Eusignius

Holy Martyr Eusignius was a Roman soldier of Antioch, who served in the imperial army some sixty years and received the death of martyrdom by beheading in the year 362, at an advanced age, in the time of the emperor Julian the Apostate. He is remembered on 5 August, a day which in the Orthodox calendar is also the forefeast of the Transfiguration. He is honoured by the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches.

The soldier

According to his life, he was born at Antioch and served in the imperial armies some sixty years, beginning under the emperor Maximian and going through the reigns of Constantius Chlorus, of Constantine the Great and of his sons. A Greek source says that in the time of Constantine he was a general. About the beginning of Constantine's reign he was a witness of the appearance of the Cross in the sky, understood as a sign of the victory to come. The Serbian source says that, by tradition, he was the first soldier who saw the cross shown to the emperor.

Eusignius was a companion of the martyr Basiliscus and is said to have been a witness of his martyrdom, at which he saw angels and Christ receiving the saint into heaven, and afterwards he told what he had seen.

The end

In old age he retired from military service and returned to Antioch, where he gave himself to prayer, fasting and the services of the Church. He lived so until the time of Julian the Apostate (361 to 363), who sought to restore paganism. After a fellow townsman, angry at a judgment given by Eusignius in a dispute, denounced him to the emperor as a Christian, he was summoned before Julian, in 362. Eusignius openly professed his faith, rebuked Julian for his apostasy and reminded him that he was the nephew of Constantine the Great. For this he was beheaded, in 362, at an advanced age, by the usual reckoning of birth in 252, at about a hundred and ten. His statue is among the hundred and forty statues of the saints on the colonnade in Saint Peter's Square at the Vatican.