ON THE HOLY ROMAN MARTYRS,
SABAS THE GOTH, COMMANDER OF SOLDIERS, AND SEVENTY SOLDIERS.
In the year 272.
CommentarySabas the Goth, Commander of soldiers (St.)
Seventy soldiers converted by him, Martyrs at Rome (SS.)
By D. P.
[1] The entries of the Roman Martyrology open this April 24 with these words: "At Rome, of Saint Sabas, Commander of soldiers, who, being accused of visiting Christians detained in prison, freely confessed Christ before the Judge. His memory in the Roman Fasti. By the Judge he was burned with torches and cast into a cauldron of boiling pitch; and when he had escaped unharmed, by that miracle he converted seventy men to Christ, who, all constantly persevering in the confession of the faith, were slain by the sword. Finally, he himself, plunged into the river, consummated his martyrdom." Thus far the Martyrology; to which Baronius adds in his Notes that the Greeks in the Menologion deal with the same saint on this day, and relate that he suffered at Rome under the Emperor Aurelian. That Menologion is the one compiled by Sirleto, largely from the Menaia. But the most ancient memorial of Saint Sabas and the other seventy is found in the Menologion of the Emperor Basil Porphyrogenitus, composed in the tenth Christian century, in which, on the following day, these things are contained:
[2] Eulogy from the Menologion of the Emperor Basil. The contest of the holy martyr Sabas, Commander of soldiers. Sabas, the martyr of Christ, lived under the rule of Aurelian, and exercised the command of a military company, being himself appointed commander in the city of Rome. He was indeed a Goth by nation, but a Christian by religion, accustomed to visit the saints imprisoned in jail and to minister to them. Moreover, by the unblemished tenor of his life and the exercise of divine things, he used to cast out evil demons from the bodies of men possessed. But he was informed against, seized, and brought before the Emperor, in whose presence he cast away the military belt with which he was girded, and freely confessed Christ. For this he was hung up and burned along his sides with torches. When he had by no small miracle emerged safe and sound from this torment, he summoned seventy men to the faith of Christ, who were all at once beheaded. Sabas was then cast into prison, where, when Christ the Lord had appeared to him, he mercifully bestowed upon him great strength. Brought forth again from prison, and ordered to deny Christ and worship the idols, when he refused to do this, his sacred head was cut off with the sword.
[3] These things are taken from the Menologion of Basil. The same things are referred almost exactly to this April 24 in an old Greek manuscript Synaxarion at the Paris College of Clermont, of the Society of Jesus, from a manuscript Synaxarion, up to the seventy consummated by martyrdom; the rest agree with the printed Menaia, though they omit what those add concerning the casting into the river. We therefore add the eulogy from the said Menaia, and it is of this sort: "The holy martyr Sabbas, a Goth by nation, in the times of the Emperor Aurelian, served as military tribune at Rome. and the Great Menaia: Because he had embraced the faith of Christ, he took singular care of the saints detained in chains for the faith. On account, too, of the innocence of his life and the exercise of virtues, he had power to drive evil spirits from men. But being accused as a Christian, he was brought to the Emperor; before whom, casting away his military belt, he freely confessed Christ. Therefore he was hung up and burned with burning torches, and cast into a cauldron full of molten pitch; and since by a stupendous miracle he was preserved unharmed in it, he summoned seventy men to the faith of Christ, who soon, for Christ's sake, were slain with the sword and merited the crown of glory. Sabbas, however, brought forth to a second interrogation — after having been strengthened and confirmed with new vigor by Christ, who appeared to him in prison — was cast into the river and bore away the laurel of martyrdom. There adorned him in wondrous fashion, while he was in the flower of his age, the whiteness of his body, the crimson of his cheeks, his beard and hair as if shining with gold. The cast of his eyes, keen and unflinching, displayed a noble and wholly soldierly spirit."
[4] Whether submerged after the beheading? These things are in the Menaia; which seem to be reconcilable with the Menologion of the Emperor Basil in this way: that Sabas was first beheaded, and then his body cast into the river. For this is indicated both by the hexameter line for the day, to be presented in its place along with the whole Ephemeris of this month, and by this distich concerning the same saint:
Ὕπελθε Σάββα φθάρτον ἠδέως ὕδωρ, Ὡς ἂν πίνης ἄφθαρτον ἠδονῆς ὕδωρ.
Enter, O Sabbas, the waters of corruption gladly, That you may drink the waters of incorruptible delight.
