The Life
In the year 320, in Sebaste in Lesser Armenia (now Sivas in Turkey), forty Roman soldiers of the Twelfth Legion — the Thundering Legion, Legio XII Fulminata — were ordered by the emperor Licinius to make a public sacrifice to the gods. They were Christians, all of them, and they refused. The governor, Agricola, tried to persuade them; he was a competent and reasonable Roman official and did not want to lose forty good soldiers. They would not yield. He had them stoned, but the stones bounced back at the throwers. He had them stripped naked and herded onto a frozen lake outside the city on the coldest night of winter. Warm baths were set up on the bank for any who would change his mind. The soldiers held one another upright through the night and prayed: forty saints, as we have entered this contest together, let us also be crowned together. Forty crowns descended from heaven — thirty-nine for the soldiers and one undecided. One man broke and ran for the warm bath. A pagan guard named Aglaius saw the crown still hovering, threw off his clothes, and ran out onto the ice to join them. The number forty was made up. In the morning the survivors were beaten to death and burned, but the Church has remembered them ever since on March 9, in the depth of Lent, as one of the most beloved corporate witnesses to Christ in the entire patristic age.
The emperor Licinius, who governed the eastern half of the Roman Empire, had at one time been a co-author of the Edict of Milan that granted religious freedom to Christians. But by 320 he had turned against the Christians, partly because they were associated with his political rival Constantine in the West, and partly because his pagan instincts had reasserted themselves. He decreed that every soldier in his army must publicly sacrifice to the gods or be discharged and punished. In Sebaste, in the Twelfth Legion, were forty Christian soldiers from various provinces of the empire. They were friends. They had served together for years. They had faith together. When the order came they did not act individually; they came as a group to the governor Agricola and stated together: we are Christians; we will not sacrifice. Agricola, who knew them as good soldiers, tried to persuade them. He praised them for their courage and their service; he warned them that they were ruining their careers; he assured them that a momentary act of token sacrifice would resolve everything. They were not persuaded. He locked them up to soften them. They prayed and sang together throughout their imprisonment. After several days he brought them out and tried again. Their answer was the same: we will not sacrifice. We are Christians.
Agricola, having failed to persuade the forty by reason or by stoning (the stones had refused to strike them and had bounced back at the executioners), chose a more cunning torment. He had them stripped naked and led out at evening to a frozen lake on the outskirts of the city. They were forced onto the ice in the middle of the lake. The night was bitterly cold; the wind came down from the mountains. He arranged for warm baths to be set up at the lake\'s edge, in clear sight of the freezing soldiers, and announced that anyone who would deny Christ could come down off the ice, warm himself in the bath, and be released. Then he stationed guards around the lake to watch through the night. The cruelty of this arrangement was deliberate: instead of killing them outright, Agricola wanted to break their unity by presenting each man, hour by hour, with the visible alternative of warmth and life. He hoped that one would yield, then another, then the rest. The forty understood this and resolved to encourage one another through the night. They held each other upright on the ice. They prayed together. They sang psalms. They reminded one another of what was at stake. One of them, Cyrion, said: God so ordained that we became friends in this short life; let us not be separated for eternity. As we have been pleasing to a mortal king, let us also strive to be worthy of the favor of the immortal King.
In the deepest hour of the night, the lake itself began to glow. A supernatural light rose from the ice; the saints felt warmth where there was no fire. Above them, in the air, forty crowns of glory began descending from heaven — one for each soldier — each crown radiating light and the promise of eternal life. The crowns were visible only to the guards on the bank. The guard Aglaius, who had been stationed at the warm baths to receive any who deserted, was watching. He saw the forty crowns. He counted them. As he counted, one of the soldiers — just one — broke and ran toward the bath. He plunged into the warm water; his frozen body could not bear the sudden change; he died at once from shock. Above the lake, where there had been forty crowns, there were now thirty-nine. One crown still hovered, undirected, waiting. Aglaius looked at the thirty-nine, and at the empty space where the fortieth should have been, and at the crown that waited. He removed his clothes. He stepped onto the ice. He confessed: I am a Christian. He took his place among the saints. Above his head the fortieth crown descended. The number forty was made up.
