The Confession in the Amphitheatre

The martyrdom of St. Menas as the Passio itself narrates it: the Egyptian-born soldier of the Rutilian (Rutiliacan) legion, garrisoned at Cotyaeum in Phrygia, who during the Diocletianic persecution withdrew to the desert mountains for a season of ascetic prayer, then returned to the city while the public games were in progress and confessed Christ aloud before the governor; the interrogation, the catalogue of tortures, the beheading, and the recovery of the body by his fellow Christians. The events are reported here as the Passio tells them — the testimony of a legendary text named to its source — and not as certified history; the source-critical assessment of that text is the companion file.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

How This Narrative Stands in the Record

What follows is the story of Menas’s death as the Passio tells it. It is not a documented biography. The martyrdom of Menas survives only in the legendary Passio (Martyrdom) preserved in Greek and in Coptic — Bohairic and Sahidic — recensions, with further Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Arabic forms, a text of uncertain and probably late date whose cast is thoroughly conventional for the genre (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946, introduction; Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Atiya, 1991, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). Per the repository standard, a hagiographical narrative of this kind is reported as what its source attests, pinned to that source, and never asserted as fact (see METHODOLOGY.md §3.5). The reader should hold the whole of the present file under that rubric: every event below is the Passio’s claim, and the firm ground of the Menas case lies not here but in the archaeology of the shrine and the diffusion of the ampullae (see The Historical Core and Archaeology versus Passio). The narrative is told here in full because it is the form in which the Church has received and venerated the saint; the assessment of its reliability is reserved for The Passio.

The Soldier of the Rutilian Legion

The Passio opens by placing Menas within the Roman army of the persecuting emperors. He is presented as an Egyptian by birth — his parents, in the developed tradition, are named Eudoxios and Euphemia, of Egyptian stock — who entered the imperial military service and was enrolled in the Rutilian (Rutiliacan) legion, a unit the text stations at Cotyaeum (Kotyaion) in Phrygia in Asia Minor (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). The detail is significant for the whole problem of the saint: the dominant tradition makes Menas an Egyptian who returns, in death, to Egypt, yet the Passio sets the decisive events of his life in Phrygia, and it is precisely this Phrygian setting that has fed the long debate over whether the Abu Mena martyr and a separate Phrygian Menas are one figure or two (the question is treated in The Passio).

The military frame is itself a hallmark of a whole class of late-antique martyr-narratives. Menas belongs, in the tradition, to the company of the great soldier-martyrs of the Diocletianic age — George, Demetrios, Theodore, Sergius and Bacchus — men whose passiones turn on the irreconcilable claims of the soldier’s oath to the emperor and the Christian’s confession of Christ (on the type, see St. George the Great Martyr and St. Demetrios of Thessaloniki). The Passio dates the events to the reign of Diocletian and his colleagues — the Great Persecution of 303–311 — the same persecution that fell with notorious ferocity on Egypt and gave the Coptic Church its calendar, the Era of the Martyrs reckoned from Diocletian’s accession in 284 (see Egypt and the Great Persecution).

The Withdrawal to the Desert

The crisis, as the Passio tells it, comes with the publication of the persecuting edicts. When the imperial command went out that Christians should be sought, denounced, and compelled to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death, Menas — a Christian serving in the ranks of a pagan army — could no longer hold his soldier’s place. The text presents him as refusing the apostasy the edicts demanded, laying aside or abandoning his military belt and station, and withdrawing into the desert mountains away from the city and the camp (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”).

This withdrawal is more than a flight from danger. The Passio presents the desert interval as a season of ascetic purification and prayer: Menas dwells apart in the mountains, gives himself to fasting, vigil, and supplication, and prepares himself — body and soul — for the confession he will make. The motif binds the soldier-martyr to the Egyptian ascetic ideal that was taking shape in exactly these years under Antony and the first desert fathers, so that Menas is figured at once as soldier, ascetic, and martyr (on the Egyptian ascetic world, see Orthodoxy: Monasticism and St. Antony the Great). The desert is where the martyr is made before he is unmade in the arena; the withdrawal is the hidden preparation for the public witness.

