Denounced Before Maximian

The Passio of St. Panteleimon makes the saint’s free and successful healing the cause of his death: the established physicians of Nicomedia, watching their patients and their fees pass to a young rival who cures in Christ’s name and takes nothing — and seeing the people drawn to Christ through cures the paid art could not work, above all the healing of a blind man who then confesses Christ — denounce him to the emperor as a Christian. This file sets out the human machinery of the martyrdom as the Passio relates it: the envy of the rival physicians, the denunciation, the trial and interrogation before the emperor (Maximian in most recensions, Diocletian in others), the demand to sacrifice, the saint’s confession of Christ and his proposal of a contest of healing, and the martyrdom of Hermolaos and his companions and of the healed blind man in the same cycle — all pinned to the Passio as its own narrative and read with the genre in view.

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

The Engine of Envy

The Passio of St. Panteleimon does not present the martyrdom as a bolt from a clear sky but builds it out of a motive already laid down in the narrative of the free healings: the envy of the men whose living the saint has undercut. According to the Greek Passio (BHG 1412z–1418) and its tenth-century Metaphrastic rewriting, the converted Pantoleon, now healing in the name of Christ and taking no payment, draws the sick of Nicomedia away from the established physicians, succeeding where the paid art has failed and gathering to himself both the patients and the gratitude that had been the other physicians’ stock-in-trade (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; on the free healing as the engine of envy, see Healing Without Payment). The Passio makes the rivalry the proximate cause of his destruction: it is his former colleagues and competitors, the physicians of Nicomedia, who watch their practice dwindle and who resolve to be rid of him (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418).

The narrative is careful, however, to give the envy a religious as well as an economic edge. The physicians do not merely lose income; they trace the loss to its cause, and the cause is the Name. What undoes their medicine is not a superior technique they might learn but an invoked power they cannot purchase or master — the name of Christ pronounced over the incurable (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). In the legend’s logic the denunciation is therefore the only weapon left to them: unable to compete with a healing that is free and works by a Name, they reach for the one instrument the persecuting state has placed in every rival’s hand — the accusation of Christianity. The free cure that is the saint’s glory becomes, in the eyes of the fee-takers, the intolerable thing that must be reported. This narrative pattern — the holy healer whose very gratuity provokes the deadly envy of the established practitioners — is a recurring shape in the legends of the Anargyroi, the Holy Unmercenaries, and is recognised as such in the source-critical reading of the collection (see Reading the Martyr-Healer; Pantoleon to Panteleimon).

The Passio supplies a precipitating episode, and it is one of the narrative’s most pointed: the healing of a blind man whom the paid physicians had treated for money and failed to cure. The narrative relates that Pantoleon, invoking the name of Christ, opened the eyes of a man whom the established physicians had taken in hand — taking his money — and left in his blindness; and that the man, receiving his sight, received with it faith, confessing Christ openly and being baptised (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; the healing of the blind man and his confession, reported here as the Passio‘s own claim per METHODOLOGY §3.5; see Healing Without Payment). The episode opens the man’s eyes twice over — to the light and to Christ — and in doing so it does precisely the thing the physicians fear: it converts a witness. The cured man’s public confession is, in the Passio’s telling, what carries the matter beyond a quiet loss of custom and into the open, for here is living proof that the new physician heals by a forbidden Name and makes Christians of his patients.

It is this, the narrative relates, that the envious physicians seize upon. The blind man’s confession furnishes them both their evidence and their grievance: the rival not only takes their patients but makes them Christians, and the persecuting court will not tolerate the second even where it might overlook the first (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). The Passio thus binds the healing and the denunciation into a single chain — the free cure, the confession of the cured, the envy of the displaced, and the accusation laid before the emperor. The structure is theologically deliberate: the very mercy that restores sight is what exposes the merciful one to death, and the convert’s confession of Christ is the occasion of the martyr’s own.

