Phileas of Thmuis

Life and Ministry

Phileas was bishop of Thmuis in the Nile Delta, a man of senatorial rank and reputation for learning, who governed the city of Thmuis before his episcopate and was known to Eusebius as one of the most respected leaders of the Egyptian church at the start of the fourth century. Arrested in the early years of the Diocletian persecution and held in the prison at Alexandria, he wrote from there a letter to the Christians of Thmuis — preserved in part by Eusebius — that gives one of the most vivid extant pictures of the tortures used to attempt apostasy: the iron claws, the brick rubbing, the broiling. The Acta Phileae, preserved in Greek (and substantially in Latin), records four examinations before the prefect Culcianus over an extended period of months.

Circumstances of Death

Phileas was offered repeated opportunities to sacrifice. The court record preserves the exchange: Culcianus presses him on whether Christ was God; Phileas answers yes. He presses him on whether Paul was a prophet; Phileas answers Paul was an apostle of Christ. He presses him on the example of Plato, who said wise things and did not die for them; Phileas answers that Plato did not redeem the world. The prefect declines a final intervention by Phileas's brother Philoromus, an imperial fiscal officer who interrupts the court to defend his brother and is himself arrested. The two are sentenced together. The act ends with Phileas extending his arms in the form of a cross, praying for the city, and being beheaded with Philoromus on the same day.

Legacy

Phileas is one of the most important North African and Egyptian witnesses to the period of the Great Persecution, his case combining episcopal authority, senatorial rank, sustained legal process, and family solidarity in death. The Acta is one of the linguistically richest of the Diocletian-era Passios, used in the Greek and Coptic liturgical calendars and excerpted in the Synaxarion. His witness is the witness of the bishop who carries his see into the prison and into the court — that the apostolic office is for going where the sheep are being pulled, not for staying in the safe house. His brother's interruption in court adds the witness of natural family bound and overruled by the higher family of the church. They died as brothers in both senses.