Cyriacus of Rome

Saint Cyriacus, hieromartyr, was a deacon of the Church of Rome, put to death for his faith in Christ during the persecution of Diocletian, around the year 303. His name, from the Greek kyrios, the Lord, is kept in the eastern synaxaria and in the Roman Martyrology, and in the West he is counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

Life

According to tradition, Cyriacus was ordained deacon by Pope Saint Marcellus. Legend tells that he was a Roman nobleman who became a Christian as an adult, gave his wealth to the poor, and devoted the rest of his life to serving the slaves who laboured at the baths of Diocletian. The earliest sure information shows only that a Cyriacus was buried, with Largus, Smaragdus and other martyrs, at the seventh milestone of the Via Ostiensis on 8 August.

His life further tells that he cast the unclean spirit out of Artemia, the daughter of Emperor Diocletian, in the name of Jesus Christ crucified, and that Artemia and her mother Serena received the Christian faith. Later, according to the same account, the king of Persia asked Diocletian to send Cyriacus, because his daughter Jobia, tormented by an evil spirit, said that only he could heal her. Cyriacus healed her, and she and the royal house were baptized. Historians regard this part as uncertain, because the persons and years do not fit what is known of Persian history.

Martyrdom

Returning to Rome, Cyriacus was arrested, tortured and then put to the sword. Tradition says he was beheaded in the year 303, in the time of Emperor Maximian, on the Via Salaria, where he was also buried. With him suffered Largus, Smaragdus and twenty other Christians, among them Crescentianus, Sergius, Secundus, Alban, Victorinus, Faustinus, Felix and Sylvanus, as well as four women: Memmia, Juliana, Cyriacides and Donata.

Veneration

Cyriacus is commemorated on 8 August and, in the Slavic synaxaria, on 7 June, as Saint Demetrius of Rostov's Lives of the Saints also shows. In the West he is venerated as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. His relics are said to have been moved to the church of Santa Maria in Via Lata in Rome and to the abbey of St Cyriacus at Altorf in Alsace. In Rome an ancient church by the baths of Diocletian bore his name, and the Italian town of Cirié has him as patron. In the Byzantine period monasteries were dedicated to him at Majdal Yaba and at Al-⁠Fasayil near Jericho.