The Denunciation

The Passio relates that the physicians went to the emperor and denounced Pantoleon as a Christian — a man who, they charged, despised the gods, healed by the name of the crucified, and turned the people of Nicomedia away from the established worship (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). The denunciation is the hinge from the narrative of the healer to the narrative of the martyr: up to this point the Passio has shown a physician converting and curing; from here it shows a confessor on trial. The setting is the Great Persecution, and Nicomedia is its epicentre — Diocletian’s eastern capital, where the persecuting edicts of 303 were first promulgated and where the imperial court itself resided, so that an accusation of Christianity laid before the emperor in that city carried the full weight of the state (on the persecution and its capital, Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12–15; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.5–6; and Nicomedia and the Great Persecution).

The Passio presents the denunciation as both the physicians’ revenge and the persecution’s opportunity. The envious accusers supply the spark; the persecuting machinery supplies the fire. In the narrative’s economy the two are made to converge — private malice and public policy meeting in the person of a single martyr — and the result is the summons of Pantoleon before the emperor for interrogation. What had been a rivalry of physicians becomes a contest between the confessor and the state.

Before the Emperor: Maximian or Diocletian

The Passio stages the trial as a face-to-face interrogation between the saint and the emperor himself, and it is here that the textual tradition’s variation must be marked. In most recensions of the Passio, and in the Metaphrastic rewriting that fixed the story for later Orthodoxy, the persecuting emperor before whom Panteleimon is tried is named Maximian (Maximianus); in other recensions and in some of the derivative tradition the emperor is Diocletian (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; Metaphrastic Vita et passio S. Panteleemonis). The variation is not trivial detail but touches the historical frame of the whole account, and it is treated in its own structured note below.

The interrogation itself follows the fixed shape of the martyr-act. The Passio relates that the emperor, confronted with so eminent and well-connected a young physician, was reluctant to lose him and sought first to win him back: he confronted Panteleimon with the accusation, professed disbelief that a man of his standing and gifts should have abandoned the gods, and pressed him to deny the charge and to demonstrate his loyalty by sacrificing to the idols (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). The emperor’s posture, in the narrative, is that of the reasonable tyrant: he offers honour and life in exchange for a pinch of incense, and treats the saint’s Christianity as a folly to be talked out of rather than a crime to be summarily punished. This is the conventional choreography of the genre — the powerful interlocutor who alternates flattery and threat — and the Passio deploys it to set the saint’s confession in the sharpest relief.

The Confession of Christ

Panteleimon, the Passio relates, refused the sacrifice and confessed Christ openly before the emperor. He would not deny the Name by which he healed; he declared the idols dead and powerless and the crucified Christ the living God and the true physician of souls and bodies; and he offered himself to whatever the emperor might do (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). The confession is the centre of the trial-scene and the thing for which the whole episode exists. As in the model of the genre, the martyr’s words are not a negotiation but a witness: where the emperor offers a way out, the saint closes it, naming Christ and refusing the incense in terms that leave no room for compromise (cf. the confession of Polycarp before the proconsul — “eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” — Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3; see St. Polycarp of Smyrna).

The Passio makes the confession also a confession of the unmercenary identity. Panteleimon does not merely affirm Christ in the abstract; he affirms the Name as the power of his healing, declaring that the cures the physicians envied were worked by Christ and not by the medical art, and that the God who heals freely cannot be exchanged for the dead gods of the court (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; on the healing “in the name of Jesus Christ,” Acts 3:6; “freely you have received, freely give,” Matthew 10:8). The trial thus gathers up the whole prior narrative: the free healer is asked to renounce the source of his healing, and his refusal is at once a confession of Christ and a vindication of the unmercenary way.

