Seraphima of Antioch
The Holy Virgin-Martyr Seraphima of Antioch, who suffered at Rome
Virgin · Martyr · b. late 1st century, at Antioch on the Orontes — d. c. 126, at Rome, by beheading
Commemorated 29 July — Martyrdom by beheading at Rome under Hadrian
Seraphima — Serapia in the Latin books, Seraphima in the Slavonic — was a Christian virgin of Antioch on the Orontes who came to Rome in the reign of Hadrian (117–138) and entered the household of a noblewoman of senatorial rank, Sabina, as her servant. She converted her mistress, and when the persecution reached them it was the servant and not the lady who was denounced. Brought before the governor Berillus (Virilus in the Slavonic transmission), she confessed Christ, was preserved untouched when two men were sent to violate her — an earthquake struck them down, and she healed them by her own prayer — and, when beatings and torches failed, was beheaded. Sabina gathered her body and buried it, and was herself martyred not long after. She is the day's Antiochene commemoration, and one of the small company of saints whose memory travelled from Antioch to Rome in a servant's baggage.
An Antiochene in Rome
The passion makes Seraphima a native of Antioch, of Christian parents, and places her in Rome in the reign of the emperor Hadrian. Nothing in that is implausible; there was no busier road in the second-century Mediterranean than the one between the Syrian capital and the Italian one, and the Antiochene presence at Rome in exactly this generation is a matter of record — it is the generation in which Ignatius of Antioch himself was carried the same way, in chains, to die in the amphitheatre. The Roman church of the early second century was substantially a Greek-speaking and Syrian-speaking church, and Serapia's Greek name and Syrian city are entirely at home in it.
She is not, in the tradition, a woman of any rank. She came to Rome as a Christian in a time of intermittent danger and attached herself to the household of Sabina, a widow of senatorial family — the passion makes her the widow of a certain Valentinus, and the daughter of Herod Metallarius — as her serving-maid and companion. The relation described is the one that recurs through the acts of the second and third centuries and which the modern reader often misses: the Christian slave or servant as the catechist of the great house. Sabina, watching her maid's manner of life, asked about it, was taught, and was baptised.
Arrest and the confession before Berillus
When the persecution came — the Antiochene sources place it in the later years of Hadrian, around 126 — Seraphima was denounced. The passion is careful about the asymmetry: Sabina's rank sheltered her for the moment, and the governor, named Berillus in the Latin passion and Virilus in the Slavonic and OCA transmission, summoned the servant alone. Sabina went with her, unwilling to let her be taken by herself, and the officials sent the noblewoman home.
Before the tribunal Seraphima refused to sacrifice and confessed, in the formula the acts everywhere preserve, faith in the one true God, Jesus Christ, and declined to give the gods of Rome any honour whatever. The governor first tried the argument from her condition — that a servant girl had nothing to gain by dying — and then the argument from her virginity, which is where the passion's central episode begins.
The earthquake, and the healing of her assailants
Berillus, unable to shake her, ordered that she be handed over to two young men to be defiled, on the reasoning familiar from many of these acts: that a consecrated virgin who could not be frightened by death might be broken by dishonour. Seraphima prayed. The passion says that as the men approached, an earthquake shook the place, and both fell to the ground paralysed, struck dumb and unable to rise.
What follows is the detail that distinguishes her story from the dozen others of its type. The governor sent for her again in the morning, and Seraphima did not leave the two men where they lay: she prayed over them, and they recovered, and standing up they testified in the governor's hearing that a young man in shining raiment had stood beside her and that they had been unable to come near. The two are not said to have been converted, and the passion does not claim it; what it records is that they told the truth about what they had seen.
Berillus put the wonder down to sorcery — the standard official reading of a Christian miracle — and returned to torture: Seraphima was beaten with rods and burned with torches on her sides. The passion adds a grim detail, that splinters flew from the rods into the tormentor's right eye, and that within three days the man was blind. At last the governor gave the sentence of the sword, and she was beheaded.
