Peter of Lampsacus and his Companions
The Holy Martyrs Peter of Lampsacus, Dionysius, Christina the Virgin, Andrew, Paul, Benedimus, Paulinus and Heraclius
Martyr · Virgin · d. c. 249–251, under Decius
Commemorated 18 May — The martyrdoms at Lampsacus, Troas and Athens under Decius
These eight are the company whose names open the Byzantine notice for May 18: Peter, Dionysius, Christina the virgin, Andrew, Paul, Benedimus, Paulinus and Heraclius, martyred in the persecution of the emperor Decius (249–251). They are in fact two separate companies joined in one commemoration: five who suffered on the Hellespont, at Lampsacus and Troas, under a proconsul the acts name Optimus — Peter broken on a wheel and beheaded for refusing to bow to Aphrodite, the two soldiers Andrew and Paul stoned to death with Dionysius, and the sixteen-year-old Christina beheaded after she had cried out in open court against an apostate; and three who suffered at Athens — Heraclius, Paulinus and Benedimus, preachers against the idols, who were cast into a burning furnace. The Greek Menaion places all eight in a single notice, and this collection follows it.
Peter at Lampsacus
Lampsacus (Lampsakos, modern Lapseki) stood on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, in the country of the Troad — a Greek city of great antiquity whose particular fame in the pagan world was its cult of Priapus, and whose civic religion was saturated with the worship of Aphrodite, the Venus of the Latin acts. It was therefore precisely the wrong city in which to be brought before a magistrate as a Christian.
Peter was arrested in the general enforcement of Decius's edict of sacrifice and set before the proconsul, whom the passion names Optimus (the Slavonic recension gives Optimines). Ordered to offer to Aphrodite, he answered — and it is the one sentence of his that the tradition has kept — that he marvelled that they should command him to worship a shameless woman, whose own myths convicted her of the vices for which the laws punished mortals, when he served the God who is chastity itself. The magistrate had him stretched on the wheel and his limbs broken; the account says his bones were crushed one by one and that he blessed God through it, until, seeing that torture accomplished nothing, Optimus ordered him beheaded.
Andrew, Paul and Dionysius at Troas
The proconsul then moved down the coast — the acts put the second trial at Troas, and some later day-lists corrupt the place-name badly. There four men stood accused: Andrew and Paul, two soldiers whose unit, the account says, had been transferred from Mesopotamia; Dionysius, a young man of the province; and one Nicomachus.
Under torture Nicomachus broke. Called on to confess Christ he cried instead, "I was never a Christian," and sacrificed. The passion relates that the punishment was immediate and public: he was thrown down in a seizure of frenzy, foaming, and tore his own flesh with his teeth until he died — a scene the acts intend as the counterweight to the martyrs' constancy, the visible ruin of a man who saved his body by losing everything else. Andrew, Paul and Dionysius held fast, refused the sacrifice, and were led out of the city and stoned to death by the crowd.
Christina
In the court that day stood a girl of sixteen named Christina. She had watched Nicomachus deny Christ and die, and she cried out over him the sentence that cost her her life — that it would have been better for him never to have been born than to have denied his Master in the last hour. The proconsul had her seized, and, finding her a Christian and a virgin, sentenced her to be taken to a brothel and given to whoever would have her: the standard Roman sentence against a Christian virgin, designed to destroy what could not be killed.
The account says that the sentence failed. An angel stood in the place where she was held; those who came in went out changed, unable to touch her, and some of them asked her prayers instead. Optimus, defeated, ordered her beheaded — the youngest of the company and, in the Greek notice, the only one distinguished by a title: Christina the virgin.
Heraclius, Paulinus and Benedimus at Athens
The three remaining names belong to another city and, on the face of the acts, another occasion. Heraclius, Paulinus and Benedimus suffered at Athens — not arrested for refusing an oath but hunted down for preaching: the account has them going about among the pagans of the city, arguing against the worship of "senseless idols" and persuading many to leave it. Denounced with those they had converted, they were tortured and then thrown into a fiery furnace, and gave up their souls in the fire. The year is given as about 250, in the same persecution.
Their names, as often with the martyrs of Greece proper, are transmitted without a governor, a formula of trial, or a burial place; what the tradition has kept of them is that they were missionaries and that they died together.
Feast and commemoration
May 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 31). In the Greek Menaion the eight martyrs are the day's first and principal notice, and the Tone 4 common apolytikion of several martyrs printed for the day is appointed to them; the martyr Theodotus of Ancyra and the seven virgins follow in the second notice and share the same hymnody. In the Slavic and OCA arrangement of the day the same names appear as two commemorations, the five of the Hellespont and the three of Athens.
Because the day falls in the second half of May, in every year it stands within the Pentecostarion, and in most years after the Ascension; the movable propers of the Paschal season take precedence over the martyrs' office wherever the two meet.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contests 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 supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
There is no developed individual iconography for these martyrs; they are painted, where they are painted at all, as a group of lay martyrs in the tunic and mantle, each with the small cross, the two soldiers Andrew and Paul distinguished by military dress and sometimes by a lance, and Christina as a young unveiled virgin in a red mantle at the front of the company. Where a narrative scene is attempted, the instruments name the martyrs: the wheel for Peter of Lampsacus, the stones for Andrew, Paul and Dionysius, the sword for Christina, and the furnace for the three of Athens, whose scene is inevitably composed after the Three Youths in the fiery furnace.
No pre-1900 image of this company, or of any member of it identifiable by inscription, was located for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for minor saints of the fixed year, covers only September to February and cannot serve for a May commemoration. The entry wants an icon.
Disputed questions
- One company or three? The Greek Menaion for May 18 has a single notice naming all eight in one breath, and the day's hymnody serves them together; the Slavic Menaion and the OCA, following a different arrangement, print two lives — "Peter, Dionysius, Andrew, Paul and Christina" and "Heraclius, Paulinus and Benedimus" — and some lists give three, by detaching Peter at Lampsacus from the trial at Troas. All the witnesses agree on the eight names and on the reign of Decius; the grouping is a matter of arrangement, not of identity, and the eight are kept here in one entry as the Menaion keeps them, with the three companies distinguished in the Life.
- The place of the second trial. The passion places Peter's death at Lampsacus and the trial of Andrew, Paul, Dionysius and Nicomachus at Troas; several English day-lists print a garbled toponym ("Euridinos," "Eurydinos") that does not correspond to any known city and is best read as a corruption in the transmission of the acts rather than as a further place of martyrdom.
- Not the great-martyr Christina. The Christina of this company, a girl of Troas beheaded under Decius, is not the great-martyr Christina of Tyre, whose feast is July 24, nor Christina of Persia; and the Dionysius here is not the Areopagite. The Andrew and Paul of this notice are soldiers of the third century and have nothing to do with the Apostles of those names.
- Benedimus. The name is transmitted in Greek as Βενέδιμος and appears in Slavonic and English lists as Benedim, Benedimus, Vendimian and Venedim; it is not the Latin Benedictus, and he is not the Venedimos or Vendimianus of other days.