Salon the Roman
The Holy Martyr Salon the Roman, who was perfected by the sword
Martyr
Commemorated 23 May — Martyrdom by the sword
Salon — the name appears also as Salonas — is known from one line of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, kept in the Greek Menaion for May 23: Σαλὼν ὁ Ῥωμαῖος, ξίφει τελειοῦται, "Salon the Roman, perfected by the sword." His notice stands beside that of the martyr Seleucus, within the office of St Michael of Synnada, who holds the day. Nothing else about him is transmitted: no date, no persecutor, no passion.
The whole record is the epithet and the instrument. "The Roman" (ὁ Ῥωμαῖος) in the Byzantine synaxaria may mean a native of the city of Rome, a Latin-speaker of the West, or — in later usage, when the Byzantines called themselves Rhomaioi — simply a citizen of the empire; the first is the likeliest sense in a martyr-notice of this antiquity, and would place him among the martyrs of the city under one of the persecutions of the second to the early fourth century. Death by the sword — beheading — was the standard penalty for a Roman citizen and the most common of all the deaths recorded in the martyrologies, so it carries no further information.
No place of burial, no relics, and no local cultus attach to him in the surviving sources. Entries of this kind are the residue of once-fuller local commemorations whose acta were lost before the great synaxaria were compiled, and the honest form of such an entry is a short one: the Church has kept his name, and that is what it has kept.
Feast and commemoration
May 23 (church date; New Calendar civil May 23, Old Calendar civil June 5). The commemoration is Greek, from the printed Menaion's synaxarion of the day and the Synaxarion of Constantinople behind it; there is no proper hymnography, and the Slavonic and Russian calendars omit him. He is kept within the office of St Michael of Synnada.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Salon, 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.
Iconography
There is no individual iconography of Salon. In the menologion tiers for May 23 he would be painted, if at all, in the anonymous martyr-type — a layman, young or middle-aged, in tunic and mantle, holding the martyr's cross — and distinguished, if at all, by the sword. No storable image is held for this entry, and none was located.
Disputed questions
The form of the name. Manuscripts and printed editions give Σαλὼν and Σαλωνᾶς, and English renderings accordingly Salon, Salonas and Salo. This repository indexes him as Salon the Roman and records the variants as alternate names.
Whether he belongs with a group. Because his notice follows immediately upon that of Seleucus, some lists print the two as though they were companions — "the martyrs Seleucus and Salonas." The synaxarion gives them separate notices and separate instruments of death, and there is no indication that they suffered together or in the same place; they are treated here as two saints who share a day, not as a group.