Proculus, Ephebus, Apollonius and Abundius
The Holy Martyrs Proculus, Ephebus, Apollonius and Abundius, disciples of the Hieromartyr Valentine of Interamna
Martyr · d. c. 269–273, Interamna in Umbria
Commemorated 30 July — Martyrdom at Interamna with their teacher Valentine
Three students from Athens — Proculus, Ephebus and Apollonius — had come to Rome to read rhetoric under the Greek master Craton, and were in his house on the night that Valentine, bishop of Interamna, straightened Craton's crippled son by prayer. All three were baptised with the household and became Valentine's disciples. After his beheading at Rome they carried his body north to Interamna and buried it on the Flaminian road; they stayed there preaching, and were taken by the consul Leontius and put to death by night, as their master had been. Abundius, son of the prefect of the city of Rome, whom Valentine had also converted and whose conversion had precipitated the bishop's arrest, came looking for them, found them dead, buried them beside Valentine — and was martyred in his turn. The four are kept with Valentine on July 30.
Three Athenians in Rome
The passion of Valentine of Interamna preserves their names and their nationality and almost nothing else. Proculus, Ephebus and Apollonius were young men of Athens, sent to Rome — as the sons of educated families of the Greek east regularly were in the third century — to complete their training in rhetoric and philosophy. Their master was Craton, himself a Greek, in whose house they lodged; and it was Craton's son, bent double by a disease of the spine and abandoned by the physicians, whose cure brought the bishop of Interamna to Rome and the three students to the faith.
They saw the boy carried in crooked and stand up straight, and they were baptised with Craton and all his household. What is notable in the account is that the three did not merely believe; they left their studies and attached themselves to Valentine, and were with him for the whole of what remained of his life.
The burial of their teacher, and their own
When Valentine was seized — the arrest following on the conversion of Abundius, son of the prefect of Rome — and beheaded in secret by night, it was these three who recovered the body. They carried it the sixty miles north along the Flaminian Way to Interamna, the bishop's own city, and buried it outside the walls at the place where his basilica afterwards stood.
They did not then go home. They remained at Interamna and preached, and the city was turned by them; and the consul Leontius, hearing of it, had them arrested. Fearing the same disturbance that had made Valentine's execution a secret one, he had them taken out and beheaded by night, and their bodies left. The account gives no interrogation and no dialogue: the three appear in the passion as they appear in the calendar, together, and go out of it together.
Abundius, learning what had happened, came from Rome, found the bodies, and buried them beside Valentine — an act which, since the burial of executed Christians was itself a crime, was his own sentence. The tradition adds that he too was put to death, and he is named with them on the day.
Feast and commemoration
July 30 (church date; New Calendar civil July 30; Old Calendar civil August 12), kept with Valentine of Interamna, to whose commemoration they are appended in the Greek and Slavic synaxaria; the Latin calendars keep them at Terni with Valentine on February 14. They have no proper hymnography, and the office of the day in the Byzantine books belongs to the apostles of the Seventy. The day stands in the free season before the Dormition Fast, which opens on August 1.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs Proculus, Ephebus, Apollonius and Abundius, 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 intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
They have no independent type. Where they are painted at all they appear as young lay martyrs — beardless or lightly bearded, in tunic and mantle, each holding the martyr's cross — standing in a row behind or beside the bishop Valentine, who is identified by his vestments and his crozier or Gospel-book; the Umbrian cycles at Terni show them instead in the narrative, carrying their master's body north along the Flaminian road by night and digging the grave. Abundius, when distinguished, is given the dress of a young Roman of rank. No pre-1900 image of the four has been located for this collection, and none of them singly; a the list of icons still being sought entry stands for them.
Disputed questions
- Whether they have an independent cultus. They have none apart from Valentine: no proper office, no separate day, no shrine of their own. They are entered here as a group, following the rule of this collection for named companions martyred together without independent veneration, and the entry exists chiefly so that the four names which the synaxarion and the calendars carry are not lost behind the bishop's.
- The number and the names. The Byzantine notices vary. Some name only the three Athenians; some add Abundius; some add Craton and his household, who in the Latin passion are converted but not martyred. Ephebus appears also as Efebus and Ephoebus, and Proculus as Proclus, which invites confusion with the many martyr-Proculi of the Italian calendars — including the Proculus who suffered with Januarius at Puteoli (April 21), with whom this one has no connection.
- Historicity. Everything said of them comes from the Passio of Valentine, a text of the fifth century or later whose historical value is limited (see the discussion in Valentine's entry). What is not in doubt is that Interamna venerated a group of martyrs at the bishop's grave from an early date; the names are the tradition's answer to the question of who they were.