ON THE TEN HOLY MARTYRS IN PHOENICIA.
CommentaryTen Martyrs in Phoenicia (SS.)
The Greeks in the printed Menaea and in Maximus Bishop of Cythera celebrate on the sixteenth of March ten anonymous holy Martyrs, whom they commemorate as having completed their lives by the sword in Phoenicia. In the Menaea these two verses are added:
A tenfold band of Martyrs by the sword The slayers of men and martyrs slay.
The region of Phoenicia between Syria and Palestine is well known, but on what occasion or at what time these ten athletes were crowned there is not clear. We gave on the twenty-fifth of February the Acts of Saints Ananias the Priest and Peter the doorkeeper, during whose torments seven soldiers were converted, baptized, and drowned in the sea. But on the twentieth of February are venerated the holy Martyrs of Tyre: Tyrannio the Bishop and very many others, whose number, as Usuard testifies, only the knowledge of God can calculate, who were killed by various torments. The eminent martyrdom of these or similar persons seems to have fallen on the sixteenth of March, on which day Galesinius celebrates them in these words: In Phoenicia, of the holy Martyrs ten, who, struck with the axe, received the palm of the contest undertaken for the faith.