Theodore of Cyrene
The Holy Hieromartyr Theodore, Bishop of Cyrene in Libya
Hieromartyr · Bishop · d. c. 310, in prison at Cyrene
Commemorated 4 July — Death in prison after the cutting out of his tongue
Theodore, bishop of Cyrene in the Libyan Pentapolis, was a calligrapher — a copyist who wrote out the books of the Church with his own hand and gave them to the faithful — and it was for his books that he died. In the persecution of Diocletian he was denounced to the governor Dignianus by his own son Leo, and commanded to surrender the Scriptures and sacrifice; he refused, was beaten with rods and had his tongue cut out, and died of his wounds in prison about the year 310. Three women whom he had brought to Christ — Cyprilla, Aroa and Lucia — suffered with him or shortly after him. He is a hieromartyr of the same African province as the little-known Donagus (Donatus) of Libya, and is not to be confused with Theodotus, bishop of Cyrenia in Cyprus.
Cyrene and the Pentapolis
Cyrene was the mother-city of the Pentapolis of Cyrenaica — with Ptolemais, Berenice, Teuchira and Apollonia — the Greek-speaking African province lying west of Egypt and known to the Greek calendars simply as Libya. Ecclesiastically it was suffragan to Alexandria, named with Egypt in the sixth canon of Nicaea, and its churches suffered in the Alexandrian persecutions. Cyrene has a place in the New Testament: it was a Cyrenian, Simon, who carried the Cross, and men of Cyrene were among the first to preach to the Greeks at Antioch (Acts 11:20). Its bishops belong to the Alexandrian dossier of martyrs, of whom a number stand in the synaxarion for the days of high summer.
The bishop who wrote out the books
What is distinctive in Theodore's notice, and what has the ring of a genuine memory of the Great Persecution, is his trade. He was a skilled calligrapher, and he copied the books of the Church — the Scriptures and the liturgical books — and distributed them. The detail places him exactly: the first edict of Diocletian in 303 ordered the churches demolished and, above all, the Scriptures surrendered and burned, and it created a whole class of confessors defined by the refusal to hand over books, and a whole class of the lapsed — the traditores of the African controversies — defined by having handed them over. A bishop who was also the copyist of his province's books was the persecution's obvious target.
Denounced by his son
The tradition says that Theodore was accused before Dignianus, the governor of the district, by his own son Leo — the charge being that he possessed Christian books and was turning men to Christ. The governor's demand was the standard one of the edict: give up the books, and sacrifice.
Theodore refused. He was beaten with rods, and, because the offence lay in what he wrote and taught, the sentence fell upon the instruments of speech: his tongue was cut out, and he was thrown into prison. There he died of his injuries, about 310. The synaxarion's epigram plays, as the Greek epigrams like to, on the mutilation — the tongue cut out for Christ speaks the louder for it.
Cyprilla, Aroa and Lucia
Named with him in the calendars are three women — Cyprilla (Kyprilla; the English lists also give Korilla), Aroa and Lucia — described as converts baptised through his preaching, who were arrested and put to death with him or immediately after. The Greek books commemorate the three women on July 5 in their own right, so that the two days belong together; the notices are brief, and beyond their names and their conversion by the bishop nothing of them is transmitted.
Feast and commemoration
July 4 (church date; New Calendar civil July 4, Old Calendar civil July 17). He is named in the synaxarion of the day, which is dominated by Andrew of Crete; the Menaion gives him no proper office, and the common of a hieromartyr is used. His companions Cyprilla, Aroa and Lucia are commemorated on July 5. The Orthodox Church in America keeps him on this day as "Hieromartyr Theodore, Bishop of Cyrene, and those with him."
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
Sharing in the ways of the Apostles and seated with them upon their throne, thou didst find in thy labours, O God-inspired one, the ladder that leadeth to contemplation; and, offering thyself a whole burnt-offering, thou didst pour forth thy blood for the Church of Christ. O hieromartyr Theodore, entreat Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
With thine own hand thou didst write out the oracles of God, and thou wouldst not surrender them; wherefore the tyrant took away thy tongue, and thou didst preach the more loudly by thy blood. O Theodore, bishop of Cyrene, pray for them that honour thee.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Theodore is painted in the hieromartyr's type: a bishop in phelonion and crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel book in the left, or with the martyr's cross in place of the blessing. Because his passion turns on his writing, painters who know the notice sometimes give him a scroll or a codex rather than the Gospel, and the mutilation of the tongue — which has no visible sign — is left to the synaxarion. He belongs to the crowded menologion rows of July, where he is identified only by the inscription Ὁ ἍΓΙΟΣ ΘΕΟΔΩΡΟΣ ἘΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΣ ΚΥΡΗΝΗΣ.
No pre-1900 image securely inscribed for this Theodore has been located for this collection. The sheer number of saints named Theodore, and the ease of confusing Libyan Cyrene with Cypriot Cyrenia, make any uninscribed candidate unsafe, and none was stored. (The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for minor saints, covers only September to February and offers nothing here.)
Disputed questions
- The son's denunciation. That Theodore was betrayed by his son Leo is the striking element of the notice and is carried by the synaxarial tradition and by the modern jurisdictional lives. It is not independently attested, and the motif of the denouncing relative is a common one in passions of the Great Persecution; it is recorded here as the tradition gives it.
- Date. The persecution frame — Diocletian, 284–305 — is uniform, and the death is usually placed about 310, i.e. in the tail of the persecution under Maximinus Daia, when it was fiercest in the Alexandrian sphere. Nothing narrows it further.
- Not to be confused with Theodotus of Cyrenia, the hieromartyr bishop of Cyrenia (Kerynia) in Cyprus (March 2) — a different city with a confusingly similar name, a different century, and a confessor who survived his tortures; nor with the several other martyrs named Theodore of the same period. His Libyan compatriot Donagus, whom the English calendars call Donatus of Libya, is likewise a distinct man, whose commemoration stands at June 28 and who is also listed by some sources on this same July 4 — see that entry.
- Cyrene or Cyrenia? English lists occasionally print "Cyrene in Cyprus," conflating the Libyan metropolis with the Cypriot Kerynia. Every Greek witness places Theodore in Libya.