Timothy and Maura

Penapeis in the Thebaid

The passion places the two martyrs at Penapeis (the Greek books also give Panapolis, and Slavonic and English retellings Perapa), a village of the Thebaid, the great southern province of Roman Egypt that in the same generation was filling with hermits and with martyrs. Timothy was the son of a presbyter named in the Greek tradition Pikolpossos, and had been raised in the church from infancy. He held the minor order of reader (ἀναγνώστης), and with it the office that in an Egyptian village church of the third century made a man both indispensable and conspicuous: he read the Scriptures aloud to the congregation, taught the catechumens, and copied out the sacred books by hand. The passion adds that he preached — that is, that he expounded what he read — and this is what brought him to the prefect's notice.

He had been married only twenty days to a young woman named Maura, of the same village, when the edict reached the Thebaid.

The books

The persecution of Diocletian (reigned 284–305) is remembered in Egypt above all for its demand for books: the imperial order that the Christian Scriptures and liturgical volumes be handed over to the magistrates and burnt. Refusal to surrender them was the formal charge that created the traditores controversy in the Latin West a generation later, and it is the exact charge laid against Timothy. The prefect of the Thebaid, Arrianus, had him brought in and required him to produce the books he was known to keep and copy.

Timothy refused. The dialogue the passion preserves has the ring of the Egyptian acts: the prefect argued that a man who would not give up mere parchment for the sake of his own body was a fool; the reader answered that the books were the words by which he lived, and that a father does not deliver up his children to be killed. Neither threat nor the offer of office moved him.

The torments of Timothy

Arrianus ordered that red-hot iron spits be driven into his ears. The burning destroyed the humours of the eyes and Timothy was blinded; the passion notes, with the flat realism these documents often have, that his sight was lost as a consequence of the torture of the ears rather than by a separate act. When he still would not yield he was hung head downward, a heavy stone tied about his neck and a gag of wood forced into his mouth so that he could not confess Christ aloud; and still he did not recant.

Maura won over

It was then that the prefect, having failed with iron, tried the subtler instrument. He sent for Maura — twenty days a wife, and by every ordinary expectation the one person who might beg her husband into compliance — adorned her, and set her before Timothy to plead for his life and hers.

The turn on which the whole passion rests is that the plan succeeded in reverse. Timothy spoke to his bride of the brief sweetness of the world and the length of eternity; and Maura, hearing him, went over wholly to his side. Her answer to the prefect — "I am ready to die together with my husband" — is the sentence for which the two are remembered in the Church, and it is on the strength of it that the pair are hymned as a ζεῦγος ὁμόζυγον, a yoked pair, drawing one plough.

The torments of Maura

The prefect turned on her the cruelty ordinarily reserved for a woman's shame. Her hair was torn out by the roots, and the fingers of her hands cut off. She was thrown into a cauldron of boiling water, and came out of it unhurt; when Arrianus, suspecting some trick, ordered her to throw the water over herself, she did so and was still unharmed, and told him that the boiling water had felt to her like the water of a bath at her own house. Bystanders who murmured that this was sorcery she answered with the sentence the passion sets against her husband's: "Let no one speak for me. I have one Defender, God, in whom I trust."

Her own mother, the tradition adds, came and begged her to save herself, and Maura refused her as she had refused the prefect.

Crucified together

Baffled, Arrianus condemned the two to the death of their Lord. They were crucified, and their crosses were set facing one another, so that each should see the other's agony and be tempted to give way; and the passion says they hung there nine days, speaking to one another and singing, and died on the tenth. The Greek synaxarion verses make this the whole point of the feast: "Christ of old stretched out His hands upon the Cross; now Maura stretches hers out too, with Timothy."

The nine days on the cross are the setting of the two visions the passion attributes to Maura, which belong to the oldest layer of Egyptian ascetic literature as much as to hagiography. In the first, a figure in white came to her with a cup of milk and honey and bade her drink; she asked where the water was, made the sign of the Cross, and the figure fled — the demon offering, on a cross, the comfort of the marriage feast she had been denied. In the second she was carried up and shown a throne and a robe and a crown, and an angel told her they were kept for her, and a second crown for Timothy, and that she must go back to her cross and finish. Both narratives turn on the same discrimination of spirits: the martyr's refusal of a consolation that has not the Cross in it.

They gave up their souls on the tenth day, about the year 286.

Relics and veneration

The two are among the earliest Egyptian martyrs to be venerated widely outside Egypt, and Maura's cultus outran her husband's. Her skull is kept in the church at Koilani in the wine country of Cyprus; particles of her relics are held at the monastery of Kykkos on the same island, and in a church at Venice — a Venetian provenance that explains the name by which the island of Lefkada was known for four centuries. The great Venetian fortress that commands the channel there was dedicated to her, and island, fortress and town alike were called Santa Maura (Ἁγία Μαύρα) until the modern Greek name was restored; she remains the island's patroness.

Timothy and Maura passed into Western usage as well, and are entered in the Roman Martyrology on the same 3 May. Their crucifixion has attracted painters outside the iconographic tradition — the seventeenth-century Dutch engravers of the martyrologies, and in the nineteenth century the Polish academician Henryk Siemiradzki, whose Martyrdom of Saints Timothy and Maura fixed the pair in the European imagination as a young couple on facing crosses.