Orentius and his Six Brothers

Soldiers in Thrace

The seven were brothers by blood, and all seven were soldiers of the Roman army stationed in Thrace in the reign of Diocletian (284–305). The passion makes a point of their military reputation: they were known for bravery, and the events that destroyed them began with a battle that they won.

A host the sources call Scythians — the standard Greek term for the peoples north of the Danube and the Black Sea — invaded the province, and the issue was put to single combat. Orentius, the eldest, went out against their champion, named in the accounts as Marathon (Mararon in some transmissions), a warrior described as fierce and undefeated, and killed him. The invasion broke. Orentius was loaded with honours.

The refusal and the sentence

The victory called for a thanksgiving, and the thanksgiving in the Roman army was a sacrifice to the gods. Orentius refused it flatly, and gave the reason that turned a decoration into a capital charge: he had not conquered by the gods of the camp but by the power of Jesus Christ, whom he worshipped as the only true God.

The commanders did not punish him at once — his service was too fresh and too public — but he and his six brothers were detained, and after some time they were formally interrogated. All seven answered, the account insists, as with one mouth: they would keep faith with Christ to their last breath, and the Saviour would judge their judges on the last day.

The sentence was exile to the Caucasus. In Roman practice this was a common alternative to execution for soldiers of good record, and it was frequently a death sentence in slow motion: a forced march of many hundreds of miles under guard, along the Pontic coast toward the edge of the empire, with neither provision nor rest for men already broken by imprisonment. So it proved.

The seven stages

The synaxaria transmit the death of each brother separately, with its place and its day — an unusually circumstantial list, and the backbone of the whole account:

• Eros (Erotas) died first, at Parembole, on June 22.
• Orentius was thrown into the sea with a stone bound about his neck — the only one of the seven to be killed outright rather than to die of the journey.
• Pharnacius reposed at Kordyle (Cordyla, on the coast near Trebizond) on July 3.
• Firmus and Firminus received their crowns together at Apsarus (given as Aspara in the English accounts), on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, on July 7.
• Cyriacus died at Ziganeis on July 14.
• Longinus, the last, gave up his soul aboard ship on July 28; the storm-driven vessel ran aground at Pityous — modern Pitsunda in Abkhazia — and there the last of the brothers was buried.

The itinerary is a real one. Parembole, Kordyle, Apsarus, Ziganeis and Pityous are stations of the Roman Pontic limes, strung along the coast from Trebizond around to the Abkhazian shore, and they fall in the order in which a convoy travelling east and north would have met them. Whatever else the passion has accumulated, the geography of it is the geography of a genuine deportation route.

Because the deaths are so scattered, no single day belonged to the company by nature, and the calendars gathered them onto one — which is why the feast has drifted by a day between traditions, and why the individual dates survive in the notice rather than in the calendar.

Veneration

Their memory is strongest where they died. Pityous — the see of St Stratophilus, who signed at Nicaea, and the place where St John Chrysostom was being taken when he died at Comana — became a shrine of Longinus, and the seven brothers passed into the Georgian and Abkhazian calendars as martyrs of that coast; the OCA's own title for them, "in Georgia," reflects that localisation, though the deaths in fact range along the whole Pontic seaboard from Thrace to Abkhazia. The Slavonic books carry them among the ordinary commemorations of June 24, in the shadow of the Forerunner's Nativity; the Greek books keep them on June 25. Their invocation in the Slavonic tradition is for protection from enemies — a soldier's patronage, appropriate to soldiers.