Pherbutha of Persia

Accusation and death

The accusation arose after a man whom Pherbutha had rejected, and others hostile to the Christians on account of the death of her brother, reported that the empress's illness was the result of poisoning or enchantment by the women. They were thus tried not only as Christians but as workers of sorcery against the empress.

The accounts describe a particularly brutal execution: the bodies of the condemned were sawn in two, and the portions were set up on either side of a path so that the empress might pass between them, supposedly to be healed. Their remains were afterward recovered and buried by Christians.

Sources and name variants

Pherbutha appears in the Orthodox synaxaria under the spellings Pherbutha, Phermoutha, and Pherfutha, with her feast on April 4. The same figure — the virgin sister of Bishop Simeon, accused of bewitching the queen and sawn asunder with her sister and servant — is recorded by the 5th-century historian Sozomen under the name Tarbula (also rendered Tarbo), drawing on earlier Syriac martyrdom accounts of the Persian Christians who suffered under Shapur II.