Timothy, Agapius and Thecla
The Holy Martyrs Timothy, Agapius and Thecla, who suffered in Palestine
Martyr · d. 304, at Gaza and Caesarea in Palestine
Timothy, Agapius and Thecla are three of the earliest named victims of the Great Persecution in Palestine, put to death in 304, its second year, under the governor Urbanus. They are not synaxarion figures but people whose deaths were recorded, within living memory and probably from the writer's own eyes, by Eusebius of Caesarea in his little book On the Martyrs of Palestine. Timothy, a learned and eloquent teacher of the faith, was tortured at length and then burned to death over a slow fire at Gaza — a mode of execution designed to be as long as possible; the Greek verses for the day turn the horror into an image of worship, the furnace a censer and the martyr the incense in it. Agapius and Thecla, condemned in the same season, were given to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre. Their memory stands on August 19 immediately after that of Andrew Stratelates, and their arena is the same one into which, days later, the eight martyrs of Agapius and his Companions deliberately walked.
The second year of the persecution
The persecution of Diocletian and Maximian opened in 303 and reached Palestine at once; by its second year, 304, the fourth edict had made universal sacrifice compulsory, and the governor Urbanus was holding assizes at Caesarea, the provincial capital, and travelling the coastal cities. Gaza, an old and stubbornly pagan city on the road to Egypt, was one of them.
The evidence for what happened there is of a quality almost unique in the fixed calendar. Eusebius, later bishop of Caesarea and the father of Church history, was living in the province throughout the persecution and wrote its record down — the deaths, the names, the provinces the victims came from, the dates by the Roman and Macedonian months. What he gives is short, dry and specific, and it is because it is dry that it is trustworthy. The three martyrs of this day stand at the head of his third chapter.
Timothy
Timothy was, by the tradition the Byzantine synaxaria transmit, a native of Caesarea in Palestine, a man who had studied the Scriptures and possessed an unusual gift of speech, and who used both as a teacher of the Christian faith — that is, a catechist, one of the class that the persecutors were under standing orders to remove first, since the teachers were the ones who made new Christians.
Brought before Urbanus, he declared himself a Christian without hesitation, and — the notices are agreed on this — did not merely confess but preached: he spoke of the love of the Lord Jesus Christ for mankind and of his coming into the world for men's salvation. It is a last lecture, delivered from the dock, and it is exactly what a catechist would do.
He was tortured at length. When it became plain that the torments were not going to shift him, he was executed at Gaza by fire — and not by a quick burning: Eusebius specifies a slow, low fire, the technique by which the executioners kept the victim alive as long as possible. The Greek distich set beside his name in the synaxarion refuses to describe the pain and describes something else instead: the furnace is a censer, bearing in its midst Timothy, a spice most fragrant. The choice is deliberate. What the crowd smelled was a man burning; what the Church says it smelled was incense.
Agapius and Thecla
In the same city and the same year, Agapius and Thecla were condemned — not to the fire but to the beasts. Their sentence belongs to the machinery of the public games: Christians who would not sacrifice were kept for the shows and given to the animals in front of a paying crowd, which is why the persecution's records are so often dated by festivals. The Greek verses for Agapius say simply that he bears the bite of the beast — and the beast that bites souls is bitten to the heart; and the verse for Thecla is put, unusually, into her own mouth: My name is Thecla; my homeland Bizye; the place, Gaza; the theatre; the contest, a beast that tears.
Beyond that the record does not go, and nothing is added here. They were condemned, they were exposed, and they died in the arena.
The arena and what came of it
The consequence of their sentence is, however, recorded, and it belongs to their entry as much as to anyone's. At the games at Caesarea at which Christians were being given to the beasts in this same season, six young men bound their own hands and walked up to the tribunal of Urbanus to declare themselves Christians and to demand the same sentence — Timolaus of Pontus, Dionysius of Tripolis, Romulus the subdeacon of Lydda, Paesis and Alexander the Egyptians, and a second Alexander of Gaza. Imprisoned rather than fed to the animals, they were joined by two more and all eight were beheaded on 24 March; the Church keeps them on March 15. The condemnation of Agapius and Thecla is thus the occasion, in Eusebius' narrative, of the most famous act of voluntary martyrdom in the Palestinian persecution: their exposure was what the six young men saw, and what they walked into the arena to share.
