Forty Martyrs of Sebaste

Life and Ministry

The Forty Martyrs were soldiers of the Legio XII Fulminata garrisoned at Sebasteia in Lesser Armenia, all of them confessed Christians. The Passio attributed to Basil of Caesarea (writing a generation later, with access to local memory) and the Spiritual Testament of the Forty Martyrs (a contemporary document preserved in Greek and dictated by the dying men) place their case in the spring of AD 320 under the eastern emperor Licinius, whose break with Constantine was reopening persecution of Christians in the military.

Circumstances of Death

Refusing to sacrifice to the emperor's gods, the forty were stripped naked and driven onto the frozen lake outside the city on a night in early March. A bath-house with hot water was set up on the shore as the price of recantation. One man broke through the night, ran to the bath, and died at the threshold of the steam. A pagan guard, struck by the sight of the others' constancy, threw off his clothes and joined them on the ice, making forty again. By morning thirty-nine had died of exposure. The last, still breathing, was loaded with the others onto carts to be burned and buried. His mother, present at the scene and the source of the local memory preserved by Basil, would not allow him to be separated from his companions and lifted him into the cart herself. The bodies were burned, the ashes scattered in the river, but some relics were recovered and venerated within decades.

Legacy

The Forty Martyrs became the most popular collective martyr-cult of the Eastern church, commemorated on 9 March in every Byzantine rite calendar, depicted in icons across the Christian East, and named in Cappadocian, Syrian, and Armenian liturgical sources from the late fourth century forward. Basil's Homily on the Forty, Gregory of Nyssa's homily, and the Russian Andrei Rublev tradition all draw on the same story. Their witness is that the Christian's number is filled by the providence of God: when one falls, another stands up; the pagan guard joined them to make forty again because the kingdom is filled, not by the work of the saints alone, but by God who calls in those whom no human council could have foreseen. The bath-house at the shore is, for them, the picture of every easy retreat from confession — the warm room the persecutor offers, the warm room that kills the soul that runs into it.