Theotima
The Holy Martyr Theotima
Martyr · d. c. 311
Commemorated 19 May — Martyrdom by the sword
Theotima is one of the saints of whom the Church has kept only the name, the manner of death and the day. The Greek synaxarion for May 19 records her in a single clause — "the holy martyr Theotima is perfected by the sword" — and the calendars add a date of about 311, at the very end of the Great Persecution. Nothing else has come down: not her city, not the persecutor, not her age or state of life. She is entered here at that value, without supplement, because the alternative to an honest short entry is an invented long one.
What is transmitted
The whole of the record is the synaxarion line: Ἡ ἁγία μάρτυς Θεοτίμη ξίφει τελειοῦται — "the holy martyr Theotima is perfected by the sword." The formula is the standard one of the Constantinopolitan synaxarion for a beheading, and it is used precisely where the compiler had a name in his list and no passion to summarise.
Two things can be drawn from it without invention. The first is that her death was by decapitation, which in Roman practice was the ordinary sentence for those to whom the dignity of a quick death was allowed, and which the synaxaria distinguish carefully from burning, drowning and the beasts. The second is the name itself: Theotimē, "honoured of God" or "she who honours God," a Greek theophoric name of the sort common in the Greek-speaking East in the third and fourth centuries. It tells us she belonged to that world, and no more.
The date c. 311 given by the OCA places her among the last martyrs of the persecution begun by Diocletian — the years of Galerius and Maximinus Daza, when the persecution in the East outlasted its abandonment in the West and continued until the edict of toleration. If the date is sound, she died within a year or two of the peace of the Church. But the date is a calendar attribution rather than a datum from a passion, and it should be held loosely.
Feast and commemoration
May 19 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 1). She stands at the end of the Greek synaxarion notice for the day, after the hieromartyr Patrick of Prusa and his companions, the venerable Memnon the Wonderworker, the martyr Akolouthos and the new martyr Kyriake; the OCA also carries her, as "Martyr Theotime." There is no proper service and no proper hymn: she is sung, if at all, with the common of a woman martyr, and in practice the day's service is that of Patrick and his companions with the Pentecostarion's movable hymns above it.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a woman martyr)
Thy lamb Theotima crieth out to Thee with a great voice, O Jesus: I love Thee, my Bridegroom, and in seeking Thee I contend; I am crucified and buried together with Thee in Thy baptism, and I suffer for Thy sake that I may reign with Thee; I die for Thee that I may live in Thee. Receive me as a spotless sacrifice, offered to Thee with love; and by her intercessions, O merciful One, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Theotima has no established iconography of her own, and could not have one: nothing about her is known that could be painted. Where she is depicted at all — in a full menologion cycle, or in a composite icon of the martyrs of a day — she takes the general type of the woman martyr of the early persecutions: a young woman standing, in the long chiton and maphorion with the head covered, holding the cross in the right hand and with the left raised, palm outward, in prayer or extended to receive the crown; her manner of death would be indicated, if at all, by the sword held or shown beside her.
No image of her has been located for this collection, and none is expected. The Menologion of Basil II, which supplies miniatures for a great many one-line martyrs of exactly this kind, covers only September to February and so cannot serve a May commemoration.
Disputed questions
- Everything except the name and the sword. No place, no persecutor, no companions and no narrative are transmitted. Some modern devotional lists supply her with a city or attach her to a neighbouring company of martyrs on the same day; nothing of the kind is warranted by the Greek notice, and none of it is repeated here.
- The form of the name. The Greek is Θεοτίμη; English calendars give Theotime (so the OCA), Theotimi, and the Latinate Theotima used here as the head-name, with the others as alternates. She is a woman; the masculine Theotimus of other days — including the bishop of Tomis — is a different name and a different person.
- Not to be confused with the several women martyrs of similar name kept on other days, in particular Theodota of Nicaea and Theodota of Bithynia, with whom she is occasionally confounded in day-lists on the strength of the resemblance alone.