Nicomedia and the Great Persecution

Nicomedia, the eastern capital of Diocletian’s tetrarchic empire, was the city where the Great Persecution broke out in February 303 — the most severe and sustained assault the early Church endured, documented with unusual fullness by the eyewitness Lactantius and by Eusebius. This file sets that solidly attested frame, and shows why a healer-martyr of Nicomedia is historically plausible even though Panteleimon’s own Passio is a developed legend: the city demonstrably produced many martyrs in exactly this period and place.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Unmercenary Healer)

The Imperial Capital of the East

The tradition of St. Panteleimon places his life and martyrdom at Nicomedia (Νικομήδεια, modern İzmit), and this is the one element of his setting that rests on firm ground, for Nicomedia at the turn of the fourth century was among the most important cities of the Roman world. A foundation of the Bithynian kings on the deep landlocked gulf at the eastern end of the Sea of Marmara (the Propontis), it had long been the chief city of the province of Bithynia, and it was here, a century and a half earlier, that the younger Pliny had governed and corresponded with Trajan about the treatment of Christians (Pliny, Letters 10.96–97). With the accession of Diocletian in 284 and the reorganization of the empire under the Tetrarchy, Nicomedia was raised to the rank of an imperial residence: it became the principal seat of the senior eastern Augustus, Diocletian himself, and so functioned as the effective capital of the eastern half of the empire in the years before Constantine’s New Rome was founded at nearby Byzantium.

Diocletian adorned the city on a scale meant to rival Rome. Lactantius, who taught Latin rhetoric at Nicomedia under imperial patronage and watched the building program at first hand, describes the emperor’s “insatiable passion for building” — the new mints, arms factories, basilicas, a circus, and palaces for the emperor and his daughter, raised with such haste and at such cost that the surrounding countryside was stripped to supply them (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 7). At the centre stood the imperial palace, and — a detail that will matter for the persecution — a Christian church stood in full view of it, on rising ground “overlooking the palace,” conspicuous in the very heart of the tetrarchic capital (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12). The city was cosmopolitan, populous, and prosperous, a meeting-place of the Greek East and the Roman administration, with a Christian community evidently large and visible enough by 303 to possess a prominent cathedral church within sight of the emperor’s residence.

It is this Nicomedia — court city, administrative hub, and home to a conspicuous Christian community — that the Passio of Panteleimon takes as its stage, casting the saint as a physician moving between the imperial court and the Christian underground of the same city (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). Whatever is finally to be said about the legendary character of that narrative (see The Historical Core), its geography is not invented: Nicomedia was exactly the kind of place where a court physician might serve, and exactly the place where, in 303, the empire’s most violent persecution began.

The Outbreak of the Great Persecution, 303

The persecution that the Orthodox tradition remembers as the era of the Great Martyrs — and within which it places Panteleimon — is not a vague backdrop but a datable, documented event, and its epicentre was Nicomedia. After nearly two generations of relative peace for the Church (the “Little Peace” since Gallienus), the senior emperor Diocletian, pressed by his Caesar Galerius and after consulting the oracle of Apollo at Didyma, resolved upon a general suppression of Christianity (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 10–11; Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.appendix and 8.2). Lactantius, present in the city, makes the chronology precise: the assault opened “when the day of the festival of the Terminalia was at hand,” that is on 23 February 303 (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12).

The first act was the demolition, at dawn, of the great church that stood opposite the palace. Lactantius describes how the praetorian prefect with military officers and a body of soldiers forced the doors, searched for an image of the deity, burned the Scriptures they found, and gave the building over to pillage; then, because Diocletian had refused to let it be fired for fear of spreading the flames through the crowded city, the Praetorian Guard came with axes and tools and levelled the lofty edifice to the ground within a few hours (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12). Eusebius, writing as the historian of the persecution rather than as a Nicomedian eyewitness, confirms the same event: in the nineteenth year of Diocletian, in the month Dystrus (March), “when the feast of the Saviour’s Passion was near at hand, royal edicts were published everywhere, commanding that the churches be levelled to the ground and the Scriptures destroyed by fire” (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.2).