The Contest of Healing

Several recensions of the Passio dramatise the confrontation by means of a contest of healing — a set-piece in which the power of the Name is tested against the impotence of the idols before the emperor’s own eyes. The narrative relates that a paralytic (in some recensions a man long sick and given up by the physicians) was brought forward, and that the pagan priests, or the rival physicians, were challenged to heal him by calling upon their gods; they invoked the idols and the man was not raised. Then Panteleimon called upon the name of Christ, and the paralytic rose up whole (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418, the contest of healing, where present in the recension; reported here as the Passio’s own claim per METHODOLOGY §3.5). The episode is a public reprise of the private healings that began the trouble: the idols are shown powerless, the Name is shown to prevail, and the contrast is staged where the whole court can see it.

The contest functions in the narrative exactly as the demand to sacrifice functions — as a test whose outcome convicts the persecutors and exalts the confessor — but it raises the stakes by making the test a public humiliation of the pagan cult. The Passio relates that the wonder, far from persuading the emperor, enraged him and the court: some of the bystanders believed and confessed Christ, which only confirmed the accusation that the young physician was turning the people, while the emperor, his gods publicly mocked and his authority defied, resolved upon the saint’s destruction (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). The narrative thus uses the contest to motivate the turn to torture: persuasion having failed and the cult having been shamed, the emperor abandons the reasonable-tyrant posture and orders the elaborate sequence of torments that the companion file treats (see The Tortures and the Olive Tree).

That the contest of healing appears in some recensions and not others is itself a mark of the developed tradition’s character: the scene is a recognisable hagiographic type — the wonder-contest that exposes the false gods, with deep roots in the literature (cf. Elijah against the prophets of Baal, 1 Kings 18; the apostolic confrontations with magicians, Acts 8:9–24, 13:6–12) — and its presence in the Passio tells us about the genre to which the text belongs as much as about any remembered event (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, Brussels 1905; on the source-layers, Pantoleon to Panteleimon).

The Passio does not isolate Panteleimon’s martyrdom but sets it within a cluster of deaths that belong to the same cycle, and two in particular are bound to his. The first is the martyrdom of Hermolaos, the hidden priest who catechised and baptised the saint, together with his companions Hermippos and Hermokrates. The narrative relates that, in the same persecution and in connection with the same affair, Hermolaos and his companions were arrested, brought before the emperor, confessed Christ, and were put to death — and the Passio and the calendar bind master and disciple together, Hermolaos and companions commemorated on 26 July, the day before Panteleimon on the 27th (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye 1902, under 26 and 27 July; Menaion, 26–27 July; see Conversion by Hermolaos). The consecutive feasts are the liturgical seal upon the narrative bond: the priest who is said to have brought the physician to Christ goes before him to martyrdom, and the Church keeps their days side by side.

The second is the martyrdom of the blind man whom Panteleimon healed. The Passio relates that the man whose sight and faith the saint had restored, having confessed Christ openly, was himself put to death in the same cycle — so that the convert whose confession helped precipitate the saint’s trial follows the saint, or precedes him, into martyrdom (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418). The detail closes the circle the healing of the blind man opened: the cure that gave the man sight and faith gives him, in the end, a martyr’s death, and the healing that exposed the saint to denunciation is shown to have made a martyr of the healed as well as of the healer. In the Passio’s telling the martyrdom of Panteleimon is thus the centre of a small constellation of deaths — the priest who converted him, the man he cured — all gathered into the one cycle and all proceeding from the same free healing in the name of Christ.

Reading the Human Machinery

Read as the Passio‘s narrative, the human machinery of the martyrdom is a single composition with a recognisable shape: the free healer who undercuts the paid physicians; the envy that cannot compete and so denounces; the convert whose confession precipitates the trial; the reasonable tyrant who alternates flattery and threat; the confession that refuses the incense and names Christ; the wonder-contest that shames the idols and enrages the court; and the cluster of martyrdoms that surrounds the saint’s own. Each element is reported here as the Passio’s own claim, in the register the methodology requires for hagiographical material — pinned to the source and never certified as documented fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The firm residue beneath the narrative is small and is treated elsewhere: an early-venerated martyr-healer of Nicomedia named Pantoleon, and a martyr-presbyter Hermolaos with his companions, kept on consecutive days in the calendar of the Church (Delehaye 1902; Menaion, 26–27 July; see The Passio Tradition).

