Proclus and Hilary of Ancyra
The Holy Martyrs Proclus and Hilary of Ancyra
Martyr · d. c. 115, at Ancyra in Galatia
Commemorated 12 July — Martyrdom of the two kinsmen at Ancyra under Trajan
Proclus and Hilary were kinsmen — uncle and nephew — of the village of Kallippi near Ancyra in Galatia, put to death for Christ under the emperor Trajan, about the year 115. Proclus was arrested first, confessed boldly before the governor Maximus, and after a celebrated exchange in which he foretold that his persecutor would one day confess Christ himself, was bound to a pillar and shot to death with arrows. His nephew Hilary, meeting him on the road to execution, embraced him and declared himself a Christian; he was imprisoned, dragged wounded through the city, and beheaded three days after his uncle. They were laid in a single grave, and the Church has never separated them.
Kallippi and the arrest of Proclus
Both men came from Kallippi, a village in the territory of Ancyra (modern Ankara), the metropolis of Galatia — a city whose Christian community was already old, having been addressed by the Apostle Paul, and which would furnish the calendar with a long roll of martyrs. The passion sets their sufferings in the reign of Trajan (98–117), when sacrifice to the gods was being enforced across the province.
Proclus was denounced and seized first. Brought before the governor named in the Greek notices as Maximus, he was ordered to sacrifice, and refused without hesitation or subterfuge; the account gives him the manner of the early confessors, answering plainly and at once, without the elaborate dialogues that later passions delight in. Under torture he was unbroken, and — in the episode for which his passion is remembered — he told the governor to his face that a day would come when Maximus would confess the Christ he was then persecuting.
The chariot on the road to Kallippi
The governor, humiliated, had the martyr fastened behind his chariot and made to run on foot as he drove out towards Kallippi. Proclus, exhausted and near collapse in the heat, prayed; and the passion relates that the chariot stopped dead on the road, and that no effort of the driver, the horses or the escort could move it a foot further. Maximus, himself unable to stir, at last put his hand to a written confession that Christ is God — whereupon the wheels turned again.
The tradition is careful to note that this was a coerced confession and not a conversion. Maximus, so far from believing what he had written, took his revenge at once: Proclus was led out, bound to a pillar, and the archers were set to shoot at him. As he stood there the soldiers urged him to save his life with a word; he would not, and prayed for the city and for his executioners as the arrows struck him.
Hilary
Hilary — called Hilarion in many of the Slavonic and Russian notices — was Proclus's sister's son, a young man of the same village. Coming along the road while his uncle was being led to the place of execution, he broke through the guard, threw his arms about him, and confessed himself openly a Christian. He was seized and held in prison, and after his uncle's death was brought to trial in his turn. He was tortured, his feet pierced and he dragged through the streets of Ancyra behind the horses, and at last beheaded, three days after Proclus. The Christians took up the two bodies and buried them in one grave, which is the reason the Church keeps them together on one day.
Veneration
Their memory travelled early: a church of St Proclus existed at Constantinople, and the Synaxarion of the Great Church records the pair at July 12, whence the day passes into the Greek Menaia, the Slavonic Prologue, and every later synaxarion. In Russian usage their names appear in the July menaion-icons of the seventeenth century among the crowded ranks of the month's saints. They have no large cultus of their own, but they have never dropped out of the calendar in any tradition, and Proclus's prophecy to Maximus was a favourite of the preachers.
Feast and commemoration
July 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 25), universally. They are commemorated together as one memory, and the service in the Menaion for the day is a joint one; where a parish keeps July 12 for Michael Maleinos, for Paisios the Athonite or for the Slavonic commemoration of the Three-Handed Icon, the two martyrs are kept as the first of the day's commemorations and hold the canon at Matins. Ancyra's other martyrs — Clement, Plato, Theodotus and the Seven Virgins — fall on other days; the Galatian church of the martyrs is thickly represented across the whole year.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest 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 prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Kinsmen in blood and kinsmen in confession, ye were bound together in one grave as ye were bound in one faith: the elder shot through with arrows, the younger given to the sword. Wherefore, O Proclus and Hilary, ye stand together before the throne, and together intercede for them that keep your memory.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The two are painted together, as they are commemorated: Proclus the elder, bearded and in the tunic and mantle of a layman, Hilary young and beardless beside him, each holding the martyr's cross. Where the passion is shown rather than the portrait, the scene is Proclus bound to a pillar and pierced with arrows — an image easily confused with St Sebastian in Western art, and distinguished in the East by the inscription and by the presence of the second, younger figure — with the halted chariot sometimes indicated in the background, and Hilary's beheading in a second register. In Russian menaion icons for July they appear among the first figures of the month's rank.
No storable image has been found. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for a minor martyr, covers only September to February and cannot serve a July saint; the only Wikimedia Commons results for these martyrs are two photographs of a seventeenth-century Russian menaion icon of the whole month of July, in which the pair are a pair of inch-high figures among a hundred others and cannot be identified with confidence, and which in any case is not an icon of these saints. A the list of icons still being sought entry is recorded instead.
Disputed questions
- Which martyr is which. Greek and Slavonic notices differ over the form of the nephew's name (Ἱλάριος / Hilary, against the Slavonic Иларион / Hilarion) and, in a few witnesses, over the order of the two deaths. The dominant account — Proclus first by arrows, Hilary three days later by the sword — is followed here.
- Not to be confused with Proclus of Constantinople (†446/447, feast November 20), the disciple of St John Chrysostom and archbishop of the capital: a hierarch of the fifth century, not a martyr of the second, and no relation. Nor with Hilarion the Great (†371), the founder of Palestinian monasticism, whose Slavonic name-form is identical to that of this martyr in many calendars, nor with Hilarion the New of Dalmatia or Hilary the Wonderworker.
- The date of the martyrdom. The passion places the events under Trajan without a year; "about 115" is the conventional reckoning of the synaxarists and is given as such, not as an established date. A minority of Western martyrologies place them under Diocletian, which is almost certainly a later confusion with the great Ancyran martyrs of that persecution.