Join me today to meet a saint who saw a terrible injustice and decided to step in.
Name: Didymus
Life: died 304 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: April 28
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The year was 304 AD. The Emperor Diocletian’s orders had arrived in Alexandria, in the North of Egypt on the Mediterranean coast. The persecution of Christians was going to take on a new form, and already, the fate of the daughter of one of Alexandria’s aristocratic houses hung in the balance.
A few days earlier, the highborn lady Theodora was only known as one of the great beauties of Alexandria. Then the emperor had ordered everyone to sacrifice to the pagan gods of Rome. Theodora had refused to sacrifice. She had admitted to being a Christian. Suddenly, the influence of her family was not enough to protect her. Now her future was uncertain, her very life in danger.
The events of the year 304 were a strange ending to the career of the emperor who had done more than most to save the Roman Empire. Back when his name had been Diocles, he had worked his way up the ranks in the military and observed the dysfunction of the Roman Empire all around him. Diocles saw that it was far too easy for a popular commander to seize power. That was especially true when an emperor died, unleashing a struggle for power among those left behind. Part of the problem, Diocles realized, was that the Roman Empire was simply too large. It was also fragmented, culturally and religiously. Romans were divided on the question of worship: the old gods of Rome, the strange cults of the East, the religion of the Christians, or the secret teachings of the Manichees.
When Diocles seized power, he set out to do things differently. He stabilized the empire. Part of this stabilization was the introduction of a new political structure: the Tetrachy. The empire would be split in two, with an Emperor ruling in the East, and one in the West. Each emperor would have a second in command. The senior emperors would rule for a while, then step back and their seconds in command would become emperors in their turn. The men who had been junior emperors would then choose heirs of their own, and so the succession problem would be solved.
As for the religious problems, Diocletian set about in his careful way to reorient Roman religion toward the old gods of Rome and make life difficult for Christians as well as Manichees. Christians had been forbidden from serving in the military. Their leaders had been arrested. Now, in 304 AD, Diocletian had been in power for twenty years. He was sick. He was thinking about retirement. But for some reason, this was the moment in which Diocletian issued his harshest orders concerning the persecution of Christians yet.
Every single man and woman in the Empire would be compelled to sacrifice to the old gods. The only exemption was for the Jews. Imperial criers would walk the streets shouting out the new edict, so that no one could pretend to be unaware. Christians would have to sacrifice in two ways, a pinch of incense and a libation, just to make it hard to do anything sneaky. The army would use census data to note each sacrifice and cross the name off a list. Those who refused to sacrifice would be executed. Governors would have wide discretion in doing what was necessary to get Christians to comply.
And so the order had come to Alexandria. Many of the members of noble families had lined up to do as they were told. Theodora had refused to make the sacrifice. So she was brought to trial before a judge, Eustratius Proculus, probably the Roman governor of Egypt at the time.
When Eustratius asked Theodora why she had not sacrificed, she replied that it was because she was a Christian. That was a bad start. Then Eustratius, perhaps on a hunch, asked why Theodora was single. She explained that she had a vocation to live as a virgin. Eustratius sighed. Rome wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of a vocation to virginity - Rome had Vestal Virgins long before anyone had heard of Christians. The problem was that Theodora’s entire life was an affront to the emperor’s orders.
Eustratius tried to intimidate Theodora. He let his men beat her, a little. Theodora was still an important person, so Eustratius wanted her to realize that she was in serious trouble. But Theodora stuck to her position. She wouldn’t perform the sacrifice. And she wasn’t going to marry, either.
Almost a hundred years earlier, in another persecution under another emperor, a young woman named Potamiaena had been martyred in Alexandria. It had been an ugly scene, with a jeering crowd that summoned the compassion of Potamiaena’s guard, Basilides, who would soon follow her to martyrdom. The end result had been a lot of public sympathy for Christians. It was the sort of scene that Eustratius wanted to avoid, and luckily for him, he had a new method.
It hadn’t been Eustratius’ idea. Elsewhere in the Empire, local leaders had realized that the fact that some Christian women were living as virgins or nuns could be used against them. The idea was simple. Such women would be told that if they refused to sacrifice, they would be stripped of their property and their freedom, and sent as slaves to be prostitutes in a brothel. The protocol seems to have been intended as a threat, although we know that it was carried out on several occasions.
Things were harsher in the ancient world, but even by Roman standards this was cruel. Some scholars think it was so cartoonishly cruel that a politician as skillful as Diocletian would never have allowed it. They conclude that Diocletian must have been too sick to know what was going on as his underlings ran amok.
Whatever the cause, Theodora faced the prospect that if she did not sacrifice, she would be forced into prostitution. Eustratius had probably assumed that the threat would be enough to shock Theodora into doing as she was told. But Theodora wasn’t intimidated.
Now that the threat had been made, Eustratius could not easily take it back. Theodora had called his bluff. I imagine that Eustratius considered his options. Theodora was from an important family. Turning the daughter of a noble into a prostitute was not going to make him any friends. And so Eustratius played for time by feigning generosity. He told Theodora she didn’t need to make a decision in the heat of the moment. She could take three days, go home and think things over.
