Two Children Martyred for Christ
The Holy Two Children who were crucified for Christ
Child Martyr · Martyr
Commemorated 28 June — Martyrdom of two children for Christ; names and date not transmitted
Among the commemorations of June 28 the Greek synaxarion names two children who were put to death for Christ, the tradition specifying that they were crucified. Their names, their country and the persecution in which they suffered are not transmitted. They stand in the calendar as witnesses of the Church's oldest conviction about the martyrdom of the young: that the confession of a child is a confession, and that the crown does not wait upon years.
What is transmitted
The Greek books give the two children in a single line among the martyrs of the day, and the fuller English lists add the manner of their death — crucified for Christ. Nothing further survives: no names, no ages, no city, no magistrate.
The detail of crucifixion is worth marking, because it is not a common sentence in the martyr-acts of the Roman persecutions after the first century; Roman law came to reserve the cross for slaves and for the provincial non-citizen, and Constantine abolished the penalty altogether. Where the synaxaria report Christians crucified, the setting is generally either the earliest persecutions, or the persecutions outside the empire — Persia under the Sasanians, or later the Islamic and Ottoman contexts — where the sentence remained in use. This is an observation about the notice, not a dating of it, and the entry claims nothing about where these two children died.
Children among the martyrs
The Church's calendar is full of the young. The Holy Innocents of Bethlehem (December 29) are the type; and after them come Cyricus the three-year-old with his mother Julitta (July 15), the three daughters of Athanasia — Theoctiste, Theodota and Eudoxia, aged fifteen, thirteen and eleven — beheaded before their mother's eyes on the same day as the unmercenaries Cyrus and John whose translation this very day of June 28 commemorates, and many more. The type-vocabulary of this collection has a term for them, child-martyr, which is used here.
Feast and commemoration
June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), in the Greek books; the Slavonic Menaion does not carry the commemoration. No proper service; the common of many martyrs is used, with the name replaced by the general commemoration of the day.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of many 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.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Child-martyrs are painted as small figures in adult dress — tunic and mantle, sometimes the chlamys — with beardless faces and the proportions of children, each holding the cross of martyrdom; they are set at the front of a rank of martyrs or beside the parent or teacher with whom they suffered. If the manner of their death is shown, the two would appear on crosses, a rare motif in Byzantine painting outside the Crucifixion itself and the martyrdom of the Apostle Andrew. No image of these two children is known, and none has been stored for this collection.
Disputed questions
- No names, no date, no place. century is omitted and the entry indexes under unknown.
- The Greek notice as transmitted at synaxarion.gr gives simply "two child martyrs"; the specification that they were crucified comes from the fuller English calendar tradition, which is followed here because it is the only circumstantial detail preserved. If it derives from a misreading of the phrase διὰ Χριστὸν ("for Christ") the error is an old one, and the entry records the received form.