Theodore the Recruit

The two Theodores

A word is owed at the outset on the pair of martyr-Theodores who stand together in the Byzantine tradition. Theodore the Recruit — Tyron — is the martyr of this entry: the common soldier of Amasea and Euchaita in Pontus, whose cult is the older and better attested, celebrated already in the fourth century by Gregory of Nyssa. Theodore Stratelates — "the general" — is the officer and governor of Heraclea in Thrace, kept on February 8. The shared name, the soldiering, the common association with the shrine-city of Euchaita, and the near-identical iconography (a young warrior-saint in armour, with spear and shield) drew the two together, and a strong current of scholarship holds that Stratelates is in origin a later doublet of the Recruit — the humble tiro of the old cult "promoted" to a general and given a fuller literary passion, with the Recruit's own shrine at Euchaita carried over to him as the resting-place of his relics. The Church, however, keeps the two as distinct saints, with two feasts and two proper offices; this entry tells the passion of the Recruit as the tradition transmits it and records the historical question under Disputed questions (the fuller treatment is given in the Stratelates entry).

The recruit at Amasea

Theodore was a young man of the province of Pontus, newly conscripted into the Roman army — a tiro, a raw recruit, whence his surname Tyron — and enrolled, the tradition says, in the cohort of the Marmaritae under its commander Brincas, quartered at the city of Amasea on the river Iris. His service fell in the years of the last and greatest of the pagan persecutions, under the emperors Maximian and Galerius Maximian (Maximianus), when it was ordered through the legions that every soldier should offer sacrifice to the gods of Rome on pain of death. Theodore, a Christian, made no secret of his faith. When his turn came to sacrifice and he refused, his officers — reluctant, the account suggests, to lose a promising young soldier, and half-hoping he might yet be won over or quietly forget his confession — did not press him at once to death but granted him a stay of some days to reconsider.

The burning of the temple

Theodore used the reprieve not to weigh apostasy but to strike a blow against the idols. Going by night to the temple of the Mother of the gods — Cybele, the Great Mother (Rhea), whose worship was among the most splendid and public of the old cults of Asia Minor — he set it on fire and burned it to the ground, that the whole city might see the powerlessness of the goddess who could not save her own house from the flames. He made no attempt to hide the deed; some tellings have him openly avow it, declaring that he had done it as a Christian, in the strength of Christ, to show the nothingness of the idols. The act was at once a confession and a provocation, and it sealed his martyrdom.

Interrogation, prison, and the vision of Christ

Arrested and brought before the governor (in the accounts, Publius) and the commander Brincas, Theodore was questioned, flattered, and threatened by turns — offered honour and advancement in the army if he would sacrifice, and torment if he would not. He answered with a bold confession of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and mocked the gods of wood and stone whose temple he had burned. He was scourged, and his sides torn with iron claws until the bones showed, yet he bore it singing the psalms. Cast into prison to be starved to death, he was — the tradition holds — fed and comforted by the Lord himself, who appeared to him in the night; and the prison was filled with a light and with the voices of a choir of angels or of the faithful singing with him, so that the guards, looking in, believed a crowd of Christians had somehow gathered to him, and found him alone.

Martyrdom by fire

Neither torture nor imprisonment moving him, the governor condemned Theodore to the death his own deed had foreshadowed: he was to be burned alive. A pyre was built, and Theodore, signing himself with the Cross, went up onto it of his own accord; the flames rose about him, but — the passion relates — did not tear or disfigure him, wrapping him rather like a vault or a sail filled with wind, and in their midst he gave up his spirit to God, his soul going up, a witness saw, like a flash of light. The year is given as about 306. The onlookers marked that his body was left whole and unconsumed in the fire.

Burial at Euchaita

A devout and wealthy Christian woman of the region named Eusebia obtained the martyr's body, wrapped it in fine linen with spices, and carried it to her own estate at Euchaita (Euchaïta), a town in the Pontic hinterland, where she buried it with honour. Over his grave there grew, in the following century, one of the great pilgrimage shrines of Asia Minor; the town took its later name, Theodoroupolis, from the martyr, and the cult of "the Theodores" spread from it through the whole Christian East. It was at this shrine, on the martyr's feast, that Gregory of Nyssa (†c. 395) delivered his famous encomium on Theodore the Recruit — the earliest full witness to the cult, describing the crowds, the martyr's tomb and image, and the wonders wrought there — a sermon that fixes the veneration of the Recruit firmly in the fourth century, a generation or more before the general of Heraclea appears in the record.

The miracle of the kollyva

The wonder for which Theodore is best loved belongs not to his lifetime but to half a century after his death, in the reign of Julian the Apostate (361–363), the emperor who forsook Christ and strove to restore the old gods. In the first week of Great Lent, when the Christians of Constantinople would be fasting most strictly and keeping the market for their simple Lenten fare, Julian — wishing to defile them secretly, so that they should be polluted with the worship of idols unawares — commanded the city eparch to have all the food exposed for sale in the markets sprinkled with the blood of animals sacrificed to the idols. That night, the tradition holds, the martyr Theodore appeared in a vision to the Archbishop of Constantinople, Eudoxius, revealed the emperor's device, and bade him warn the faithful to buy nothing from the market; and when the archbishop asked how the poor, who had no provisions laid by, were to eat, the saint bade them boil the wheat they had in their houses and eat that — kollyva (κόλλυβα), boiled grain — so that the people were preserved from the defilement and Julian's malice came to nothing. In memory of this deliverance the Church keeps, every year on the First Saturday of Great Lent, the commemoration of the miracle of the kollyva, with the blessing of a dish of boiled wheat sweetened with honey and fruit in the martyr's honour — the same kollyva that is offered ever after at the Church's memorials of the dead. This movable commemoration is noted here in prose and is not minted as a dated feast; the fixed feast of the martyr is February 17.

Relics and later cultus

From Euchaita the veneration of Theodore the Recruit spread early and widely. His relics, or portions of them, were in time translated and divided among many churches; a chief portion is said to have been carried to Brindisi in Italy in the middle Byzantine centuries, where the martyr is honoured as a patron, and his head is claimed at Gaeta. In the imperial city his memory was kept in more than one church dedicated to him, and he was numbered among the holy warrior-martyrs (οἱ ἅγιοι στρατηλάται / the military saints) — with George, Demetrius, the general Theodore, Procopius, Mercurius, and the rest — whom the Byzantine army and the Christian East loved as protectors in battle. The eleventh-century bishop of Euchaita, John Mauropous, wrote in honour of the two Theodores of his see and is a chief witness to their twinned veneration. A second Euchaita feast on June 8 is kept in the calendars for the translation of the relics to Euchaita; in the service-books this June commemoration is generally assigned to Theodore Stratelates, whose burial-place Euchaita is said to be — a further mark of how completely the two cults were fused at the one shrine (see Disputed questions).