Historical Setting
The martyrdom is set within the great persecution of Christians launched by the Sasanian king Shapur II. After the Roman emperor Constantine I embraced Christianity, Shapur came to regard his Christian subjects with suspicion as potential agents of a hostile foreign power, and persecution intensified during his wars against Rome.
Contemporary and later accounts describe the persecution as vast in scale. The 5th-century church historian Sozomen estimated upwards of sixteen thousand documented martyrs, with many more unrecorded. Named victims of the wider persecution include Shemon Bar Sabbae, patriarch of the Church of the East, his successors Shahdost and Barba'shmin, and Bishop Barbasceminus of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, executed with sixteen of his clergy in 346.
Within this setting the courtiers Acindynus, Pegasius, and Anempodistus, who had served at Shapur's court as secret Christians, were denounced and brought before the king.
Trial and Martyrdom
Standing before the king, the martyrs fearlessly confessed their faith, declaring the Most Holy Trinity, one in essence and undivided, to be their true homeland and life. Shapur ordered them beaten with whips, and they were subjected to further tortures and imprisonment.
Their synaxarion relates that during their sufferings the torturer Aphthonius witnessed a miracle when boiling lead failed to harm the martyrs; he confessed Christ and was immediately executed. The accounts also describe the king ordering the martyrs sewn into skins and cast into the sea, from which they were delivered, and record visions said to have sustained them in prison.
The king commanded that Acindynus, Pegasius, Anempodistus, and Elpidephorus be led outside the city for execution. Elpidephorus, described as a royal noble, denounced the slaughter of innocent Christians and was beheaded; during the procession the soldiers are said to have killed some seven thousand accompanying believers. The remaining named martyrs were burned in a furnace, together, by tradition, with a company of soldiers and the king's mother, who had come to believe. Christians afterward recovered the bodies, found them unharmed by the fire, and buried them with reverence.
Traditional Accounts
The fuller synaxarion narrative carries several elements preserved as tradition: the appearance of Christ with a face radiant as the sun and of comforting angels during the martyrs' imprisonment; the failure of boiling lead to harm them, which converted the torturer Aphthonius; the martyrs being sewn into animal skins and cast into the sea, from which Saint Aphthonius is said to have appeared with three angels to lead them to safety; and the conversion of twenty-eight (in some accounts) soldiers and of the king's mother, who suffered with them. The details and the number of the seven thousand are handed down through the hagiographical tradition rather than independent historical record.
