The Sixteen Martyrs of Thebes

The Holy Sixteen Martyrs of Thebes

Martyr

Commemorated 30 August — Martyrdom by the sword

A company of sixteen martyrs called Thebans, beheaded for Christ, whose number and manner of death is the whole of what the synaxarion transmits. They are commemorated on August 30 in the Greek books, where Nikodemos the Hagiorite gives them the customary couplet and nothing more; no names, no place beyond the ethnic, no date, and no persecutor. The present entry records the fact of them and refuses to invent the rest.

The Greek synaxaristes carries them in the form:

Ereis arithmou tynchanein hex kai deka / tmēthentas andras artiakis artiou —

"You would say that the men beheaded were of the number sixteen, an even number evenly doubled" — followed by the single line: the holy Sixteen Martyrs, the Thebans, were martyred by the sword.

Which Thebes is not stated. Two are possible and both were places of martyrdom. The Thebaid of Upper Egypt gave the Church some of its largest companies of martyrs under Diocletian, and the Egyptian usage "Thebans" for the Christians of that province is common in the passions; if that is meant, the sixteen belong with the mass martyrdoms of the Great Persecution. But Thebes in Boeotia also had its martyrs, and Greek synaxarion entries naturally read the name in its Greek sense. The tradition gives nothing to decide between them.

Their number, sixteen, is not one of the round symbolic totals that so often signal a literary company (forty, seventy, three hundred) — which is faintly in favour of the record resting on some real memory of a real group; the hymnographer's couplet plays on it as artiakis artiou, evenly even, four times four.

Feast and commemoration

August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12), in Greek usage. They are named at the synaxarion reading of the day, whose office belongs to the three patriarchs of Constantinople. The Slavonic calendars and the OCA do not carry them.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of many martyrs)

Thy martyrs, 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

Anonymous companies of this kind are painted as a compact crowd: a rank of heads and shoulders, the foremost figures given faces and the rest indicated behind them, all in the tunics and mantles of laymen and all holding the small cross of martyrdom, with the number written above them — Οἱ Ἅγιοι ΙϚ´ Μάρτυρες. Where the passion itself is shown it is a beheading scene: the martyrs kneeling in a row, the executioner with the drawn sword, the severed heads below. No image of them has been located for this collection, and the Menologion of Basil II, which covers only September to February, cannot supply one for an August day.

Disputed questions

Which Thebes. See above. Egyptian Thebaid or Boeotian Thebes; unresolved.
When. No persecution and no emperor is named. If Egyptian, the Diocletianic persecution is the natural setting; but the entry carries no century, and they are indexed under saints of unknown date.
Confusion with the Theban Legion. They are not to be confused with the Theban Legion of Saint Maurice, martyred at Agaunum in the West — a company of thousands, drawn indeed from the Thebaid, but a distinct and much better documented tradition. The coincidence of the ethnic has caused the two to be run together in some modern lists, and there is no ancient warrant for it.