Patroclus of Troyes
The Holy Martyr Patroclus of Troyes in Gaul
Martyr · Wonderworker · d. c. 259–275, at Troyes in Gaul
Commemorated 17 August — Beheading at Troyes under Aurelian
Patroclus was a wealthy and devout Christian of Tricassae — the city that is now Troyes in Champagne — who was beheaded for his faith in the third century, by the common reckoning under the emperor Aurelian (270–275). The Passio remembers him for his charity, for a plain exchange with the emperor in which he called the man on the imperial throne a pauper, and for a wonder at his execution: the soldiers taking him to the sandy ground beyond the Seine were struck blind for a moment, and the martyr walked across the water. He is one of the very few saints of Roman Gaul carried by the Byzantine synaxaria, and the medieval West kept him with great honour after his relics were carried to Soest in Westphalia in 964, where the cathedral still bears his name.
Tricassae in the third century
Troyes — Roman Augustobona Tricassium, later simply Tricassae — lay on the upper Seine at the junction of the great roads of northern Gaul. Its Christian community is attested from the third century, and Patroclus belongs to that first generation. The Passio describes a man of substantial family and independent means who lived by a rule of his own making: much prayer, the reading of the Scriptures, strict fasting, and the systematic giving away of what he had to the poor. The tradition adds that for this life the Lord gave him the gift of wonderworking, which is what brought him to the notice of the authorities — the healings, not a denunciation, made him conspicuous.
Before the emperor
The passion sets the confrontation between Patroclus and the emperor Aurelian himself, in the course of an imperial progress through Gaul. Summoned, offered "great honours and riches" to sacrifice, Patroclus refused, and the exchange that follows is the reason the text was remembered:
He told the emperor that he was a poor man. Aurelian, master of the world, took this badly and said so. Patroclus answered that a man who does not believe in Christ has forfeited the blessedness of Paradise, and that a man who has forfeited Paradise is poor whatever else he possesses; the emperor's wealth was a temporary loan against an eternal destitution. It is the whole argument of the martyr-acts in one sentence, and the Latin text does not soften it.
Aurelian ordered him beheaded.
The crossing of the Seine
The soldiers led him out of the city toward the sandy waste on the far bank, where executions were done. As they went, according to the Passio, their eyes were clouded — they could not see their prisoner — and Patroclus crossed the river Sequana (the Seine) on foot, walking on the water, and went on to the other side. When their sight returned, some of the soldiers glorified God at what had happened; others said it was sorcery.
A pagan woman, who had seen him from the far bank, told them where he had gone. They crossed the river, found him, and struck off his head. The body was left where it fell, and was taken up by night and buried by a priest named Eusebius and a deacon named Liberius, with the Christians of the city.
Relics and the cultus at Soest
The tomb at Troyes became the centre of a strong local cultus. The historian Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, gives a notice of Patroclus in the Glory of the Martyrs and reports that his passion was long unknown at Troyes until a copy of the text was brought from Italy — a detail that goes some way to explain the discrepancies in the dating.
In 964 the greater part of the relics were translated to Soest in Westphalia, given by the archbishop of Cologne, Bruno, brother of the emperor Otto I. Soest made Patroclus its patron; the great Romanesque St Patrokli-Dom, begun in the eleventh century, holds his shrine, and his figure — with the sword and the palm — is the emblem of the city to this day. The twelfth-century stained glass of the region preserves scenes of his interrogation. The cultus thus has two centres, the Gallic tomb and the Westphalian shrine, and two names, Patroclus of Troyes and Patroklus of Soest, for one man.
Feast and commemoration
August 17 (church date; New Calendar civil August 17, Old Calendar civil August 30), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. Patroclus is kept on this day in the Byzantine synaxaria, in the Slavonic books and on the OCA calendar; the Latin West keeps him on January 21 at Troyes and June 2 at Soest for the translation, and the Roman Martyrology now enters him on January 21. He is one of the small number of Western pre-schism martyrs who passed into the Greek calendar, and he is honoured in the Orthodox parishes of France and Germany as a local patron.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Patroclus, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
In the Byzantine manner Patroclus is written as a lay martyr: a young or middle-aged man, short-bearded, in tunic and mantle, holding the cross of confession. In the Western tradition that grew up around Soest he is shown quite differently — as a noble youth or soldier-saint in courtly dress, crowned or coroneted, bearing the sword of his beheading and the palm of martyrdom, and it is in this form that he appears on the gable of Soest town hall, in the cathedral sculpture, and in the twelfth-century glass of Westphalia, where one surviving fragment (c. 1160/66) shows his interrogation before the judge. The narrative scene proper to him is the crossing of the Seine: the martyr walking upon the water while the soldiers on the bank grope with their hands before their faces.
No image has been stored: the surviving pre-1900 depictions are Western — architectural sculpture and stained glass, photographed at an angle, which are neither Orthodox icons nor faithful flat reproductions of a 2-D work — and no Byzantine or Slavonic panel of the saint alone has been located.
Disputed questions
- Under which emperor? The Byzantine synaxaria and the OCA follow the Passio in naming Aurelian (270–275). The Latin tradition, and Gregory of Tours, more often set the martyrdom under Valerian and Gallienus, about 259 — which is where the modern Roman Martyrology places him, and which better fits the general chronology of the Gallic persecutions. The wording of the Passio is not decisive; both dates are within a single generation and neither is independently documented. The entry keeps the range.
- The historicity of the imperial audience. That a reigning emperor personally interrogated a provincial layman at Troyes is the standard convention of the genre rather than a probable fact; the trial would have been before the governor. Gregory of Tours's remark that the passion-text reached Troyes late, from Italy, suggests a document composed at some distance from the events.
- Not the Patroclus of Bourges or of Colombier, a sixth-century Gallic abbot and recluse (†576, kept November 19 in the West), with whom he is sometimes confused in Latin hagiographical indexes. The martyr is not that man.