In some forms of the tradition the desert interval is crowned by a vision or a heavenly voice — Menas hears the call to confess, or sees the crowns of the martyrs prepared for those who endure — a feature that has close analogues across the martyr-acts (compare the heavenly voice in the Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The vision, where the recensions give it, supplies the inward motive for the return: Menas does not stumble back into the city by accident but goes deliberately, summoned, to lay down his life. The desert has done its work; the confessor is ready.

The Return and the Public Confession

The Passio now brings Menas back from the mountains to the city — in the developed Phrygian setting, to Cotyaeum — at the very moment when the place is given over to a great public festival: the games are in progress, the population gathered in the amphitheatre or the public arena, the spectacle in full course before the governor and the assembled crowd (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). The choice of moment is deliberate in the narrative’s logic: the largest possible audience, the most public possible stage, the very theatre of pagan civic religion — and into the midst of it walks the deserter-ascetic to make his confession.

What Menas does is the defining act of the Passio. Standing where all can hear, he confesses Christ aloud and publicly, openly declaring himself a Christian, renouncing the gods of the games and the emperors, and proclaiming the one God before the whole assembly. The confession halts the spectacle; the crowd and the magistrate turn upon the man who has interrupted the festival of the gods with the name of Christ. The narrative thus stages, in its sharpest possible form, the gospel saying that governs the whole martyr-tradition — “whoever confesses me before men, him will I also confess before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before men, him will I also deny” (Matt 10:32–33) — and Menas is presented as the very type of the one who confesses and is not denied.

It is worth noting that the Passio here departs pointedly from the older and more reticent martyr-ideal. The Martyrdom of Polycarp had explicitly refused to praise those who hand themselves over, holding that the true martyr waits, like the Lord, to be sought and betrayed rather than provoking the authorities (Martyrdom of Polycarp 4; trans. Holmes 2007; see The Martyrium Polycarpi). Menas’s deliberate return to the games to confess unbidden is the later, “voluntary” pattern of confession that the developed passiones came to celebrate — a shift the source-critical file marks as one of the signs of the text’s date and genre (see The Passio).

The Interrogation Before the Governor

Menas is seized and brought before the magistrate. The Passio names the presiding official variously across its recensions — the governor or prefect of the province, called in versions Pyrrhus and in others Argyriscus — and stages the classic forensic confrontation of the martyr-act: the interrogation, the demand to sacrifice, the offer of honour and office, the threat of torment (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). The fluidity of the magistrate’s name across the versions is itself a token of the text’s hagiographic rather than archival character: the historical magistrate, if there was one, is not remembered, and the name floats.

The interrogation follows the conventional rhythm. The governor asks Menas who he is and why he has cast off his soldier’s belt and station; Menas answers by confessing his name, his Egyptian origin, his soldiering, and above all his Christianity, declaring that he has left the army of the emperor to serve the King of heaven. The magistrate urges him to consider his youth, his rank, the rewards of compliance, and to offer sacrifice to the gods and to the emperors’ images; Menas refuses outright, professing that he will not exchange the eternal King for temporal masters, and that the tortures the governor threatens are nothing beside the fire prepared for those who deny God. The exchange — reasoned offer met by steadfast confession, escalating threat met by escalating boldness (parrhēsia) — is the standard dialogic core of the genre, and the Passio gives Menas the confessor’s serene and unanswerable replies throughout (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). The crowd’s clamour, the magistrate’s mounting anger, and the saint’s unshaken constancy drive the scene toward the sentence of torture.

The Tortures

When confession will not yield to argument or threat, the Passio turns — as the genre demands — to the prolonged catalogue of torments, the martyr’s body made the arena of the contest between the persecutor’s power and God’s grace. The text subjects Menas to a sequence of tortures drawn from the conventional repertory of the passiones: he is scourged, his flesh torn; he is raked with iron combs or hooks (the ungulae), the instruments that lacerate the sides; he is burned or seared with fire and torches; he is bruised, stretched, and afflicted with further torments as the recensions multiply them (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). Throughout, the narrative presents the saint as enduring each torment without yielding, often miraculously preserved or healed between the bouts, his constancy itself a wonder that confounds the persecutors and is meant to win the watching crowd.