Feast and commemoration
August 19 (church date; New Calendar civil August 19, Old Calendar civil September 1). The three are commemorated together, in the Greek synaxarion and in the Slavonic and OCA calendars alike, on the day of Andrew Stratelates, whose service occupies the Menaion; theirs is a synaxarion memory with no proper hymnography, kept within the afterfeast of the Dormition. The Greek books give them the three distichs quoted above; the Slavonic calendars date them "c. 304." They are kept universally.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their supplications, O Christ our God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No developed iconographic type belongs to these three, and no pre-1900 image of them has been identified for this collection. Where they appear it is in menologion compositions for August — the calendar-icons that give each day of the month a small scene — and there the conventions are the ordinary ones: Timothy as a young or middle-aged layman in tunic and mantle holding the martyr's cross, with the fire beneath him where the scene of his death is shown; Agapius likewise as a layman, with the beast; and Thecla as a woman in the long tunic and head-covering, holding the cross, sometimes with the lion or bear at her feet. Because Thecla of Iconium's iconography is so much more developed — and includes beasts that refuse to touch her — any bare image of a "Saint Thecla with a beast" must be treated as the Iconian saint unless an inscription or a menologion context proves otherwise, and no such image is stored here.
Disputed questions
- Which Agapius? Eusebius names an Agapius at least twice more. One is the Agapius who was added to the six young men at Caesarea and beheaded with them on 24 March, kept in this corpus on March 15 and described as a man of Gaza who had already been repeatedly tortured in an earlier round of the persecution; another is the Agapius of Eusebius' sixth chapter, exposed to a bear in the amphitheatre at Caesarea in 306 in the presence of the emperor Maximinus himself, and described as one who had already been brought out for the beasts more than once and each time sent back to prison. Whether these are one man, two, or three is a genuinely open question: the repeated reprieves that Eusebius describes are precisely the mechanism by which a man condemned to the beasts in 304 could still be alive in 306, and a martyr repeatedly paraded and returned would naturally leave more than one trace in the record. The Byzantine calendar treats them as separate commemorations, and this corpus follows the calendar; but the identity is not settled, and the entries are cross-referenced rather than merged.
- "My homeland Bizye." The Greek verse gives Thecla's patris as Bizye, a town of Thrace, while placing her contest at Gaza. A Thracian woman dying in a Palestinian amphitheatre is not impossible — the empire moved people, and Eusebius' own martyr-lists are full of Egyptians dying in Palestine and Palestinians dying in Egypt — but the line may equally be a copyist's importation from another Thecla. It is recorded here as what the verses say, not as an established fact.
- Gaza or Caesarea? The Byzantine notices say that Timothy was a native of Caesarea and that Agapius and Thecla suffered "in the same city," while Eusebius places Timothy's burning at Gaza. The most economical reading is that Timothy was a Caesarean who was tried and burned at Gaza, and that the "same city" of the later notices has slipped from Gaza to Caesarea in transmission. The modern calendars accordingly head the group "of Palestine" rather than naming a city, which is the safest formula and is followed here.
- Not the same as Thecla of Iconium. This Thecla has nothing to do with Thecla of Iconium, the first-century disciple of the Apostle Paul, protomartyr among women, whose feast is September 24 and whose shrine is at Seleucia and at Maaloula in Syria. The two are separated by two centuries and by the whole character of their cults; the confusion arises only from the name, which was common in the East precisely because of the Iconian saint.
- Not the same as the other Timothys of the calendar. Distinguish Timothy the Apostle (January 22), the disciple of Paul and bishop of Ephesus; Timothy of Prusa (June 10), the bishop-martyr under Julian; Timothy of Proconnesus (August 1); and Timothy of Symbola (February 21).