The Witnesses Converted

The legendary Acts of St. George do not leave him alone in his ordeal: at his example a procession of figures confess Christ and are won over — above all the Empress Alexandra, in the legend the wife of the persecuting emperor, who declares herself a Christian and is martyred with George; the sorcerer Athanasius, whose poison fails and who converts; and soldiers, bystanders, and (in some recensions) the dead raised as a sign. This file reads these conversions as elements of a hagiographic romance — the standard martyrological topos of the persecutor’s own household won to Christ — pinned to the Passio tradition and not asserted as history. Alexandra in particular is treated as a legendary figure with no independent historical attestation, distinct from the documented women of Diocletian’s household.

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

The Converts as a Feature of the Genre

The torture-cycle of the George legend is not a solitary contest. Strung through the serial deaths and revivals (see The Tortures and the Threefold Death) is a second pattern, just as conventional and just as revealing: at each fresh display of the martyr’s invincibility, onlookers are converted. A magician confesses; soldiers believe; the persecuting emperor’s own wife declares for Christ. Hippolyte Delehaye, in Les légendes grecques des saints militaires (Brussels, 1909), listed the conversion of bystanders — and, climactically, of someone inside the persecutor’s household — among the defining conventions of the passions épiques, the “epic passions” that the George Passio exemplifies (Delehaye 1909). Karl Krumbacher’s survey of the Greek recensions in Der heilige Georg in der griechischen Überlieferung (Munich, 1911) shows the same converts recurring across the tradition, with names and numbers shifting from version to version in the way that marks a literary motif rather than a remembered fact (Krumbacher 1911).

The repository’s rule for such material (METHODOLOGY §3.5) governs the whole file: these figures are reported as what the Passio tradition attests, pinned to that tradition, and read for the meaning the genre gives them — never certified as historical persons or events. The conversions are the narrative’s way of letting the martyr’s victory overflow onto others. If the threefold death proclaims that the persecutor cannot defeat George, the converted witnesses proclaim that the persecutor cannot even contain the effects of George’s witness: it spreads to his magician, his soldiers, and his very household. Christopher Walter, in The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition (Aldershot, 2003), and Samantha Riches, in St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Stroud, 2000), both read the legend in this register — as a celebration of the martyr’s triumph radiating outward — rather than as a roster of real conversions (Walter 2003; Riches 2000).

The Empress Alexandra

The most prominent of the converts, and the one the liturgical tradition has most firmly received, is the Empress Alexandra (Greek Alexandra; in the legend the wife of the persecuting emperor). In the Passio she watches George endure and survive his torments, and at the climax — most often after a wonder such as the shattering of the idols or a resurrection — she steps forward before the court and confesses Christ openly, rebuking her husband. For this she is condemned, and in the common form of the legend she is martyred together with George, or dies on the way to execution before the sentence can be carried out (Krumbacher 1911; Delehaye 1909). Her commemoration is attached to George’s own: she is remembered with him in the synaxaria, and in the Orthodox calendar her memory falls on or beside the feast of George.

[Disputed: the date of St. Alexandra’s commemoration is given variously. The Greek tradition and many synaxaria commemorate “the holy Empress Alexandra” with St. George on 23 April, his feast; other usages and martyrologies place her memory on 21 April. The variation reflects the different calendar traditions rather than any independent record of the woman; the repository reports both and resolves neither.]

Alexandra must be handled with particular care, because devotional usage and serious history pull in opposite directions here, and the methodology requires that the pull be named rather than smoothed over. As a matter of the documentary record, there is no independent historical attestation of an empress Alexandra converted by George: she appears only within the legendary Passio and the calendars that depend on it, and she shares in the whole text’s character as romance (Delehaye 1909; Krumbacher 1911; Walter 2003). The figure of the persecutor’s wife or daughter who is secretly or finally a Christian is itself a recurrent hagiographic topos — it appears in the legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria, where the empress (sometimes named Augusta) is converted and martyred in much the same way (see St. Catherine of Alexandria) — and its recurrence across the passions épiques is exactly what marks it as a convention of the genre (Delehaye 1909).