The destruction of the church was followed at once by the first of a series of imperial edicts. The day after the demolition, the first edict was promulgated: it ordered churches throughout the empire razed and the Scriptures burned, deprived Christians of rank and civic standing, stripped them of the protection of the law, and reduced Christians of the imperial household to slavery (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 13; Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.2). Lactantius records the first act of open defiance: a man “of no mean station” tore down the edict where it had been posted, mocking it as a notice of victories over the Goths and Sarmatians, and was seized, tortured “with the greatest cruelty,” and burned alive, enduring his death “with admirable patience” (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 13). Eusebius reports the same deed — though, characteristically, without giving the man’s name (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.5). The Church would later remember him under the name of the martyr Euethius, but the bare event — the tearing-down of the first edict and the man’s execution — is fixed by the contemporary record.

The Palace Fires and the Widening of the Edicts

The persecution at Nicomedia escalated when, within a fortnight or so, fire broke out twice in the imperial palace itself. Lactantius, with evident suspicion of Galerius, reports that the Caesar secretly contrived the blaze in order to fasten the blame on the Christians and force Diocletian’s hand; Constantine, then a young man at the court, is cited by Lactantius as believing it the work of Galerius (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 14). Whatever its cause, the consequence was savage. Diocletian, enraged and convinced of a Christian plot against his life, turned on the Christians of his own household: members of the court were examined under torture, and a wave of executions followed in the capital. Lactantius describes the emperor presiding in fury while eunuchs and palace servants were put to death, and Eusebius, surveying the Nicomedian martyrs, reports that “an unspeakable multitude” suffered there, some beheaded and some perfected by fire, “so that whole families perished in a single day” (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.6).

Among the Nicomedian martyrs of this moment Eusebius singles out figures of the court: a man of great honour named Peter, an imperial servant, who was tortured with extreme cruelty and at last roasted over a slow fire, and the household officials Dorotheus and Gorgonius, men of high rank in the palace, who were put to death; and Eusebius notes that even the bishop of Nicomedia, Anthimus, was beheaded (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.6). These are not figures of later legend but men named in the contemporary or near-contemporary record of the persecution’s historian. The picture they give is consistent and pointed: at Nicomedia, in 303 and the years immediately following, Christians attached to the imperial court and city — officials, servants, physicians, and clergy — were arrested, tortured, and executed in large numbers.

Three further edicts followed across 303–304, progressively tightening the net. The second ordered the imprisonment of the clergy — bishops, presbyters, and deacons; the third offered imprisoned clergy release if they would sacrifice, with torture for those who refused; and the fourth, of early 304, extended the demand of sacrifice to the whole population, on pain of death (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.2 and 8.6; Eusebius, De martyribus Palaestinae, preface; and the reconstruction of the four edicts in modern scholarship, e.g. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, 2006, and Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981). The persecution would run, with varying intensity across the tetrarchic territories, until Galerius’s deathbed edict of toleration in 311 (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 34) and finally the settlement under Constantine. In the eastern provinces under Galerius and later Maximinus Daia it was especially prolonged and severe.

The Witnesses: Lactantius and Eusebius

Two facts about the sources give the Nicomedian persecution its unusual solidity. First, in Lactantius the Church possesses something close to an eyewitness chronicle. Lactantius was a Latin rhetorician summoned by Diocletian to teach at Nicomedia; he was in the city when the church opposite the palace was demolished and the first edict torn down, and his De mortibus persecutorum (“On the Deaths of the Persecutors”), written shortly after 313, narrates the outbreak with a wealth of circumstantial detail — the date, the prefect at the doors, the burning of the Scriptures, the palace fires, the executions — that no later hagiographer could have supplied (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12–15; on Lactantius’s presence and reliability, Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981). His tract is polemical in purpose, eager to show God’s vengeance on the persecutors, but its account of the Nicomedian events is the report of a contemporary on the scene.

