The Tortures and the Threefold Death

The legendary Acts of St. George recount not a single execution but an extravagant, days-long cycle of tortures in which the martyr is killed and raised again — in the most developed recensions, three times over a span the legend gives as seven years — before his final beheading. This file reads that cycle as it actually is: a hagiographic romance built from recognizable topoi, in which the multiplication and reversal of death dramatizes the martyr’s triumph as Tropaiophoros, the Trophy-Bearer, and not as a chronicle of events. It is precisely this serial death-and-resurrection that marked the Acts as fabulous to ancient and modern readers alike and that drew the early Church’s own censure in the Decretum Gelasianum.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; the Trophy-Bearer)

A Romance, Not a Chronicle

The thing that strikes any reader of the early Passio Georgii is its sheer excess. Where the Martyrdom of Polycarp gives one arrest, one trial, and one death told with restraint (see The Martyrium Polycarpi), the George legend gives an unbroken procession of torments stretched over days or years, interrupted again and again by the martyr’s death and his miraculous restoration to life. This is not a feature to be apologized for or quietly reduced to a historical kernel; it is the defining literary character of the text. Karl Krumbacher, whose Der heilige Georg in der griechischen Überlieferung (Munich, 1911) remains the foundational critical survey of the Greek recensions, classed the oldest stratum of the legend with the apocryphal romance literature rather than with the sober acta of the historical martyrs, and showed that the cycle of tortures and revivals belongs to the text’s earliest recoverable form, not to a late accretion (Krumbacher 1911). Hippolyte Delehaye, in Les légendes grecques des saints militaires (Brussels, 1909), placed George at the head of his catalogue of the military-saint legends and treated the Passio as a textbook specimen of the passions épiques — “epic passions,” hagiographic compositions governed by the conventions of edifying fiction rather than by the record of an event (Delehaye 1909).

To read the cycle as legend is therefore not a modern imposition but a recovery of how the text behaves on its own terms. The repository’s governing rule for such material (METHODOLOGY §3.5) is that hagiographic claims are never “verified” as historical fact but pinned to their earliest written attestation and reported as what the source attests. For George that rule bites hard, because the Acts themselves carry a Churchly warning-label: the early-sixth-century Decretum Gelasianum names the Passio Georgii among writings “not to be received” (non recipienda), composed “by heretics or schismatics” (von Dobschütz 1912; see The Acta and Their Condemnation). The very features catalogued below are what the decree was reacting against. The martyr is honored; the romance is flagged. Holding both at once is the discipline of this section.

The Inventory of Torments

The torments differ in number and order across the recensions, but a stable repertoire recurs. The earliest Greek tradition (Krumbacher’s oldest layer, sometimes called the “Vienna” form after the palimpsest that preserves an archaic version) and the later “normal” or vulgate recensions share most of the following episodes, which the Latin and vernacular versions inherit and amplify (Krumbacher 1911; Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003; Riches 2000):

The wheel set with blades or knives. George is bound to a wheel studded with blades or spikes (sometimes a pair of wheels turning against each other) and torn apart; he is killed and then restored whole. The instrument is so closely associated with this kind of legend that the analogous machine in the Passio of St. Catherine of Alexandria gave us the word “Catherine wheel” (on the kinship of these Passiones, see The Acta and Their Condemnation).
Dismemberment and revival. The martyr is cut into pieces — in some recensions chopped small and thrown into a pit or well — and is raised entire, a death-and-resurrection in the strict sense.
Boiling and the cauldron of molten lead. George is plunged into a cauldron of boiling water, or in the more lurid versions molten lead, and emerges unharmed or is killed and revived.
The quicklime pit. He is cast into a pit of quicklime (asbestos, unslaked lime) and left for days — three days in several recensions — and is found alive.
The red-hot iron shoes. He is shod with iron boots heated in the fire and driven to run, one of the legend’s signature images.
Crushing and sawing. In some recensions he is laid under a great stone or column to be crushed, or sawn, recalling the sawing of the prophet Isaiah in legend.
The poison of the magician. A sorcerer named Athanasius is brought in to dispatch George with poison; the poison fails, and the magician, confounded, confesses Christ and is himself martyred (treated with the other converts in The Witnesses Converted).
Scourging, the rack, salt rubbed into wounds, beating with hammers, and similar standard tortures fill the intervals between the spectacular set-pieces.

