Seleucus
The Holy Martyr Seleucus, who was perfected by being sawn asunder
Martyr
Commemorated 23 May — Martyrdom by being sawn asunder
Seleucus is one of the martyrs whose whole surviving record is a single line of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, preserved in the Greek Menaion for May 23: that he was sawn asunder (πρισθεὶς τελειοῦται) and so was perfected. No place, no date, no persecutor and no companion is transmitted. He is commemorated with the martyr Salon the Roman, whose notice stands beside his in the same synaxarion, and within the office of St Michael of Synnada, who holds the day.
Nothing is recorded of Seleucus but his name and the manner of his death. The Greek synaxarion of May 23, after the notice of St Michael the Confessor and that of the myrrh-bearer Mary of Cleopas, enters him with the bare formula of the martyrologies: Σέλευκος, πρισθεὶς τελειοῦται — "Seleucus, being sawn, is perfected."
The saw as an instrument of execution appears in a small number of martyr-notices, and the Church's memory of it reaches back through the Epistle to the Hebrews, where among the sufferings of the righteous of the Old Covenant are named those who "were sawn asunder" (Heb. 11:37) — the verse behind the tradition of the death of the prophet Isaiah. Where a synaxarion gives only the instrument, that instrument is usually all that the local memory of the martyr had preserved when the notice was compiled.
The name Seleucus is Hellenistic and Syrian in flavour — the dynastic name of the Seleucid kings — which makes an origin in Syria or Cilicia and a death in one of the general persecutions of the third or early fourth century the natural guess; but it is a guess only, and this entry does not assign him a century. He is indexed among the saints for whom no date is transmitted.
Feast and commemoration
May 23 (church date; New Calendar civil May 23, Old Calendar civil June 5). The commemoration is Greek: it stands in the printed Menaion's synaxarion for the day and in the tradition descending from the Synaxarion of Constantinople, but has no proper hymnography, and the Slavonic and Russian calendars, which fill this day with the northern commemorations, generally omit him. He is kept within the office of St Michael of Synnada.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Seleucus, 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
No individual iconography of Seleucus is known, and none is to be expected of a saint reduced to a single line: where the menologion tiers paint the martyrs of May 23 he appears, if at all, as an anonymous martyr-type — a layman in tunic and mantle holding the cross — and where the instrument of his death is shown it is the saw, the attribute that alone distinguishes him. No storable image is held for this entry, and none was located.
Disputed questions
Not to be confused with the several other Seleucoi of the martyrologies, among them the Seleucus who suffered at Caesarea in Palestine with Pamphilus and his companions under Galerius (February 16) — a soldier of Cappadocia whose passion Eusebius records in the Martyrs of Palestine, and who is a documented person, unlike this one. Whether the May 23 notice is a duplication of that Seleucus under a different day and a different instrument of death has been asked and cannot be answered from the evidence; the calendars keep them apart.