These torture-scenes are the most frankly conventional part of the whole narrative, and the source-critical file treats them as such: the catalogue of scourge, iron comb, and fire is a topos of the developed martyr-act, deployed to magnify the martyr’s hypomonē (endurance) and the futility of the persecutor’s rage rather than to record a forensic sequence of events (see The Passio; on the genre’s conventions, compare the reading of the wonders in The Martyrium Polycarpi). They are reported here as the Passio‘s testimony to the saint’s endurance, not as an inventory of certified fact. The theological point the text presses through them is constant: the body broken in torment is the body sealed in witness, and the martyr’s refusal to break under the iron and the fire is the visible sign of the invisible grace that holds him.

The Beheading

The tortures having failed to move him, the magistrate at last pronounces the capital sentence, and Menas is led out and beheaded by the sword (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). Decapitation is the death the Passio gives him, and it is fitting to his station: the sword was the soldier’s death, the end proper to a Roman citizen-soldier, and it marks Menas’s final exchange of the earthly army’s blade for the martyr’s crown. In the tradition his death is dated to the persecution under Diocletian, around the year 309, and commemorated on 11 November (Coptic Hathor 15) — the day kept as his feast across the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic churches (see Feast and Cult).

The recensions surround the beheading with the signs that the genre attaches to a martyr’s death — a heavenly light, a voice, a fragrance, the saint’s final prayer commending his soul and interceding for those who will call upon him — features reported as the Passio’s testimony to the holiness of the death and not as independently established events. With the stroke of the sword the witness is completed: the soldier who confessed Christ at the games has confessed him to the end, and the Passio presents his death as victory rather than defeat, the genethlia, the heavenly birthday, of the martyr.

The Recovery of the Body

The narrative closes, as the martyr-acts characteristically do, with the fate of the holy body. The Passio reports that fellow Christians recovered the body of Menas after the execution — taking up the relics of the martyr, as the Smyrnaeans had taken up the bones of Polycarp “more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 18.2; trans. Holmes 2007) — and saw to its honourable keeping (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Coptic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint”). The recovery of the body is the narrative hinge between the martyrdom and the cult: it is the body, taken up and preserved, that becomes the relic, and the relic that becomes the shrine.

For Menas this hinge is especially load-bearing, because the dominant tradition carries the relics from the place of martyrdom back to Egypt, where — by the celebrated founding legend — they are borne across the Mareotis desert until the camel bearing them will go no further, and there, at that spot southwest of Alexandria, the body is buried and the great pilgrimage-shrine of Abu Mena arises (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; Kaufmann, Die Menasstadt, 1910). That translation-and-founding legend is the proper subject of Section 03 and is owned there; it is named here only as the destination toward which the recovery of the body points (see The Camel and the Founding Legend and The Great Pilgrimage City). With the body recovered and bound for Egypt, the Passio‘s work is done and the cult’s begins: the martyr who confessed in the amphitheatre becomes the wonderworker of the desert shrine.

References

Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The central edition and translation of the Coptic — Bohairic and Sahidic — Passio and Miracles; the Rutilian legion and Cotyaeum, the desert withdrawal, the public confession at the games, the interrogation under the governor, the catalogue of tortures, the beheading, and the recovery and translation of the body.)
Atiya, Aziz S., ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991, s.v. “Menas the Martyr, Saint.” (Summary of the Passio narrative — the Egyptian soldier of the Rutilian legion at Cotyaeum, the withdrawal, confession, tortures, beheading, and the relics carried to Egypt; the names of the parents and the magistrate across versions; the legendary character and uncertain date of the text.)
Kaufmann, Carl Maria. Die Menasstadt und das Nationalheiligtum der altchristlichen Aegypter. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1910. (The excavation of Abu Mena and the founding-of-shrine tradition to which the recovered body is carried.)
Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (The Martyrdom of Polycarp — the prototypical martyr-act cited for the heavenly voice at 9.1, the refusal to praise volunteers at 4, and the gathering of the relics “more valuable than precious stones” at 18.2.)
The Holy Bible. Matthew 10:32–33 (the confession-before-men saying that governs the martyr-confession motif).