The point is not to diminish a saint whom the Church commemorates, but to be exact about what is being commemorated and on what basis. As the flagship method of this repository insists, the Church in honoring such a figure receives and ratifies a cult and the holiness it venerates — a witness who confessed Christ at the cost of her life — without thereby certifying a biography that the documentary record cannot supply (the model is set out for the limit case of St. Xenia: see St. Xenia of Petersburg, and METHODOLOGY §3.5). Alexandra is venerated as the type of the convert who, beholding the martyr’s constancy, can no longer keep silence; that is the truth the cult carries, and it does not depend on her being a documentable empress.

Alexandra, Prisca, and Valeria

The care Alexandra requires is sharpened by a real historical complication, which the legend’s “empress” invites and which must be set out plainly rather than left as a loose end. The historical women of Diocletian’s household are known — but they were not named Alexandra, and their religious histories, while genuinely entangled with Christianity, are very different from the legend’s.

The contemporary Christian polemicist Lactantius, in De mortibus persecutorum (On the Deaths of the Persecutors, c. 313–315), names them: Diocletian’s wife was Prisca, and his daughter Valeria (married to the Caesar and later Augustus Galerius) (Lactantius, De mort. pers. 15). Lactantius reports that at the outbreak of the persecution both women were compelled by Diocletian to sacrifice, language that has long been read as implying that they were Christians, or at least sympathetic to the faith, and were forced to conform (Lactantius, De mort. pers. 15). After Diocletian’s abdication, Lactantius narrates the bitter later fate of Prisca and Valeria under Galerius and then Licinius: their exile, their wandering, and finally their execution — a grim history he tells in detail and as a vindication of divine justice on the persecutors’ house (Lactantius, De mort. pers. 39–41, 50–51).

This creates an obvious temptation to identify the legend’s converted empress with one of these documented women — to suppose that “Alexandra” is a hagiographic memory of Prisca or of Valeria, the wife or daughter of Diocletian whose Christian sympathies Lactantius records.

[Disputed: the relation of the legendary Empress Alexandra to the historical women of Diocletian’s household is uncertain and is best left as a possible conflation rather than asserted as an identification. (a) Lactantius names Diocletian’s wife as Prisca and his daughter as Valeria, and reports that both were made to sacrifice, language often read as implying Christian sympathy (De mortibus persecutorum 15; cf. 39–41 for their later fate) — neither is called Alexandra, and neither is associated with St. George. (b) Some devotional and reference traditions nonetheless treat the legend’s Alexandra as reflecting, or being conflated with, Prisca (and a few with Valeria), so that the saint commemorated with George would be a hagiographic transformation of Diocletian’s historically attested, possibly Christian-leaning wife or daughter. (c) Critical scholarship treats Alexandra as a figure internal to the legendary Passio, with no demonstrable link to the historical household and no independent attestation; the name and the conversion belong to the romance (Delehaye 1909; Krumbacher 1911; Walter 2003). The repository reports the legendary Alexandra as legendary, notes Prisca/Valeria as the actual, separately documented women of Diocletian’s house, and does not collapse the one into the other.]

The honest statement, then, is twofold. There were real women in Diocletian’s household with real and disputed religious histories, and we know of them from a contemporary source, Lactantius. And there is a legendary empress in the Passio of George, Alexandra, whose name and story belong to the romance and who cannot be securely identified with any of them. To present Alexandra as “really” Prisca would import an identification the sources do not support; to deny any relation dogmatically would overstate in the other direction. The discipline is to keep the two registers distinct and to flag the possible confusion as a confusion — which is what the Disputed note above does.

The Magician Athanasius

The second major convert is the sorcerer Athanasius (the name varies in the recensions). When torture and even repeated killing fail to break George, the persecutor turns to magic and summons a famous magos to destroy him by poison. Athanasius prepares a lethal draught — in the more elaborate versions, two cups, one to madden and one to kill — and George drinks them with no effect, having signed himself with the Cross. Confounded that his art is powerless against the Christian, the magician throws himself down, confesses Christ, and is himself put to death, becoming a martyr (Krumbacher 1911; Delehaye 1909).

