Potamon of Heraclea
The Holy Hieromartyr and Confessor Potamon, Bishop of Heraclea in Egypt
Hieromartyr · Bishop · Confessor · d. c. 341, at Alexandria or Heraclea in Egypt
Commemorated 18 May — Death from the clubbing inflicted by the Arian party in Egypt
Potamon, Bishop of Heraclea in Egypt, is the rare saint who was twice a martyr's victim: maimed by the pagans and killed by fellow Christians. In the persecution of Maximinus Daia, about the year 310, he confessed Christ, was mutilated — he lost an eye and was crippled — and was sent to the mines; he came to the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 with his wounds on him, one of the scarred confessors whose presence gave that council its moral authority, and there stood against Arius. Ten years later, at the Synod of Tyre, it was Potamon who rose and challenged Eusebius of Caesarea to his face to explain how he had come out of the same prison whole. He remained to the end a defender of Athanasius; and when the Arian intruder Gregory and the prefect Philagrius were breaking the Egyptian Church by force, the old confessor was beaten with clubs and left for dead, and died of it about the year 341 — a hieromartyr, as Athanasius himself records, at the hands of Christians.
Confessor under Maximinus
Potamon was bishop of Heraclea in Egypt — a see the sources do not further specify, and which is variously identified with Heracleopolis Parva in the eastern Delta and with Heracleopolis Magna to the south; the Greek notices are content with "Heraclea in Egypt." He belonged to the generation of Egyptian bishops formed by the Great Persecution.
In the phase of it conducted by Maximinus Daia (Daza), about 310, Potamon was arrested and refused to sacrifice. He was tortured, and the punishment inflicted on him was that which Maximinus's officers used in Egypt against Christians whom they intended to enslave rather than kill: the right eye was gouged out and the left leg hamstrung, the tendon severed with a hot iron, and the mutilated confessor was sent to labour in the imperial mines and quarries. It is the same sentence carried by Paphnutius the Confessor of the Upper Thebaid, and it left both men recognisable for the rest of their lives.
Nicaea
Potamon survived to the peace of the Church and was among the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325. The historians make much of the confessors at that council — men who had been in the mines and the prisons and who came to Nicaea in the emperor's own carriages, honoured by Constantine, who is said to have kissed the empty socket of Paphnutius's eye. Potamon was one of that company, and he took the side of the Nicene faith against Arius, whose doctrine had come out of his own province.
The confessors' authority at Nicaea was not merely sentimental. In a Church that had just emerged from persecution, the question who had stood and who had bent was live and bitter; and a bishop with one eye and a lamed leg carried in his body an argument that no theological subtlety could answer.
Tyre, and the challenge to Eusebius
That is exactly how Potamon used it. In 335 the emperor summoned a synod at Tyre to try Athanasius of Alexandria on the charges the Eusebian party had accumulated against him. Eusebius of Caesarea, the historian, sat among the judges. Potamon, who had come in Athanasius's train, rose in the session and put to him a question that the Church has never forgotten — reported by Epiphanius of Salamis, who had it from the Egyptian memory of the affair:
Do you sit as judge, Eusebius, and does Athanasius stand before you to be judged? Who could endure it? Tell me — were you not with me in prison in the persecution? I lost an eye for the truth. You came out with your body whole, and suffered nothing. How were you released from prison, unless you promised those who laid the persecution on us to do the unlawful thing, or did it?
Eusebius, Epiphanius says, rose in fury and broke up the sitting, saying that if they came to Egypt and were slandered in their turn they would learn what such accusations were worth. Whatever the truth about Eusebius's conduct under Diocletian — the charge of having sacrificed, or of having compromised in some lesser way, has never been proved and is generally doubted — the exchange fixes Potamon's character in the record: an old man with a ruined face, unafraid of the greatest scholar of the age.
Death at the hands of Christians
Athanasius was condemned at Tyre and exiled. When, after the emperor Constantine's death and the intrusion of the Arian Gregory of Cappadocia into the see of Alexandria in 339, the prefect Philagrius put the machinery of the state at the disposal of the Arian party, the Nicene bishops of Egypt were hunted, their churches seized and their clergy beaten. Potamon, who would not communicate with Gregory, was seized and flogged/beaten with clubs about the head and body so savagely that he was left insensible and taken up for dead. He recovered consciousness but not his life: he died a short time afterwards of the injuries, about the year 341.
Athanasius himself set the death down, in the letters in which he told the Church what was being done in Egypt: Potamon the bishop and confessor, who had lost an eye in the persecution, beaten with clubs by the Arians until he died. It is that testimony, from an eyewitness and the greatest name of the century, that makes Potamon's a securely historical martyrdom, and it is why the calendars style him hieromartyr and not only confessor: he was crowned twice over, once by the pagans who took his eye and once by the Christians who took his life.
Feast and commemoration
May 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 31). Potamon is carried on the Greek day-lists for the day, styled hieromartyr, Bishop of Heraclea in Egypt, and Confessor, with the year 340 or 341; he has no proper office, and is commemorated in the synaxarion reading with the common of a hieromartyr. He is honoured with the Egyptian confessors of the Great Persecution and with the Nicene fathers, and in the Coptic tradition among the bishops who suffered under the Arians.
The day always falls within the Pentecostarion, whose movable propers take precedence.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, O divinely-inspired one, thou didst find in contemplation the means to ascend to divine heights; rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst struggle for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Potamon: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Potamon is painted in the type of the hierarch-confessor: an aged bishop in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left. What belongs to him alone, where an iconographer chooses to show it, is the mark of his confession — the destroyed right eye, painted closed or scarred, exactly as Paphnutius the Confessor of the Upper Thebaid is painted, and sometimes a staff or the lame leg, from the severed tendon. In compositions of the First Ecumenical Council he may be placed among the seated fathers on the Nicene side, one of the mutilated confessors whom that iconography traditionally includes.
No identity-verified pre-1900 image of Potamon has been located for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for minor saints, covers only September to February and cannot serve a May commemoration. The entry wants an icon.
Disputed questions
- Confessor or hieromartyr? Some lists commemorate Potamon simply as a confessor, since he did not die under the pagan sentence; the Greek day-lists for May 18 style him hieromartyr, on the ground that the beating that killed him was inflicted for his refusal to abandon the Nicene confession. Both titles are given here.
- The year. Athanasius's notices place the death in the violence that followed Gregory's intrusion of 339; the received date is c. 340–341, and some authorities give 341 exactly. It cannot be fixed more closely.
- Which Heraclea? No source identifies the see beyond "Heraclea in Egypt." Neither the Delta nor the Upper Egyptian identification can be established, and the subscription lists of Nicaea do not settle it.
- The charge against Eusebius. Potamon's question at Tyre is the origin of the persistent suspicion that Eusebius of Caesarea lapsed in the persecution. Epiphanius reports the challenge; no one, then or since, has produced evidence for the accusation, and it is best treated as what it plainly was — the indignation of a maimed confessor at seeing an unmarked survivor sit in judgement on Athanasius — rather than as a finding of fact.