When morning came the bodies of the forty were lying frozen on the lake, but the soldiers were not all dead. A few were still breathing. Agricola, finding them alive, ordered their legs broken with clubs to finish them off and ensure that no martyrs survived. Many died at the first blow. The youngest of the forty, Meliton, was a slim boy not yet twenty. His mother had come to the lakeside through the night and was watching. When the soldiers came to break Meliton\'s legs they noticed that he was the only one still able to walk; they decided to leave him to one side, hoping that, away from his fellow martyrs, he might still recant. His mother, watching, was afraid that her son\'s separation might lead him to fall. As the soldiers loaded the broken bodies onto a wagon to take them to be burned, the mother saw that Meliton was being left behind. She picked her son up in her arms, carried him to the wagon, laid him on top of the bodies of his companions, and said to him: my son, finish your race with your brothers; do not be separated from them, do not fall behind. Be the youngest crown but be one with them. Meliton died on the wagon as it bore them all to the fire. The bodies were burned and the ashes were thrown into the river so that the Christians could not gather them.
The persecutors thought they had finished. The bodies were burned, the ashes thrown in the river; nothing remained that the Christians could gather. They were wrong. The bones of the saints had not all burned, and the ashes had not all dissolved; portions of relics had settled on the riverbank, hidden among rocks and reeds. Three days after the martyrdom, the saints appeared together to Saint Peter, the Bishop of Sebaste, in a dream. They told him where their relics could be found. They asked him to gather them and give them proper Christian burial. Peter rose by night, taking trusted clergy with him, and went to the riverbank. By the light of torches they searched and found, exactly where the saints had said, the bones and ashes that the river had not taken. They gathered them, wrapped them in clean cloth, and brought them back to the city. Soon the relics were distributed throughout the Christian world. Pieces went to Constantinople, to Cappadocia, to Brescia in the West, to Alexandria, to Antioch. Wherever they went, churches were built in their honor. By the late fourth century, the Forty Martyrs were among the most universally venerated saints in all of Christendom.
During the night between their imprisonment and their freezing, the forty soldiers wrote a Testament — a kind of will. It survives. It is one of the earliest Christian documents we have outside the New Testament that was actually composed by ordinary Christians at the moment of their death. They give it the simple title: The Testament of the Forty Holy Martyrs of Christ. They sign it with all their names, in order. They make these requests: that their property be distributed by the Church to specific persons, mostly poor Christians and family members; that they be buried together in one place, since they have suffered together and wish to be remembered together; that the local clergy take care of certain elderly relatives and children that they are leaving behind; that everyone who reads the Testament pray for them. The document is short, practical, written in the plain Greek of soldiers rather than the polished Greek of theologians. It does not make grand theological claims. It assumes the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints without arguing for them. It commends the brothers to one another and to the Church. It is one of the most moving documents of the patristic Christian world, and one of the most authentic.
The Church does not commemorate the Forty Martyrs as forty separate saints. They are one feast, one synaxis, one corporate witness. This is theologically deliberate. Christian life is not finally a matter of individual heroism but of corporate participation in the Body of Christ. The forty soldiers had been a community before their martyrdom — they had served together, prayed together, eaten together, encouraged one another in faith. When the moment of testing came, they did not act as forty isolated individuals; they acted as an unified Christian community. They held each other up on the ice. They prayed together through the night. They wrote a Testament together, signing all their names. When the Lord gave the crowns, He gave forty crowns at once, in a single descent. When the Bishop recovered the relics, he buried them together. When the Church remembers them, it remembers them together, on a single day, in a single feast. This corporate dimension of their witness is an icon of the corporate dimension of all Christian life. We are not saved one by one in isolation but together as the Body of Christ.
The feast of the Forty Martyrs is on March 9 every year. Because of where Lent falls in the Christian calendar, this date almost always lands somewhere in the middle of Great Lent. This is not an accident. The early Church deliberately placed the feast of the Forty Martyrs in the heart of the Forty Days of Lent so that the witness of the Forty Martyrs would inspire and sustain Christians who are themselves engaged in the Lenten contest. There is a correspondence: forty soldiers, forty days. The soldiers endured a single night on the freezing lake; the Christian endures forty days of fasting and prayer. The soldiers received the crown of life at the end of their endurance; the Christian receives the crown of Pascha at the end of Lent. The Lenten fast is in some real sense modeled on the witness of the Forty Martyrs, and the witness of the Forty Martyrs is in turn the prototype of the Lenten contest. The Orthodox tradition has preserved a beautiful custom: Christians bake forty small pastries shaped like skylarks on March 9, distributing them as a sign of solidarity with the saints and as a small relaxation in the rigor of the Lenten fast. The skylarks announce the coming of spring and the coming of Pascha; the Forty Martyrs are the heralds of both.