Following the Martyrs

After her widowhood freed her to serve openly, the Passio Anastasiae carries Anastasia out of Rome and across Illyricum — through Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Macedonia — following the persecuted Christians from prison to prison, consoling the confessors, supplying their needs, and burying the dead. In this wandering the legend binds her to a cluster of other martyrs: the three virgin-sisters of Thessalonica, Agape, Chionia, and Irene; the matron Theodota; and, in the background, her teacher Chrysogonus. This file lays out the episode and then applies the source-critical discipline that governs the whole dossier — for each of these companions had an independent cult that the Passio fused, and the virgins of Thessalonica are themselves genuinely attested martyrs whose authentic acta survive apart from anything to do with Anastasia.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

The Wandering Ministry

In the connected legend, the death of the pagan husband Publius removes the last constraint on Anastasia’s charity, and she devotes her freedom and her fortune to the imprisoned confessors of the Great Persecution (the widowhood and its meaning are treated in The Widow and Her Faith; the prison ministry that defines her in The Minister to Prisoners). Where the earlier part of the Passio keeps her at Rome, ministering in secret, the latter part sets her in motion: she leaves the city and travels through the provinces of Illyricum — the Passio and its derivatives name Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Macedonia — seeking out the places where Christians are being held and put to death, that she may serve them with food, money, medicine, and burial (Passio Anastasiae; Greek Passio, BHG 76–81; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). The motif is the one that gives the saint her enduring character: she is the servant of the martyrs, the woman who goes where the confessors suffer and does for them what no one else dares.

The geography is significant for the legend’s own logic. Illyricum and the Balkan provinces — with Sirmium, the great Tetrarchic capital on the Save, at their heart — were a principal theater of the Diocletianic persecution; the oldest martyrologies are dense with the names of Balkan martyrs of the years around 303–304 (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8; Martyrologium Hieronymianum, ed. de Rossi–Duchesne, 1894). By carrying Anastasia from Rome into this region, the Passio brings its Roman heroine to the very place — Sirmium — where the oldest martyrology independently attests a martyr Anastasia (the documentary anchor is set out in The Historical Core). The wandering is thus the narrative seam by which the Roman legend is sewn to the Sirmium cult: it is the literary device that lets one woman belong to both cities.

The Companions: Agape, Chionia, Irene, and Theodota

In the course of this ministry the Passio associates Anastasia with several other martyrs, and the associations are the hinge of the whole source-critical problem. Three of them are the virgin-sisters Agape, Chionia, and Irene, whom the legend connects with Thessalonica and the Sirmium region, and who are presented as confessors whom Anastasia serves and whose deaths she witnesses or honors (Passio Anastasiae; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1). A fourth is Theodota, presented in the connected legend as a Christian matron, sometimes a widow with sons, who is bound to Anastasia in the same web of charity and suffering and who is herself martyred (Passio Anastasiae; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). Standing behind the entire sequence, from the Roman opening of the legend, is Chrysogonus, Anastasia’s teacher and spiritual father, whose own martyrdom the Passio sets in this same theater of the Illyrian persecution and to whose example her constancy is referred (Passio Anastasiae; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

Read as a single story, this is a moving and coherent picture: a noblewoman moving among a circle of fellow-confessors — her teacher, three virgin-sisters, a fellow-matron — until she too is taken. But read against the documentary record, the coherence is the achievement of the hagiographer, not a deposit of history. Each of these figures had a cult and a commemoration of his or her own before the Passio Anastasiae gathered them into one narrative.

Source-Critical: The Fusion of Independent Cults

The decisive observation belongs to Hippolyte Delehaye, the Bollandist critic of the Roman legendary. Delehaye demonstrated that the connected Passio Anastasiae is a literary construction that fuses several originally independent martyr-cults — Anastasia herself, Chrysogonus, the virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irene, and Theodota — into a single connected story, supplying kinship, motive, and incident where the older sources preserved only names and feast-days (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936). The mechanism is the one familiar across the Roman legendary of the fifth century: a writer took the bare entries of the martyrologies and the liturgical calendar and wove them into a romance that reads as one continuous life. The companions of Anastasia in the Passio are, on this analysis, not the historical associates of a single woman but the separately venerated martyrs whose names the calendar happened to place near one another, narratively conscripted into her story (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

This is precisely why the companions matter to the larger argument of the collection. The conflation that produced the saint of later devotion (treated in full in The Passio and the Conflation) is visible in miniature in the wandering episode: in following the martyrs, Anastasia is made to keep company with exactly the figures whose distinct cults the Passio has absorbed. The fusion is not a flaw to be apologized for but the very thing the source-criticism brings to light — and it is, in the discipline of this repository, reported as a topic, not concealed (per METHODOLOGY §3.5; METHODOLOGY).

[Disputed: whether Anastasia’s association with Agape, Chionia, Irene, Theodota, and Chrysogonus is historical or a literary device of the Passio. Delehaye (Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936) treats the connected Passio Anastasiae as a fusion of several originally independent cults, so that the companionship is a creation of the hagiographer rather than a record of associates; the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”) likewise distinguishes the separately attested figures and treats the connected legend as composite. The opposite reading — that the Passio preserves a genuine memory of a circle of confessors around Anastasia — cannot be documented from any source independent of the legend itself. This collection reports the fusion as the better-supported position and the historical companionship as unattested outside the Passio.]