The list is not a transcript of an ordeal but a thesaurus of martyrological motifs. Almost every item in it appears, separately, in the passions épiques of other legendary martyrs; their concentration on a single figure, and their repetition past the point of death, is what marks the George Passio as romance (Delehaye 1909; Krumbacher 1911). Even the wonder-laden Martyrdom of Polycarp reports the fire’s refusal to consume the bishop and the issue of blood as the claims of one witnessing community, told once and bound to a single death (see The Martyrium Polycarpi). The George cycle is of a different order: the death itself is repealed and reimposed, again and again, as a structural device.

The Threefold Death and the Serial Resurrection

The feature that most decisively removes the Acts from the genre of historical acta is the threefold death: in the developed recensions George does not simply endure torture unto death but dies and is raised three times, the whole sequence unfolding over a span the legend gives as seven years, under a persecuting king the early Greek text names not Diocletian but a legendary “Dadianus,” with a court of seventy or seventy-two tributary kings — a frankly fairy-tale apparatus that the later, “historicized” recensions quietly replaced with Diocletian and a Roman setting (Krumbacher 1911; Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003). The serial resurrection is the engine of the narrative: each death is a defeat for the persecutor and each rising a fresh vindication, so that the martyr’s triumph is rehearsed three times over before the final, permitted beheading that releases him to God.

The numbers themselves are unstable across the tradition, which is itself a sign that they are literary rather than chronological:

[Disputed: the duration and the count of deaths vary by recension. The archaic Greek form (Krumbacher’s oldest stratum) gives a persecution lasting seven years under the legendary king “Dadianus” and presents George as dying and being raised three times before his final death (Krumbacher 1911). Other recensions shorten or omit the seven-year span, set the events under Diocletian within a compressed time, and differ on whether the revivals number three or some other figure; the later “vulgate” Greek and the Latin and vernacular versions tend to rationalize the framework, dropping Dadianus and the seventy-two kings (Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003; Riches 2000). The repository reports these as variant features of a legendary text, not as a chronology to be reconciled.]

What the threefold death means, within the logic of the genre, is the martyr’s conquest of death itself — and here the title the whole collection turns on becomes legible. George is the Tropaiophoros, the Trophy-Bearer: the trophy (tropaion) was in antiquity the monument raised on a battlefield to mark the enemy’s rout, and in Christian usage the trophy is the Cross, the instrument by which death was defeated (on the title in image and cult, see The Trophy-Bearer in Icons). A martyr who dies and rises again and again before going to his crown is a living tropaion — a walking proclamation that, in Christ, death has no final hold. The serial resurrections are not clumsy attempts at biography but a hagiographer’s way of writing, in narrative, the Paschal confession that Christ “trampled down death by death.” Christopher Walter, in The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition (Aldershot, 2003), reads the legend’s extravagance as the projection onto George of the victory-theology the warrior-saint cult exists to celebrate; Samantha Riches, in St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Stroud, 2000), traces how this superhuman endurance made George the type of the invincible champion long before the dragon attached to him (Walter 2003; Riches 2000).

This is the disposition METHODOLOGY §3.5 calls for, applied to a torture-cycle: the episodes are reported as what the Passio tradition attests, named and located in their recensions, and read for the meaning the genre gives them — never asserted as events. The wheel and the quicklime and the iron shoes are not data about the year 303; they are the vocabulary in which a victorious martyr was praised.

Why the Topos-Reading Is the Honest One

It would be possible, and is sometimes attempted, to “save” the historicity of George by stripping the cycle down to a plausible residue — a soldier, a refusal to sacrifice, a beheading — and treating the rest as pious exaggeration of a real ordeal. The trouble is that the residue is not what the early text gives, and the operation imports a historical core the sources do not supply. The securable minimum about George is established elsewhere in this collection from the cult, not from the Passio (see The Historical Core and What Can Be Known): a soldier-martyr of the Great Persecution, venerated very early at Lydda/Diospolis, whose biography cannot be recovered behind the legend. The torture-cycle adds nothing to that minimum, because it was never a record of it. To read the cycle as legend is therefore not skepticism but accuracy: it is reading the text as the kind of text it is.