But since on April 12 with us, and with the Greeks on April 18 of this same month, another Sabas the Goth is honored, who suffered in Gothia and completed his martyrdom submerged in the river Musaeus, and since he, both at Constantinople and in the churches of Cappadocia, was of more celebrated name and veneration on account of the extant Acts of his Martyrdom, and there have not been lacking those who also added to him the title τοῦ Στρατηλάτου ("the Commander"), as we noted had been done in the Menaia: whether confused with the other Sabas the Goth? for these reasons, I say, a strong suspicion arises in us lest with similar inattentiveness (for the Menaia are somewhat inattentively compiled) the death by water inflicted on that Sabas has been transferred to this more ancient one; concerning whose being cast into the river none of the better Synaxaria have anything — from which the aforesaid Manuscript of the Clermont College agrees almost word for word with the printed editions, but is silent about the kind of death endured. The Menologion of Basil, however, as we have seen, openly says that he was beheaded. However that may be, the account of the Menaia has been followed by the authors both of the distichs prefixed to the eulogies and of the metrical Ephemeris, and also by Sirleto and Galesinio, likewise by Baronius and the enlarger of the German Martyrology, and finally by Maximus, Bishop of Cythera, in his Lives of the Saints.
[5] Why he suffered at Rome and so long remained unknown, It is still more obscure how it came about that, having suffered at Rome and being unknown to all the martyrologies which the Roman Church anciently employed, he should have been made and could be made known to us through the Greeks. And yet no one will doubt that among them some Acts of his Passion also existed, who understands how these brief eulogies of the Synaxaria succeeded in place of longer histories, of which they are epitomes — just as the Lessons of the Breviary with us are abridgments of longer Legends formerly in use.
That Saint Andrew the Apostle preached the Gospel to the European Scythians is the constant sense of the Church; that these were called Goths in their own vernacular tongue, Trajan the Patrician is the authority in Theophanes. And although their kings or princes, almost until the time of Valens, clung entangled to the pagan rites, nothing nevertheless prevents us from believing that many of the people, just as in the Roman empire under idolatrous Emperors, constantly retained the faith received from the Apostle; and hence the faithful were so multiplied there that at length through the writings of the Greeks he came to light? that their Churches were governed by several Bishops, whose Metropolitan, finally, in the sixth year after the treaties concluded between Constantine the Great and the Gothic peoples, came to the First Council of Nicaea and subscribed to it, as has been said elsewhere. This being laid down, it will be very easy to believe that the distinguished Sabas, imbued with the faith of Christ in his own country, entered Roman military service — not that he absorbed that faith while soldiering among the Romans; and that when at Rome he had ascended to that rank of honor, he had in his legion men of his own nation and faith, whom he employed more familiarly, and one of whom described the passion of his commander and sent it to his countrymen to be read. This being laid down, that this same Legend was carried from Gothia into neighboring Thrace, whose capital was Constantinople, after the treaties were renewed under Valens, is as little alien to great likelihood as there is nothing surprising in the fact that, among so many Greeks and Romans known to the whole City by illustrious contests, the bravery of a foreigner and, at that, a barbarian soldier, should have remained obscure.
[6] But if there was lacking to the Roman Notaries — whom about thirty years before the passion of Sabas Pope Anterus had instituted the body of some St. Sabas brought from Rome, — either leisure or diligence for describing his struggle, or if to posterity, which had so many domestic examples, the memory of a foreign man slipped away; there was not lacking to the pious faithful the care of burying the corpses in haste, through which it has come about that even today innumerable bodies of holy martyrs are brought forth from the Roman crypts and cemeteries, with only the expression of the name and of the martyrdom endured for Christ. This care was extended also to Saint Sabas and his
companions, we are the more easily persuaded, because the bodies of a certain Saint Sabas and his companion, having been found around the year 1612, were transferred to Picenum, to the ancient church of Saint Venantius, attributed to the college of our Society at Ascoli by the most Reverend Father General Claudius Aquaviva. There was still living there in the year 1670 Father Hyacinthus Canthus, a venerable old man of 74, and he recalled that before everything else care had been taken that two most ornate reliquaries be fashioned from wood most elegantly gilded: one of which should have the form of a military statue drawn down as far as the breast, to receive the sacred head of Saint Sabas; the other, worked in the form of a tomb, should receive the other relics of the holy fellow-soldier. Then he said that, by public processions he is venerated at Ascoli on April 12, — in which a great multitude of the clergy, both secular and regular, and the greatest part of the citizens took part — both biers were carried around through all the streets of the city, and brought back to our church, in which both are exposed for the veneration of the people, both on the greater feasts (as John Marchinus, Rector of the College, wrote to us), and especially on April 12, when the feast is celebrated under the rite of a double office.
