The Dux and the Nun. Hagiography and the Cult of Artemios and Febronia in Constantinople

In sixth-century Constantinople, incubation was a very popular practice, and many shrines in martyria or churches welcomed sick people who would bed down, hoping to be healed by a saint during a dream. A church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, located in an area called Oxeia, hosted incubation rituals surrounding a pair of martyrs, Artemios and Febronia. Their healing activities are attested in a seventh-century collection of forty-five miracles performed by Artemios (BHG 173), a few passages in which allude to Febronia as his female counterpart. Hagiographical texts have recorded Artemios’s and Febronia’s lives and passions, but do not mention their medical cult in Constantinople. Several versions of the Passion of Artemios (BHG 169y–z; 170–71c) say that this former dux of Egypt, close to Emperor Constantius II, was beheaded in Antioch by Emperor Julian and that his relics were subsequently transferred to Constantinople. As for Febronia, her Passions (BHG 659-659h) depict her as a young nun from Nisibis tortured under Diocletian because she refused to apostatize and marry a Roman soldier. At first sight, none of these hagiographical narratives carries any trace of the importance that the saints had in the imperial capital.The aim of this article is to propose a fresh reading of Artemios’s and Febronia’s dossiers, studied here together for the first time. Artemios’s career, death, and subsequent cult are still being debated by scholars. His Passions enable historians not only to picture Emperor Julian himself as a cruel, bloodthirsty persecutor but also to make conjectures about the Arians’ obscure history and martyrial cults. So far, no satisfactory explanation has been offered as to why an unpopular fourth-century commander in Egypt, linked to the Arian party, came to be venerated many years later in Constantinople as an orthodox healer saint. Febronia’s dossier is much more scant and, until recently, little attention has been paid to the Constantinopolitan healing activity of the nun from Nisibis. Surprisingly, the raison d’être for the close association of Artemios and Febronia, whose lives and deaths originally had nothing in common, has never been discussed in modern scholarship, even by those examining the foundation of their cult. This article is the first to consider the links between Artemios’s and Febronia’s hagiography and their cult on the ground. To that end, the etiology of their hagiographical narratives will be analyzed, so that we can understand when, why, and how these legends arose. I will begin by reconsidering the issue of the transfer of both martyrial cults from Nisibis and Antioch to the capital. In doing so, I will revise the traditional claim that the dux of Egypt was executed at Antioch and that his martyrial cult initially developed within the Arian community of Antioch. I will then turn to the local cultic context in Constantinople for the fictions of the martyrs’ deaths, drawing on the analysis of both pagan and Christian evidence to propose a new solution to questions about the origin and development of Artemios and Febronia’s joint medical cult: I will argue that this medical cult did not begin with the importation of the relics of the foreign martyrs but was the prolongation of a traditional local cult. This new reading of Artemios’s and Febronia’s Passions will shed light on the strategies behind hagiographical discourses created long after the events described. Those texts, works of fiction, were intended to ensure the development of the saints’ cult, guaranteeing their reception as proper Christian saints.