156 Martyrs of Palestine

The company belongs to the terminal phase of the Great Persecution in Palestine, for which the Church possesses an eyewitness historian: Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Martyrs of Palestine describes how confessors from Egypt and Palestine — many already mutilated for the faith, blinded in the right eye and hamstrung in the left leg — were condemned to penal labour in the copper mines of Phaeno, south of the Dead Sea. There the condemned organised themselves into a church in chains, with their own places of prayer and their bishops and clergy among them, until the authorities resolved to break the community. The governor Firmilian had already presided over the great martyrdoms at Caesarea; on the emperor's order the leaders of the mine-church and their companions were put to death.

The synaxarion tradition, which the Byzantine calendar follows on September 17, gives the arithmetic of the company thus: one hundred martyrs of Egyptian origin, beheaded in one day with a single eagerness, as the verses say; fifty martyrs of Palestine given to the fire; and, named at their head, the bishops Peleus and Nilus — Egyptian bishops serving among the condemned — with the presbyter Zeno and the distinguished laymen Patermuthius and Elias, all of whom were burned. The received total of 156 embraces the whole company. The OCA Life adds the tortures that preceded: eyes put out, the tendons of the feet cut — the standard mutilation of confessors sent to the mines, exactly as Eusebius records it.

The date falls around 310 (the persecution under Galerius and Maximinus, 305–311/313; Eusebius places the Phaeno executions near the persecution's end).