[Disputed: which emperor presided. In most recensions of the Passio and in the Metaphrastic rewriting the persecuting emperor before whom Panteleimon is tried is named Maximian (Maximianus); in other recensions and in parts of the derivative tradition he is named Diocletian (Passio Panteleemonis, BHG 1412z–1418; Metaphrastic Vita et passio S. Panteleemonis). The historical setting underlying both names is the tetrarchic court at Nicomedia in 303–305, where the Great Persecution was launched: the Augustus Diocletian resided in the city and promulgated the persecuting edicts there, and the Caesar Galerius — its chief instigator in the sources — was likewise present; Maximian (Maximianus Herculius) was Augustus of the West and seated at Milan, not at Nicomedia, so that his appearance as the presiding emperor at a Nicomedian trial is geographically and administratively improbable (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12–15; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2, 8.5–6). The discrepancy is best understood not as a recoverable datum but as a feature of the genre: "Maximian" functions in the Passio as the conventional villain-name of the persecuting tyrant, the stock antagonist whom the hagiographer supplies without regard to the precise tetrarchic geography, much as other Diocletianic Passiones name now one and now another emperor as the persecutor (Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, 2nd ed. Brussels 1966, on the stock tyrant of the epic passion; Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques, Brussels 1905). The secure frame is the persecution at Nicomedia c. 303–305; the named emperor is the convention of the legend, and is reported here as the Passio's, not certified as history.]

The recognition of the pattern is not a disproof of the saint. That the Church venerated, from early times, a martyred healer of Nicomedia who died in the Great Persecution is the secure and central thing; the Passio‘s trial-scene is the developed tradition’s vivid exposition of that death, drawn with the genre’s conventional brush and reported in the register the evidence warrants (see Reading the Martyr-Healer). The tortures by which the enraged emperor sought to break him, and the wonders by which the Passio says Christ delivered him, are the subject of the companion file (see The Tortures and the Olive Tree).

References

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 envy of the rival physicians; the healing of the blind man and his confession; the denunciation to the emperor; the trial and the demand to sacrifice; the saint’s confession of Christ; the contest of healing where present in the recension; the martyrdoms of Hermolaos and companions and of the healed blind man. The emperor named Maximian in most recensions, Diocletian in others. The miracle-episodes are reported as the Passio’s own narrative per METHODOLOGY §3.5.)
Symeon Metaphrastes. Vita et passio S. Panteleemonis (10th c.). In Patrologia Graeca 115, where verified; and the Menologion tradition. (The polished rewriting that fixed the trial-narrative and the name Maximian for later Orthodoxy.)
Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae (Synaxarion of Constantinople). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The commemoration of the Hieromartyr Hermolaos with Hermippos and Hermokrates at 26 July and of St. Panteleimon at 27 July.)
Menaion, 26 July (Hermolaos and companions) and 27 July (Panteleimon). (The liturgical commemorations on consecutive days.)
Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum 12–15. (The launching of the Great Persecution at Nicomedia in 303; Diocletian and Galerius at the eastern court; Maximian Augustus of the West at Milan.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 8.2, 8.5–6. (The persecution at Nicomedia, its edicts, and its setting in Diocletian’s capital.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires. 2nd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1966. (The stock tyrant and the conventional choreography of the epic passion; the persecuting emperor as a literary type.)
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. (Method for reading a martyr-legend; the wonder-contest and the topos of the envious denouncer.)
Scripture: Acts 3:6 (healing “in the name of Jesus Christ”); Matthew 10:8 (“freely you have received, freely give”); 1 Kings 18 (Elijah against the prophets of Baal); Acts 8:9–24; 13:6–12 (apostolic confrontations with the powers of magic).