The Temptation and Martyrdom
The account of Philosophus is preserved in brief form in the Orthodox synaxaria, where the defining episode is his resistance to a temptation devised to make him fall. Having endured physical torture without renouncing Christ, he was restrained on a bed so that he could not flee, and a woman was brought to seduce him. By the tradition, when he felt desire beginning to stir, he bit through his own tongue and spat it at her, an act of self-mutilation that both ended the temptation and drove the woman away in terror.
His captors, unable to break him by either force or enticement, put him to death by beheading. The sources present his steadfastness through both modes of assault, violent and seductive, as the heart of his witness.