Serapion the Martyr
The Holy Martyr Serapion
Martyr · d. c. 205
Commemorated 13 July — Martyrdom by fire under Severus
Serapion is a martyr of the persecution under the emperor Septimius Severus, put to death about the year 205 by burning. The synaxarion notice which is all that survives of him relates that he was arrested and tried before a judge named Achilles, endured his tortures with an open confession of Christ, was thrown into prison broken by them, and was there healed by Christ himself; that when he was produced a second time and found sound and whole, the court, taking the healing for contempt, condemned him to the fire; and that he gave up his soul in the flames. His memory is kept on July 13.
The persecution of Severus
The reign of Septimius Severus (193–211) brought the first properly imperial persecution since Marcus Aurelius. The tradition, following Eusebius, attaches to the year 202 an edict forbidding conversion to Christianity and to Judaism; whether or not such an edict was ever issued in those terms, the years around it saw a sharp local persecution concentrated in Egypt and North Africa — it is the persecution of Leonides the father of Origen, of Potamiaena and Basilides at Alexandria, and of Perpetua and Felicity at Carthage. Serapion's date of about 205 places him in exactly this wave, and his name, which is formed from that of the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis, is one of the commonest names of Roman Egypt; it is a reasonable inference, though not a transmitted fact, that he was an Egyptian and that he suffered in that province.
The passion
The notice is short and its shape is the ordinary shape of a Greek passion: arrest, interrogation, torture, prison, a second hearing, the sentence. Two elements in it are its own.
The first is the judge, named Achilles — in some copies Achilleus or Aquila. He is not otherwise known and cannot be matched to any recorded governor, which is characteristic of the shorter synaxarion notices, where names of officials are often the only detail transmitted from a fuller passion now lost.
The second is the healing in prison. Serapion, thrown back into his cell mangled by the tortures and expected to die of them, was visited and made whole — the notice says by Christ himself, and this is a topos of the martyr-literature (the same is told of Panteleimon, of George, of many others) which expresses the conviction that the martyr's body is already in the hands of the Lord for whom he is dying. Its narrative function is also plain: it takes away from the persecutor the power to kill by wearing down, and forces him to a direct sentence. When Serapion stood before the judge a second time, unmarked, the court read the recovery not as a wonder but as an insult, and passed the sentence of burning alive. He was consumed in the fire, praising God, about 205.
Feast and commemoration
July 13 (church date; New Calendar civil July 13; Old Calendar civil July 26), in Greek, Slavonic, Antiochian and OCA usage, in the fourth place in the day's order — after the Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel, Stephen of Mar Sabbas and Julian of Le Mans, and before Marcian of Iconium. He has no proper office and is served from the common of a martyr; the Russian books give him simply as мч. Серапиона, with no epithet at all.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyr Serapion, O Lord, in his struggle received an incorruptible crown from thee our God; for possessed of thy strength he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble boldness of the demons. By his prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
Serapion is written as a martyr and, since nothing is transmitted of his age or state, as a man in the prime of life: in the tunic and cloak of a layman, holding the cross of the confessor in the right hand, sometimes with the palm. His distinguishing scene, where one is given, is the fire: he stands in or before the flames with the hands raised in prayer, in the manner in which Polycarp and the martyrs burned alive are shown.
No pre-1900 icon of this Serapion has been identified. The Menologion of Basil II, the first resort for minor martyrs, covers only September to February and cannot serve a July commemoration; the surviving July menaion tablets do not appear to give him a crop; and images circulating under the name "Serapion" belong to the bishop of Thmuis or to the Sindonite. He is entered in the the list of icons still being sought list, and no candidate has been stored, since storing an image of a different Serapion would create exactly the confusion the Disputed questions section above exists to prevent.
Disputed questions
- Which Serapion? The calendars carry a considerable number of martyrs of this name, and the notices are easily confused. The best known is the Serapion of Alexandria reported by Bishop Dionysius in the letter Eusebius preserves (Ecclesiastical History VI.41), who in the persecution under Decius (250) was burned in the joints and thrown headlong from the upper storey of his own house; that martyr is separately commemorated, died half a century later, and died by a different death. The July 13 Serapion is also distinct from Serapion of Thmuis, the fourth-century bishop and friend of Athanasius; from Serapion the Sindonite, the wandering ascetic of Egypt; and from the Russian Serapion of Novgorod and Serapion of Kozheozero.
- Place. No place of martyrdom is transmitted. Some modern lists supply "of Alexandria," which is a guess drawn from the name and from the date, and this entry does not follow them; the slug is deliberately neutral. Should a fuller passion be identified in a synaxarion manuscript, the entry should be revisited.
- Century. A repose about 205 falls in the third century by the ordinary reckoning (the third century runs from 201 to 300), and he is indexed there, although the reign in which he died began in the second.