Ten Ascetics of Egypt
The Holy Ten Ascetics who were of Egypt
Venerable
Commemorated 8 August — Repose of the ten Egyptian ascetics
The Greek synaxarion for August 8 commemorates ten unnamed ascetics of Egypt, recording of them only that they were ten, that they were Egyptians, and that they reposed in peace. Not a name, a place, a monastery or a century survives. They stand in the calendar for the great anonymous body of the Egyptian desert — the monks of Scetis, Nitria and the Thebaid whose lives were never written — and the epigram appointed for them in the Menaion turns their number into the day's single memorable figure: ten offshoots of Egypt, matched to the ten plagues that Egypt once suffered.
Nothing is transmitted beyond the notice itself, and the entry does not pretend otherwise. The synaxarion line reads: On the same day, the holy ten ascetics, who were of Egypt, are perfected in peace. The couplet attached to it runs:
Ten offshoots of Egypt come to their end, equal in number to those ten plagues of old.
That is all. They were ascetics (askētai) — monastics of the Egyptian desert, the mother-country of Christian monasticism — and they died in peace, which in the language of the synaxaria means expressly that they were not martyred. The commemoration of a round number of unnamed desert fathers on one day is a familiar feature of the Byzantine calendar, and preserves the memory of communities whose individual names were lost while the fact of their sanctity was not.
Feast and commemoration
August 8 (church date; New Calendar civil August 8, Old Calendar civil August 21), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration. They close the Greek synaxarion of the day, after Emilian of Cyzicus, Myron of Crete, Theodore of Orobi, and the martyrs Eleutherius and Leonidas. No office is appointed to them; they are commemorated by the reading of the synaxarion at Matins and by the concluding petition, By the prayers of thy saints, O God, have mercy on us.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of venerable fathers)
O God of our Fathers, who dealest ever with us according to thy gentleness, take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy venerable ones guide our life in peace.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Anonymous companies of this kind are painted as a group, ranged in two or three overlapping ranks with only the foremost faces fully shown: monks in the dark habit, bearded, of varied ages, some with hands raised in prayer and some holding scrolls, and above them the hand of God blessing from a segment of heaven. Egyptian ascetics are distinguished, where a painter troubles to distinguish them, by the plaited palm-leaf habit and the bare, ochre desert ground of the Thebaid behind them. No individual icon exists or could exist, since no name is transmitted; and the Menologion of Basil II, which supplies group miniatures for many such commemorations, covers September to February only and cannot serve for August. A wanted icon is recorded, with the note that only a group composition would be appropriate.
Disputed questions
- In peace, or at sea? The Greek synaxarion is explicit that they were perfected in peace (ἐν εἰρήνῃ τελειοῦνται). The Orthodox Church in America's notice for the day, however, says that the ten Egyptian ascetics "died at sea," and joins to them two martyrs of Tyre who were "dragged over the ground." Neither the manner of death nor the two Tyrian martyrs appears in the Greek Menaion for August 8 consulted here. The divergence is most likely the result of two adjacent synaxarion notices having been run together in transmission. This entry follows the Greek text; the "two martyrs of Tyre" are noted as a separate and unverified commemoration rather than merged into this one.
- Century. None is transmitted. The entry is indexed under saints of unknown date. Egyptian anchoritism flourished from the fourth century onward, which is the outer bound that can honestly be given.