Theodota, Mother of the Unmercenaries
The Holy Theodota, Mother of the Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian
Righteous · d. 3rd–4th century (reposed in peace)
Commemorated 1 November — Commemorated with her sons Cosmas and Damian
Theodota was the widowed mother of the holy unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Mesopotamia, commemorated with her sons on November 1. Natives of Asia Minor, the family was left fatherless while the two boys were still small, their pagan father having died; and it was Theodota alone, by her own example and by reading the holy books to them, who raised her sons in Christian piety and purity of life, so that they grew into the righteous physicians whom the Church venerates as the first and greatest of the unmercenaries. She reposed in peace and is honoured among the righteous.
Almost all that the tradition records of Theodota concerns her motherhood. She was a Christian woman of Asia Minor — the Slavic books say of Mesopotamia — married to a pagan husband who died while their two sons, Cosmas and Damian, were still small children. Widowed and left with the whole charge of their upbringing, she raised them in the faith and fear of God: the Life stresses that she taught less by precept than by her own manner of life, and that she read the Scriptures and the holy books aloud to them, keeping them in purity according to the Lord's command. The fruit of that formation was the two unmercenary physicians whose freely-given healings and peaceful repose the Church keeps on the same day. Theodota herself reposed in peace, and is numbered among the righteous.
Feast and commemoration
November 1 (church date; Old Calendar civil November 14), the feast of her sons. In the Greek Menaion the day's proper service is that of Cosmas and Damian, within whose synaxarion notice the mother is remembered; the Slavic tradition and the Orthodox Church in America give Theodota a distinct commemoration of her own on the day, and it is on that witness that this entry rests. She has no separate proper hymnography, being commemorated in the service of the unmercenaries.
Iconography
No pre-modern icon of Theodota alone has been identified. In manuscript and narrative cycles of the unmercenaries she may appear as the mother teaching or reading to her two young sons; on panel icons the veneration attaches to Cosmas and Damian themselves. She would be depicted as a matron in the maphorion of a holy woman. (Several Menologion of Basil II miniatures labelled "Theodota" belong to other, distinct saints of that common name — the martyr Theodota of Nicaea, Theodota with Socrates the priest, and others — and none depicts this Theodota.)