Sabina, and the burial
Sabina claimed the body — a noblewoman could do so where a poor Christian could not — and buried her maid honourably, in her own family tomb. The Roman tradition holds that Sabina herself was denounced and beheaded soon afterwards, and that the two were buried together; the great titular church on the Aventine, Santa Sabina, preserves the memory of the household, and the West keeps Sabina on August 29. Orthodox usage keeps the servant on July 29 and does not generally observe the mistress, so that the Church's calendar, in one of its quiet reversals, remembers by name the Antiochene servant girl and passes over the senatorial lady who buried her.
Feast and commemoration
July 29 (church date; New Calendar civil July 29, Old Calendar civil August 11), together with Callinicus of Gangra and the Martyr Theodota and her three sons. She carries no proper service; the day's propers are Callinicus's, and Seraphima is commemorated in the synaxarion reading and at the doxastikon of the martyrs. Her memory has particular weight in Antiochian usage, where she is named as "of Antioch" and not, as in the Western books, "of Rome" — the Church of Antioch counting as its own a daughter who was martyred abroad. In the West she is commemorated on July 29 as Serapia, with Sabina on August 29.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (general troparion of a woman martyr)
Thy lamb Seraphima, O Jesus, crieth out with a great voice: Thee, my Bridegroom, do I love, and seeking Thee I contend, and am crucified and buried with Thee in Thy baptism; I suffer for Thy sake, that I may reign with Thee, and I die for Thee, that I may live in Thee. As a spotless sacrifice receive her who with longing is slain for Thee. By her intercessions, as Thou art merciful, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 4
A servant in the house of the great, thou wast a teacher of thy mistress in the faith; and when they would have taken thy purity from thee, the earth was shaken and thy tormentors fell, whom thou didst raise up by thy prayer. Wherefore we cry to thee, O virgin Seraphima: entreat Christ God that our souls be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Seraphima is painted as a young woman-martyr: bare-headed or lightly veiled, in a red or crimson maphorion over a plain undergarment, holding the cross in her right hand and with the left open before her breast — the standard type of the virgin-martyr, distinguished only by the inscription. Where a narrative cycle exists, the scenes are the catechising of Sabina, the earthquake with the two assailants prostrate, and the beheading; Russian icons occasionally pair her with Sabina at the tomb.
No pre-1900 icon of Seraphima of Antioch alone has been located for this repository. Searches of Wikimedia Commons under her Greek, Latin and Slavonic names returned nothing; the Aventine images at Rome depict Sabina, and the Menologion of Basil II — which in any case covers only September to February — has no miniature for her. She is therefore listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Name. Serapia is the form of the Latin passion; the Greek and Slavonic books turned it into Seraphima (Серафима), plainly by assimilation to seraphim, and the OCA calendar prints both ("Seraphima (Serapia)"). The underlying name is theophoric in the Egyptian manner — from Serapis — which is a further small argument for the antiquity of the tradition, since no later hagiographer would have invented it for a Christian saint.
- The governor. Berillus (Latin), Virilus or Beryllus in the Slavonic; he is not identifiable in the Roman fasti, and the name may well be corrupt.
- Historicity. The Passio Sabinae et Serapiae is generally classed by critical hagiography among the later Roman legendary passions, composed to furnish the Aventine church with a founder's story; the Antiochene origin of Serapia, the household relation, and the burial are its historical core, if it has one. The Church commemorates the martyrs without ratifying the details of the passio, and this entry records the account as the tradition transmits it.
- Not to be confused with the martyrs named Serapia or Serapion who appear as companions in Egyptian and Cappadocian companies, nor with the several saints named Seraphim; and her mistress Sabina, the Roman noblewoman, is not the confessor Sabina who suffered at Smyrna with Pionius.
- No Wikidata item corresponding to this saint was found to exist at the time of writing; the field is therefore omitted rather than guessed.