This too is a recognizable topos. The contest in which a holy man defeats a court magician, who then converts, runs back through the apocryphal Acts of the apostles — the type-scene of Peter and Simon Magus stands behind a whole tradition of such confrontations — and its appearance in the George Passio is one more mark of the text’s place among the legendary romances rather than the historical acta (Delehaye 1909). The failed poison dramatizes the same confession as the failed tortures: the powers of the persecutor’s world, including its occult powers, are simply inoperative against a man joined to Christ. The magician’s conversion is the victory overflowing once more — onto the very specialist hired to ensure the martyr’s death.

Soldiers, Bystanders, and the Sign of Resurrection

Beyond the two named converts, the legend gathers anonymous believers. Soldiers of the guard, and in some recensions named tribunes, are converted by what they witness and are martyred in numbers the recensions give variously — a hagiographic shorthand for the spread of the faith even within the persecuting apparatus (Krumbacher 1911; Delehaye 1909). Bystanders in the crowd believe at the wonders. And in several recensions George performs, at the persecutor’s challenge, a public resurrection as a sign: he raises a dead man, or restores to life a peasant’s dead oxen, and the crowd that sees it confesses Christ (Krumbacher 1911; Riches 2000). The resurrection-on-demand is the genre’s most direct statement of the martyr’s participation in the risen Christ’s power over death, and it functions, like the serial revivals of George himself, as a proof staged for the conversion of witnesses rather than as a reported event.

[Disputed: the sign-miracles attributed to George within the Passio — the raising of a dead man, the revival of dead oxen, the sprouting of the dry throne or pillar into a living tree — vary considerably by recension, and the count and identity of the converted soldiers and bystanders differ accordingly (Krumbacher 1911; Delehaye 1909; Riches 2000). They are reported here as features of the legendary tradition, named to their recensions where the scholarship specifies, and not as historical occurrences.]

Reading the Conversions Rightly

Taken together, the converted witnesses are the Passio‘s way of making the martyr’s victory communal and contagious. Every figure who confesses — the empress in the palace, the magician at his cauldron, the soldier in the ranks, the crowd at the grave — measures how far the triumph reaches and refutes the persecutor’s project: he cannot kill George, and he cannot stop George’s witness from converting his own people. Read as the genre intends, the conversions are a theology of martyrdom in narrative form, the blood of the martyrs (Tertullian’s phrase) dramatized as it falls and springs up on the spot.

That reading is the respectful one and the accurate one at once. It honors Alexandra and Athanasius and the nameless soldiers as the Church honors them — as types of the convert won by the sight of constancy unto death — while declining to convert a romance into a chronicle. The same discipline applied to the torture-cycle (see The Tortures and the Threefold Death) applies to its converts: pinned to the recensions catalogued by Krumbacher and Delehaye, and set against the documented household of Diocletian known from Lactantius, the witnesses converted are read here as the hagiographic topos they are — the persecutor’s own house won to Christ — and not as a register of historical conversions. What the Church receives in commemorating Alexandra with George on 23 (or 21) April is not a verified biography of an empress but the truth her figure carries: that the martyr’s witness is so powerful that it claims even the persecutor’s wife, and that no rank or proximity to the throne is a defense against the grace that shone in the Trophy-Bearer.

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 Greek recensions; the recurring converts — Alexandra, the magician, the soldiers, the resurrection-signs — with their variation across versions.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Brussels: Bureaux de la Société des Bollandistes, 1909. (The passions épiques and their conventions, including the conversion of bystanders and of the persecutor’s household and the magician-contest topos.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The warrior-saint cult; the legend as celebration of the martyr’s triumph radiating to others.)
Riches, Samantha. St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000. (The growth and cultural afterlife of the legend, including the sign-miracles.)
Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum (On the Deaths of the Persecutors). Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed, Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. (Names Diocletian’s wife Prisca and daughter Valeria, their compulsion to sacrifice at De mort. pers. 15, and their later exile and execution at 39–41, 50–51 — the contemporary source for the actual women of Diocletian’s household.)