Twelve Roman Martyrs
The Holy Twelve Martyrs of Rome, perfected by the sword
Martyr
Commemorated 31 July — Perfected by the sword
Twelve martyrs of Rome, commemorated on July 31 in the Greek synaxarion by a single line — Οἱ ἅγιοι δώδεκα μάρτυρες οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι ξίφει τελειοῦνται, "the holy twelve martyrs, the Romans, are perfected by the sword." No names, no persecutor, no emperor, no year, no relics, no office: a number, a city and a manner of death. They are one of the many bare notices of the Byzantine calendar which the Church has kept precisely because they are bare — a company whose members she does not know by name and commemorates anyway.
What is transmitted
The entry is complete in one clause. The martyrs are twelve; they are Ῥωμαῖοι, Romans; and they were ξίφει τελειοῦνται, perfected by the sword, the synaxarion's formula for beheading, which was the penalty for Roman citizens and the ordinary sentence in the persecutions from the third century onward. The Greek Menaion carries the line among the "on the same day" notices beneath Eudocimus of Cappadocia; the Slavonic books and the Russian calendars generally omit them altogether.
Nothing else has been transmitted. The synaxarion assigns them no distich, which is unusual and suggests that the compiler had no more than a line in his own exemplar. There is no passion, no translation of relics, no church known to have borne their name, and no notice in the Latin martyrologies of Rome that can be matched to them — the Roman calendar of the West has several companies of martyrs of like size and no way to identify any of them with this notice.
What cannot be said
It would be easy, and wrong, to supply what the record does not give. The number twelve invites the guess that they were a household, a company of soldiers, or a group taken together in one of the great Roman persecutions under Nero, Decius, Valerian or Diocletian; the epithet "Romans" invites the guess that they suffered in the city rather than merely held its citizenship. Neither guess has any support. This collection records the notice as it stands and leaves the blanks blank.
The one thing the entry does establish is that the Church of Constantinople, compiling her calendar, thought it right to keep the memory of a company she could not name. That, rather than any recoverable biography, is the point of them, and the hymnody of the common of martyrs — which addresses martyrs collectively and by their virtue rather than individually and by their story — serves them exactly.
Feast and commemoration
July 31 (church date; New Calendar civil July 31, Old Calendar civil August 13), as a synaxarion notice of the Greek books, beneath Eudocimus and beside Joseph of Arimathea and the dedication of the Blachernae church. No proper office; no festal rank. Greek usage; the Slavonic calendars do not generally carry them. The day is the last before the Dormition Fast.
Hymns
Apolytikion — 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 intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
Companies of unnamed martyrs are painted in the menologia as a rank of figures behind one another, the front three or four distinguished by age and beard and the rest indicated by heads and haloes receding, all in the tunic and mantle of laymen and all holding the martyr's cross; where the manner of death is known it is shown by the executioner with the drawn sword at the left of the group, and the leading figure kneels. Nothing individuates the Twelve Romans, and no image of them has been identified — the number is too common and the notice too thin for any surviving miniature or fresco to be attached to it with confidence. No pre-1900 icon was located for this collection.