The honesty of this reading is underwritten, unusually, by the Church’s own tradition. Most hagiographic source-criticism is a modern enterprise applied from outside; in George’s case the flag was raised from within, in Latin, around the year 494, when the Decretum Gelasianum placed the Passio Georgii among the books non recipienda and named the apocryphal passions of the martyrs as a category to be received with caution because of who composed them (von Dobschütz 1912; see The Acta and Their Condemnation). It is worth being precise about what the decree did and did not do: it did not deny that George was a martyr, nor did it forbid his veneration — George’s cult continued without interruption, and he is a Great Martyr of the universal Church. What the decree distrusted was the text — the romance with its serial deaths — and the modern verdict simply restates, with the apparatus of textual scholarship, the discomfort the decree already registered (Delehaye 1909; Krumbacher 1911; Walter 2003). The threefold death is exactly the feature that provoked both reactions: a martyr killed and raised three times is manifestly not the subject of a court record but the hero of an edifying fiction.

Delehaye’s analytic vocabulary makes the same point structurally. The passions épiques are recognizable by a set of conventions — the contest extended over an implausible span, the catalogue of escalating and survivable tortures, the confounding of magicians, the conversion of bystanders and even of the persecutor’s household, the final beheading that the martyr must ask to be granted — and the George Passio exhibits nearly the whole set (Delehaye 1909). When a text conforms point-for-point to the conventions of edifying fiction, the conventions, not the events, are what it is reporting. The threefold death is that pattern pressed to its limit: survivable torture taken to the point where death itself becomes survivable, three times over, so that the martyr’s victory may be displayed in the most emphatic possible form.

Reading the Cycle Devotionally Without Reading It Historically

None of this empties the legend of value; it relocates the value. The Orthodox tradition has always read the Passio of George liturgically and iconographically rather than as a chronicle, and the topos-reading restores that register. The cycle is a long meditation on a single confession — that the martyr, joined to the crucified and risen Christ, cannot be defeated by anything the persecutor can do to the body, because the worst he can do (kill him) has already been undone by the Resurrection. The threefold death stages that confession three times for emphasis; the catalogue of torments stages the persecutor’s exhaustion of his whole arsenal against a man it cannot touch. Read this way, the romance is true in the only way it was meant to be — as a hymn to the Trophy-Bearer’s victory, not as a deposition about the spring of 303.

This is also why the figures inside the cycle matter as legend and not as prosopography. The magician Athanasius who cannot poison George and is converted, the soldiers who believe, the empress who confesses Christ at his example are the narrative’s way of showing the victory overflowing onto others — the standard motif of the persecutor’s own household won to Christ — and they are treated in their own file as elements of the same romance (see The Witnesses Converted). The cycle’s afterlife, too, belongs to the sections that follow: this image of the invincible champion prepared the ground for the medieval dragon that has nothing to do with the early cult (see The Origin of the Dragon Legend and Reading the Dragon Symbolically). What the present file establishes is the foundation those readings stand on: that the torture-cycle and the threefold death are hagiographic topoi, the signature of a passion épique, attested in the recensions catalogued by Krumbacher and analyzed by Delehaye, flagged by the Church in the Decretum Gelasianum, and read here — respectfully and exactly — as a romance of the Trophy-Bearer’s triumph rather than as the history of his death.

References

Krumbacher, Karl. Der heilige Georg in der griechischen Überlieferung. Ed. Albert Ehrhard. Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-philologische und historische Klasse, 25.3. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1911. (The foundational critical survey of the Greek recensions; the archaic stratum with the legendary king “Dadianus,” the seven-year persecution, the seventy-two kings, and the threefold death; the classification of the Passio with the apocryphal romance literature.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Brussels: Bureaux de la Société des Bollandistes, 1909. (George at the head of the military-saint legends; the Passio as a specimen of the passions épiques and the analysis of their conventions.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The warrior-saint cult and its victory-theology; the rationalizing of the legendary apparatus in the later recensions.)
Riches, Samantha. St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000. (The growth of the legend and the image of the invincible champion; the cultural afterlife.)
Decretum Gelasianum (De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis). Ed. Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in kritischem Text herausgegeben und untersucht. Texte und Untersuchungen 38.4. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912. (The early-sixth-century list naming the Passio Georgii among books non recipienda and flagging the apocryphal passions of the martyrs.)