[7] Indeed, since two Sabases appear on this day in the Roman Martyrology, these Fathers first persuaded themselves as if it were another Sabas, of whom then; that the body brought to them was of one or the other. But how ambiguous this persuasion is, and how exposed to many errors, there is no need to explain at length, since it is apparent to anyone willing to consider how many and almost infinite martyrs suffered at Rome whose names are not inscribed in the Martyrology; and likewise how many martyrs of the same name there often were, of whom one may vainly attempt to divine which has been entered in the Martyrology. Leaning nevertheless on such a persuasion, the aforesaid Fathers, since they found only two Sabases in the Martyrology, did not labor much to discern whose body could more probably be believed to have been brought from Rome (which, given the place of martyrdom, ought not to have been difficult); but they chose him who was either more convenient to themselves, or, from Acts more copiously written, more celebrated — when by a stronger right the one of whom we are now treating ought to have been taken.
[8] Thus in the year 1661, when we had gone out from Pavia and turned aside to the neighboring monastery of the Holy Spirit, a similar error elsewhere concerning a certain St. James, Martyr, to greet Dom Angelo de Nuce, then residing there with the title of Abbot after holding the office of Archimandrite of Monte Cassino, and he had ordered all the relics of the sacristy to be shown to us, there was shown among others a chest with the body of Saint James the Martyr brought from Rome, which was believed to be of Saint James Intercisus; and therefore November 27, on which he is inscribed in the Roman Martyrology, was kept as festive. But when the Sacristan admitted that it was brought forth not from some one of the Roman basilicas (which no one is unaware were enriched with various exotic relics zealously conveyed thither), but from the hidden places of the cemeteries, we concluded from this that it could not prudently be believed that that was the body of James Intercisus, who was tortured to death so far from Rome, in Persia. Wherefore the records of donations were sought, and nothing else was found in them except that it was the body of a James, Martyr. Then it became apparent what those who designated the day had followed, being taken for St. James Intercisus, namely, the Roman Martyrology; in which, since no martyr of that name appeared crowned at Rome, and all the others of the same name were also distinguished by the title of Priest or Deacon, this one alone seemed capable of being indicated by a simple encomium of "Martyr." Therefore, since we were not ignorant that there were other churches elsewhere which claim to have the body of Saint James Intercisus by better or at least older right, we suggested to the Abbot and monks a useful counsel — which they also promised they would follow — that, in order to cut off from posterity the cause of useless contentions about the truth of the undoubtedly holy body, they should dismiss that day and take any other, not liable to producing confusion, with the consent of the Ordinary; or rather, should celebrate each year with a festive celebration the day of Translation, which they had celebrated once. We urged the same thing to be done elsewhere, and we will urge it on every similar occasion, lest, if to the homonymy of many the veneration of the same day be also added, and only one and the same saint be acknowledged, the uncertainty of the relics be increased and the devotion of the faithful be diminished, while they hear it doubted whether they are truly of him whose they are said to be.
[9] But, that the discourse may return to that Sabas with whom it began: he is written to have suffered under the Emperor Aurelian. Time of the Martyrdom. This man reigned from the year 270 to 275; and in the year 272 he renewed the edicts against Christians, whom Sabas, when they had been cast into chains by his prescript, used to console. As for those seventy whom he sent before himself to the palm of martyrdom, they are commemorated in the Menaia with this distich:
Κάρας ἀριθμῶν τῷ ξίφει τετμημένας Εὕροις πεσόντας ἄνδρας ἑπτάκις δέκα.
Numbering the heads that lie cut off by the sword, You will say that seven times ten men have fallen.
Saint Sabbas is venerated here not only by the Greeks, but in imitation of them also by the Muscovites, as is clear from the entries of the often-cited Calendar; also from the Ruthenian Calendar in Possevinus. There is also inscribed in the Arabic Egyptian Martyrology, rendered into Latin by Grace Simonius, the contest of "Saint Sabas the Pastor," which surname seems to have been given him on account of the seventy stirred up to martyrdom. In the Coptic Calendar in Selden the feast of the "companions" is noted — that is, of Saint Sabas — a name which perhaps was lacking in the Arabic original.