The Virgins of Thessalonica Are Genuinely Attested

The case of Agape, Chionia, and Irene deserves to be stated with special care, because it is the one point where the Passio’s companions step out of legend and onto firm documentary ground — though independently of Anastasia. The three virgin-martyrs of Thessalonica are not figures known only from the Anastasia romance: their own acta survive, and they are among the comparatively small number of early martyr-accounts that scholars accept as substantially authentic. The Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, and Chionia preserves what reads as a genuine record drawn from official proceedings: the sisters are tried at Thessalonica before the prefect Dulcitius in the year 304, interrogated for refusing to eat food sacrificed to the gods and for keeping forbidden Christian books, and condemned — Agape and Chionia to the fire, Irene later and separately (the Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, and Chionia, in Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1). The dating to 304, the named prefect, and the procedural texture place these three among the securely historical martyrs of the Great Persecution, attested without reference to any Anastasia.

The point for the present file is twofold. First, the historicity of the Thessalonican virgins is genuine but belongs to their dossier, not to Anastasia’s: their authentic acta know nothing of a Roman noblewoman who served them. Second, their independent and well-attested cult is exactly the kind of pre-existing material the Passio Anastasiae drew upon — three real martyrs of 304, with a fixed feast and a famous story, available to be gathered into the connected narrative of a saint whose own historical core lay at nearby Sirmium (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936; Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 1972). The legend, in other words, did not invent its companions out of nothing; it borrowed real martyrs and assigned them a place in Anastasia’s wandering. That is the conflation working with genuine raw material — which is what makes it so durable and so easy to mistake for history.

[Disputed: the relation of the Passio’s virgins to the historical martyrs of Thessalonica. The Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, and Chionia (Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 1972) attests three virgin-martyrs at Thessalonica under the prefect Dulcitius in 304, with no mention of Anastasia; the Passio Anastasiae connects virgins of the same names with Anastasia and locates them toward Sirmium. Whether the Passio’s figures are the very martyrs of the authentic acta (so that the legend has annexed a genuine Thessalonican cult) or homonymous martyrs later assimilated to them is debated; Delehaye (Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936) and the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (vol. 1) treat the connected legend as drawing on the independently attested cult. This collection follows that reading and keeps the authentic acta and the Passio episode distinct.]

Arrest and the Road to Sirmium

The wandering ends, in the legend, with Anastasia’s own arrest. Drawn into the persecution by the very ministry that defines her — discovered tending and burying confessors, or denounced for her faith — she is taken and brought before the authorities, and the Passio sends her to the provincial administration of Illyricum, before the prefect (named in some recensions Illyricus, the figure who presides over her trial) and ultimately to Sirmium for sentence and death (Passio Anastasiae; Greek Passio, BHG 76–81; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”). With this the legend completes its narrative geography: the Roman noblewoman, having followed the martyrs across the Balkans, is herself made a martyr at the Pannonian capital — the place where, independently of the whole romance, the oldest martyrology attests a martyr Anastasia.

The trial and the execution by fire that follows are treated in the companion file The Death by Fire, where the manner of her death is pinned to its attestation in the Passio and set against the single secure datum — the Sirmium cult of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum. What the wandering episode establishes, and what it is honest to claim from it, is not a documented itinerary but the shape of the legend and the seam of the conflation: a ministry that carries the saint from Rome to Sirmium, and a circle of companions every one of whom the source-criticism resolves into a separately venerated martyr. The episode is, in the deepest sense, the Passio’s way of making one cult out of many — and the careful reader watches the seams precisely here.

See Also

• The Minister to Prisoners — the ministry to confessors that the wandering extends across Illyricum
• The Widow and Her Faith — the widowhood that frees her to follow the martyrs
• The Death by Fire — the arrest’s outcome: the martyrdom at Sirmium, pinned to its source
• The Historical Core — the Sirmium attestation that the wandering narratively reaches
• Rome and the Great Persecution — the persecution backdrop of the Balkan martyrs
• The Passio and the Conflation — the full source-critical treatment of the fused cults
• Reading the Anastasia Tradition — the method for the secure cult on a developed legend
• METHODOLOGY — the attestation-pinning standard applied throughout

References

• Passio Anastasiae (Latin) and the Greek Passio of Anastasia (BHG 76–81). Cited as the source of the connected legend, including the wandering across Illyricum, the companions, and the arrest.
• The Martyrdom of Agape, Irene, and Chionia. In Herbert Musurillo, ed. and trans., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. (The authentic acta of the three Thessalonican virgin-martyrs, Thessalonica, 304, before the prefect Dulcitius.)
• Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Ed. G. B. de Rossi and L. Duchesne, Acta Sanctorum, Novembris II.1. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1894. (The Sirmium attestation and the density of Balkan martyrs of the Great Persecution.)
• Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936. (The Passio Anastasiae as a literary fusion of independent cults — Anastasia, Chrysogonus, Agape, Chionia, Irene, Theodota.)
• Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII della Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961. (The companions, the wandering, and the composite character of the legend.)
• Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History, Book 8. (The Great Persecution as the backdrop of the Balkan and Illyrian martyrdoms.)