Second, Eusebius of Caesarea devotes the eighth book of his Ecclesiastical History to the persecution as a whole, and treats Nicomedia at length, both for the demolition of the church and for the martyrs of the court and city (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.2, 8.5–6). Eusebius writes as a historian assembling reports rather than as a Nicomedian eyewitness, and his theological framing is unmistakable; but his testimony converges with Lactantius’s on the central facts — the edicts, the burning of the books, the church opposite the palace, the multitude of martyrs — and the two together place the Nicomedian persecution among the best-documented episodes in the whole history of the early Church.

Why a Healer-Martyr of Nicomedia Is Historically Plausible

This is the point at which the secure history bears on the legendary Passio. The collection holds firmly to the distinction (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Historical Core) that the persecution is documented while Panteleimon’s own role in it is what the Passio claims, not what the contemporary sources record: neither Lactantius nor Eusebius names a physician Pantoleon or Panteleimon among the Nicomedian martyrs, and the saint’s biography descends entirely from a later martyr-legend (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; on the legendary genre, Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, 1905). The honest statement is that Panteleimon’s connection to the persecution is asserted by his Passio and not corroborated by the documentary record.

Yet plausibility is not the same as proof, and on the question of plausibility the secure history is strongly in the saint’s favour. The Passio sets its martyr in precisely the city, the period, and the social milieu that the contemporary sources show actually produced martyrs in large numbers. Nicomedia in 303 was the empire’s leading killing-ground for Christians; its court and city produced named martyrs of exactly the kind the Passio describes — household servants, men of rank, clergy (Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 8.6); and the figure of a physician moving between the imperial court and the Christian community fits a city that was both an administrative capital and home to a conspicuous Church. That the developed narrative around such a figure is legendary does not entail that no such figure existed; Delehaye’s whole method insists on separating the firm fact of an early cult from the legendary Passio spun around it (Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd ed., 1933). The secure history of Nicomedia establishes that a martyr-healer of that city in that persecution is entirely possible and even unremarkable — which is precisely why the ancient cult of an early Nicomedian martyr named Pantoleon (the subject of the companion file) can be taken seriously as historical, even while the rich biography attached to him is read as the Passio’s own. The frame is solid; only the portrait within it is legendary.

References

Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum (On the Deaths of the Persecutors). Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. (Eyewitness account of the Nicomedian outbreak: the building program at chapter 7; the church opposite the palace and its demolition on 23 February 303 at chapter 12; the first edict and the man who tore it down at chapter 13; the palace fires and the court executions at chapters 14–15; Galerius’s edict of toleration at chapter 34.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (Historia ecclesiastica), Book 8. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1; Greek text in the GCS edition. (The edicts and the destruction of the churches at 8.2; the man who tore down the edict at 8.5; the Nicomedian martyrs — Peter, Dorotheus, Gorgonius, Bishop Anthimus, and the multitude — at 8.6.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Martyrs of Palestine (De martyribus Palaestinae), preface. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. (On the fourth edict’s general demand of sacrifice, 304.)
Pliny the Younger. Letters 10.96–97. (The earliest correspondence on the treatment of Christians in Bithynia, a century and a half before the Great Persecution.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes hagiographiques. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1905. Eng. The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater. New York: Fordham University Press, 1962. (The method for reading a developed martyr-legend.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les origines du culte des martyrs. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933. (Separating the firm fact of an early cult from the legendary Passio built upon it.)
Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. (Lactantius’s presence at Nicomedia and the chronology and reconstruction of the four edicts.)
de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Ed. Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (The sequence and content of the four edicts of the Great Persecution.)
The Greek Passio of St. Panteleimon (Passio Panteleemonis), BHG 1412z–1418. Catalogued in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 3rd ed., ed. François Halkin. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The martyr-legend that supplies the saint’s connection to the Nicomedian persecution.)