The Life
Olympias was born around 365 in Constantinople into a wealthy Greek noble family. Her grandfather Flavius Ablabius had held consular rank under Constantine the Great. Orphaned young, she was raised by Christian relatives. Around 384 she married Nebridius, the Prefect of Constantinople, but he died after only twenty months. The Emperor Theodosius I urged her to remarry; she refused all proposals. Patriarch Nectarius ordained her a deaconess of Hagia Sophia in 391. She distributed her vast inheritance to the poor, churches, monasteries, and shelters, founded a monastic community of about 250 deaconesses next to the cathedral, and supported many great hierarchs. When Saint John Chrysostom was elected Patriarch in 397, she became his closest spiritual daughter. After his unjust exile in 404, she was tried for arson, fined, and exiled to Nicomedia. She received his seventeen surviving letters of consolation. She reposed July 25, 408, and ordered her body cast into the sea, which washed up at Vrochthoi at the church of Saint Thomas.
Saint Olympias was born around 365 into a wealthy Greek aristocratic family. Her father Seleucus was a wealthy Greek rhetor; her mother Alexandra was an Antiochian Greek noblewoman. Her paternal grandfather Flavius Ablabius had held consular rank in Constantinople under Constantine the Great — one of the highest civil positions in the empire. Her maternal uncle Calliopius had served under the famous rhetor Libanius. The family was at the highest social levels of the Eastern Roman Empire. Saint Olympias’s parents died when she was still a child. She was raised by family connections in the aristocratic Christian households of her relatives at Constantinople. She received the classical Christian education available to the Roman aristocracy of the late fourth century: grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, theology. The Christian Faith was central to her formation.
When Saint Olympias came of age, her family arranged her marriage to a young Roman noble named Nebridius, who was the Prefect of Constantinople — one of the highest civil positions in the Eastern Roman Empire. The marriage took place around 384 or 385 when she was about nineteen or twenty years old. The marriage was a prestigious match befitting her noble birth. But Nebridius died after only twenty months of marriage. Saint Olympias was widowed at the age of about twenty. The cause of her husband’s death is not preserved; it may have been illness or some other accident. She was left with the vast wealth of both her father’s inheritance and her husband’s patrimony.
The Emperor Theodosius I (379–395) urged Saint Olympias to remarry. The Emperor proposed a Spanish noble named Elpidius as a suitable second husband. The proposal was effectively an imperial command. Saint Olympias refused. She rejected the imperial proposal and rejected all subsequent marriage proposals as well. Her refusal was an act of considerable courage; the imperial authority of the late Roman Empire was absolute. The Emperor, angered at her refusal, placed an administrator over her fortune to prevent her from distributing it freely as she wished. Saint Olympias endured the imperial restriction with patient faithfulness, waiting for the providential moment when her diaconal vocation could begin. The restriction continued for several years until 391, when she was ordained deaconess and her fortune was restored to her own control.
In 391, after Saint Olympias had reached the canonical age of thirty (the age at which a Christian woman could receive the diaconate under the ancient canons), the holy Patriarch of Constantinople Saint Nectarius (381–397) ordained her a deaconess of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia. The emperor released her fortune to her own personal control. Saint Olympias began to distribute her vast wealth to all the needy: the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the sick, the imprisoned. She gave generously to the churches, monasteries, hospices, and shelters. She built a hospital and an orphanage in Constantinople. She ransomed slaves from their masters. She founded a women’s monastic community of about 250 deaconesses and consecrated virgins on the grounds adjacent to Hagia Sophia, becoming a kind of abbess of the community. The community was the largest women’s monastic foundation in the imperial capital and one of the great women’s monastic communities in the entire Christian East.
Saint Olympias provided great assistance to the hierarchs of the Eastern Christian Church who came to Constantinople on ecclesiastical business. She hosted Saint Amphilochius the Bishop of Iconium, Saint Onesimus of Pontus, Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint Peter of Sebaste, Saint Epiphanius of Cyprus, and many others. She attended to all of them with great love. She earned the affection and the respect of the great hierarchs through her practical generosity and her theological seriousness. When Saint John Chrysostom was elected Patriarch of Constantinople in 397, Saint Olympias found in him the spiritual father whom her diaconal vocation had been seeking. Saint John deeply held her in the deepest regard and showed her great goodwill and spiritual love. He considered her the very embodiment of the ideal deaconess, as is clear from his many accolades of her in his letters.
When Saint John Chrysostom was unjustly deposed and exiled by the Synod of the Oak in 403 (orchestrated by Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria), Saint Olympias and the other deaconesses were upset. Leaving the cathedral church for the last time, Saint John called out to Olympias and the deaconesses Pentadia, Proklia, and Salbina. He told them that the matters incited against him would come to an end, but scarcely more would they see him again in this life. He asked them not to abandon the Christian Church, but to continue serving it under his successor. After his banishment, someone set fire to a large church and the conflagration took hold of many public buildings in Constantinople. All the supporters of Saint John came under suspicion of arson. Saint Olympias was summoned to trial and rigorously interrogated. She was fined a large sum of money for the crime of arson, despite her innocence and the lack of evidence against her. She left Constantinople for Kyzikos. In 405 her enemies sentenced her to imprisonment at Nicomedia, where she underwent much grief and deprivation. Saint John wrote to her from his exile in Cucusus and Pontus, consoling her in her sorrow.
The biblical foundation of Saint Olympias’s diaconal ministry is the apostolic teaching of Saint James that pure religion is to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction. Saint Olympias had herself been an orphan and a widow; she understood the affliction of these particular conditions from her own personal experience. The providence of God had prepared her own early experience of orphanhood and widowhood as the providential preparation for her later ministry to the orphans and the widows of Constantinople. May we, in our own particular vocations, care for the fatherless and the widows of our own communities, remembering that pure religion before God is found in the practical Christian charity that Saint James commends.
Saint John Chrysostom reposed in his continuing exile on September 14, 407. Saint Olympias survived him by less than a year. In the year 408 (some sources say 409), Saint Olympias entered into eternal rest in her continuing exile at Nicomedia. She was about forty-three years old. Shortly before her death she gave instructions that she wanted her remains to be placed in a wooden coffin and cast into the sea, leaving her final resting place to divine providence. “Wherever the waves carry the coffin, there let my body be buried,” the saint said. The coffin was cast up at a place called Vrochthoi (or Brokhthoi), where there was a church dedicated to the Apostle Thomas. There she was buried, and great miracles of healing have been performed through the centuries by her relics. Later, during an invasion by enemy forces, the church was burned, but her relics were preserved. Under Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople, they were transferred to Constantinople and put in the women’s monastery she had founded.
Olympias gives the Christian Church a particular gift: the early Eastern dramatization that the diaconal vocation is one of the great early Christian vocations for women, and the generous distribution of wealth to the poor in the service of the apostolic Faith is one of the most authentically Christian uses of any wealth. She was widowed at twenty after a brief marriage to Nebridius. She refused imperial pressure to remarry. She was ordained deaconess by Nectarius in 391. She founded a monastic community of about 250 deaconesses next to Hagia Sophia. She supported the great hierarchs and became Saint John Chrysostom’s closest spiritual daughter. She was tried for arson, fined, and exiled to Nicomedia after his unjust banishment. She received his seventeen surviving letters of consolation. She reposed July 25, 408. We may not be wealthy aristocrats. But we are all called to use whatever the providence of God has entrusted to us for the service of the apostolic Faith and the care of the poor.