appear, when they appear at all, as a pair of standing lay martyrs in tunic and cloak with crosses in their right hands, one bearded and one younger, filling out the third day beside Hyacinth. The distinctive episodes of their notice — the family following Mokianus on the road, and Mark's wife receiving the severed head — are not, so far as can be traced, represented in any surviving cycle, though they are exactly the kind of scene the illustrated menologia elsewhere favour. No pre-1900 image identifiable as theirs has been located, and none is stored here.
Disputed questions
- The day. These two are firmly a July 3 commemoration in the Greek synaxarion and in the Slavonic books alike ("мчч. Мокия и Марка, IV"). They are sometimes drawn by mistake into the crowded June 16 notice, which commemorates a different Mark, bishop of Apollonias, one of the Seventy, among the martyr-companies of that day; the two Marks are unrelated and the confusion is one of proximity in the alphabetical lists, not of tradition.
- Which name comes first? The Greek books head the pair Mark and Mokianus, following the metrical couplet, in which Mark suffers first and opens the way. The Slavonic books head them Mokius and Mark. The order is not a claim about precedence of rank.
- Not to be confused with the hieromartyr Mocius of Amphipolis (May 11), presbyter of Amphipolis martyred at Byzantium about 295, whose name in Greek is Μώκιος rather than Μωκιανός and whose cultus at Constantinople — the great church and cistern of St Mocius — is entirely distinct; nor with the martyr Mocius of the company of Hermogenes and others. The forms Mocius and Mocianus are freely interchanged in the Latin and English calendars, and the OCA renders this day's pair as "Martyrs Mark and Mocius," which is what makes the collision easy.