Thalelaeus the Unmercenary

Origins and early life

The passion makes Thalelaeus a native of Lebanon, that is of Roman Phoenicia, and gives the names of his parents: his father Berucius (Beroukias) was an officer in the imperial service, his mother Romylia. A brother of his is described as a subdeacon, which tells us that the household was Christian and in some degree in the service of the Church — an unremarkable but useful detail, since it locates Thalelaeus not among converts from paganism but among the children of the third-century Christian provincial gentry.

He left Phoenicia for Cilicia to study medicine, and the tradition names his master: the physician Macarius. He was, when he was arrested, a student of about eighteen — young enough that his youth is one of the two things the synaxarion insists upon. The other is what he did with the art he was learning. He took no fee: he treated whoever came, poor and rich alike, for nothing, and by that habit he is enrolled with Cosmas and Damian of Arabia, Cyrus and John and the other Anargyroi — the "silverless ones," physicians who refused money for healing on the ground that the gift was not theirs to sell. Thalelaeus is unusual among them in that his unmercenary practice belongs to his student years and was cut short almost as soon as it began.

Arrest under Numerian

The persecution in which he suffered is placed in the short reign of Numerian (283–284), and the magistrate named is the prefect Theodore, who governed at Aegae in Cilicia and sent soldiers through the district to hunt out Christians. Thalelaeus was taken and brought before him. He made no attempt to shelter behind his youth or his profession: asked who he was, he answered that he was a Christian, and refused to sacrifice.

The bored knees, and the conversion of the executioners

The sentence Theodore devised is the distinguishing episode of this passion, and it is what the iconography and the hymns fix upon. Two men of the prefect's service, Alexander and Asterius, were ordered to bore through the martyr's knees, pass a rope through the holes in the bone, and hang him head downward from a tree.

The two set to work; and when the prefect came to look, Thalelaeus stood unhurt, and what the augers had bored through was a length of wood. Whether the account means that God had blinded the executioners or that the martyr's limbs were made proof against the iron, the sources do not resolve; what they agree on is the consequence. Alexander and Asterius, understanding that they had been made instruments of a sign, confessed Christ before the prefect and were beheaded — the first fruits of Thalelaeus's witness, and commemorated with him on this day.

Theodore, enraged, is said to have taken up the tool himself, and to have injured his own hand in the attempt; a strand of the tradition adds that the martyr healed him, and that the healing hardened rather than softened him.

Martyrdom

There followed the standard escalation of the passions, each stage failing. Thalelaeus was thrown into water to be drowned, and was not drowned; he was exposed to wild beasts, and they would not touch him. Theodore, out of inventions, ordered him beheaded, and so he was perfected — in the year 284, at about eighteen years of age. A minority of the Greek witnesses dates the martyrdom to 289 and places it in May, which is at any rate consistent with the day the calendar keeps.

Veneration

His cult was established early and widely: he is in the Synaxarion of Constantinople at May 20, in the Greek Menaia, and in the Slavonic menologia, and healings were reported at his shrine, as is usual with an unmercenary. The Greek tradition sometimes styles him ὁ ἐλεήμων, "the merciful," alongside ὁ Ἀνάργυρος. He is invoked as a physician of soul and body, and belongs — with his fellow-students in the trade of healing — to that class of saints by whom the Church declared, against the whole habit of the ancient medical profession, that the art of healing is not a commodity.