Marcian, Nicander and Companions
The Holy Ten Martyrs of Egypt — Marcian, Nicander, Hyperechius, Apollonius, Leonidas, Arius, Gorgias, Selenias, Irenaeus and Pambo
Martyr · d. c. 305–311
Commemorated 5 June — Martyrdom in Egypt under Maximian
Ten Christians of Egypt — Marcian, Nicander, Hyperechius, Apollonius, Leonidas, Arius, Gorgias, Selenias, Irenaeus and Pambo — who suffered together in the last of the great persecutions, under Maximian (in the years between 305 and 311). The synaxarion preserves little more than their names and the manner of their death: arrested as Christians, they refused the sacrifices, were beaten and dragged along the ground until their flesh was torn from them, and were then dispatched by the sword. They are commemorated as one company on June 5, at the sixth ode of the canon of the day.
The company and its names
The notice of these martyrs in the Synaxarion of Constantinople is a single paragraph, and everything securely known of them is in it. They were natives of Egypt and they suffered together, which in the language of the synaxaria means that they were arrested in one sweep and tried at one sitting — the ordinary procedure in the Egyptian provinces during the Great Persecution, when Christians were brought in from a village or a quarter of a city and dealt with in batches.
The names are a mixed bag of exactly the kind that inspires confidence in their transmission rather than doubt: two ordinary Roman names (Marcian, Apollonius), several plain Greek ones (Nicander, Leonidas, Gorgias, Irenaeus), one that is rare and unmistakably Egyptian-monastic in flavour (Pambo, the same name as the great desert abba Pambo of Nitria), one that is distinctly odd for a Christian (Arius, borne here half a century before the heresiarch made it unusable), and two that the manuscripts cannot agree about — Hyperechius and Selenias.
Martyrdom
The transmitted account is brief. Brought before the governor and required to sacrifice, the ten confessed Christ. They were scourged, then bound and dragged over the rough ground — a punishment used in Egypt and attested for several martyrs of the region — so that their bodies were flayed and broken; some witnesses add that they were stoned as they were dragged. Those who still lived were beheaded. The synaxarion gives no place-name and no name for the judge, and assigns the passion only to the reign of Maximian, which in the usage of the Greek synaxaria of this period may mean Maximian Herculius (286–305), his colleague Galerius Maximianus (305–311), or Maximinus Daza, prefect and then augustus in Egypt and Syria (305–313) — the last being, on the geography, the likeliest. The dating of c. 305–311 given here is a range, not a computation.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18), as a secondary commemoration of the day behind Dorotheus of Tyre. No proper service is appointed; they are named in the synaxarion notice read at the sixth ode of the canon, and where their memory is kept liturgically the common of several martyrs is used. The commemoration is universal, appearing in the Greek, Antiochian, Slavonic and Romanian calendars alike.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
O Lord, Thy martyrs 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.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The ten are written as a company of martyrs, ranked in a row or in two tiers, each holding a cross in the right hand, differentiated only by age and beard — young beardless faces at the ends, older bearded ones in the middle — with their names inscribed above their heads, which in a group of this kind is the whole of the identification. Where a passion scene is given, it shows the martyrs bound and dragged behind horses or by soldiers over stony ground, with the executioner's sword raised over those who remain. Where the tradition of the two women is followed, Selenia and Irene are shown veiled among them.
No pre-1900 icon of this company has been located for this collection. As a commemoration of June 5 they cannot appear in the Menologion of Basil II, whose miniatures cover only September to February.
Disputed questions
- The roll of names. Manuscripts and printed calendars vary. Hyperechius appears also as Hyperechios or Hyperichius; Selenias as Selenia or Selenias; Irenaeus appears in some lists as Irenius, and in others, read as a feminine, as Irene. Where the two doubtful names are taken as feminine, the company is understood to have included two women, Selenia and Irene — this is how the Russian synaxaria and the OCA present them; where they are taken as masculine, as in the Greek tradition and OrthodoxWiki, the ten are all men. The names are given here in the masculine forms of the Greek list, with the variance recorded rather than resolved, since the sources give no independent evidence either way. Pambo also appears as Pambon.
- Number. Ten is the number in the received list, but a few witnesses count differently by splitting or merging the doubtful names.
- Not to be confused with Nicander of Egypt, the martyr-physician of March 15 (†c. 302), who buried the bodies of the martyrs and was flayed alive — a genuinely different man of the same name and the same country and persecution, and the confusion most likely to arise with this company. Nor with Nicander of Myra (November 4), nor with the Nicander of the Thirty-three Martyrs of Melitene. Marcian is likewise a common martyr's name: this Marcian is not the Marcian martyred with Nicander in the Danubian provinces (June 8 in the Greek usage), a pair with whom the present company is occasionally conflated precisely because the two leading names coincide.