Eustratius probably thought that three days was plenty of time for Theodora’s family and friends to talk her out of her plan. But the delay had another consequence as well: it turned the trial into a circus. Was this beautiful girl really going to throw her life away? Could anyone value God so highly as to be willing to face this punishment? Pagans watched. Christians prayed. Alexandria held its breath.
After three days Theodora was brought back before Eustratius. Her mind was not changed. And so Eustratius, who was now constrained by the logic of his own decisions, had Theodora arrested and marched off to a brothel. She would be working as a prostitute when it opened that evening.
Theodora had placed her future into God’s hands.
As the evening arrived, a crowd of gawkers were gathered in front of the brothel. We don’t know whether Theodora was able to look out to see them. If she could, she would have seen another group of men milling about, eager to be the first in, waiting for her. There were civilians and soldiers wearing their military cloaks. There was even the plume of an officer’s helmet in the crowd.
And then the time came.
The first man to come into Theodora’s room was the officer. He had swaggered to the front of the line and pushed aside the subordinate soldiers and civilians. Now he swaggered into the room where Theodora was waiting and locked the door behind him.
Theodora was pressed against the far wall when she realized that something was off about the officer. When he took off the helmet it was clear that it didn’t really fit him. He called Theodora sister, and said that he was a brother. He didn’t mean that he was her literal brother. The man meant that he was a brother in Christ. This wasn’t a rape. It was a rescue.
We know almost nothing about the man in the officer’s helmet. The name that has come down to us for him is Didymus, which is the Greek version of the Apostle Thomas’ name. Thomas and Didymus both mean something doubled, a twin. Perhaps our Didymus had a twin brother. Perhaps he was named after Doubting Thomas. The name Didymus was uncommon, but not unknown, so perhaps it has no significance at all.
What we do know is that Didymus was a young man. He was obviously a Christian by the time he arrived in Theodora’s room. We don’t know how long he had been a Christian. It is possible that he was part of the Christian community of Alexandria who were outraged by the treatment of Theodora. It is also possible, however, that Didymus was a pagan Roman soldier who was disgusted by what was happening and decided to do something about it.
Whatever his background, as the story of Theodora unfolded, Didymus felt God calling him to intervene. He had snuck through a military encampment and snatched an officer’s helmet and cloak. He had used them to pull rank and bluff his way into the brothel, demanding to be first in line. Now he took off the cloak and helmet and told Theodora his plan for what was going to happen next.
And so it was that the officer reemerged from the little room where the Christian slave Theodora was being kept. Anyone who was watching would have thought the officer was a little embarrassed by what had just happened. The officer walked out, head down with the red military cloak drawn in close. As the officer was disappearing into the back alleys of Alexandria, an uproar came from the brothel. The next man in line had gone into the room expecting to find Theodora only to find an angry young man waiting in her place. By the time anyone figured out what had happened, the officer was long gone.
From the point of view of the governor Eustratius, things could not possibly have gone worse. He had tried to bluff Theodora into sacrificing to the gods. She had called his bluff and he had been forced to horrify Alexandria with a cruel punishment. The Christians and many pagans were disgusted. And then even that punishment had failed to do what it was supposed to do, thanks to the intervention of a single young man.
Didymus had been taken into custody at the brothel. Now he was called to explain himself to the governor. Didymus said that he was a Christian too. When Eustratius asked where Theodora was hiding, Didymus said that he honestly had no idea. They could torture him, but he simply did not know. However, Didymus told Eustratius, there was one crucial piece of information he had about Theodora. When pressed to say what it was, Didymus replied that he was quite certain that wherever she was, Theodora was a handmaid of God.
The fact that Didymus went out of his way to antagonize the governor shows us that he was under no illusions about his own fate. Didymus was sentenced to die for a whole lot of things at once, for his own refusal to sacrifice, for stealing military supplies, for interfering in the governor’s plans and antagonizing him to boot. Saint Didymus would be executed, one of the martyrs of Alexandria.
And what about Theodora? In some versions of the story, Theodora slips away into the shadows of Alexandria, perhaps joining the network of Christians that tended to spread out through the countryside in such times of persecution. But the way Saint Ambrose tells the story, that is not what happened. In his version, Theodora came to the place where Didymus was being executed to die alongside him. When asked why she had come back, she said that it was gallant of Didymus to protect her chastity. That didn’t mean she was going to let him have her martyr’s crown. The governor had learned his lesson the first time around and sentenced Theodora to be executed immediately. In this version of the story, the Saints Didymus and Theodora die together, on the same day.
There is something strange about the story of Didymus and Theodora. For one thing, it comes as the Roman persecutions of Christians were drawing to a close. The next year, Diocletian would retire to his palace, one of the few Roman emperors to leave the throne while still alive. He would prove just as good at staying out of politics as he had been good at getting into it, telling one envoy who was hoping for his help that the real game was cabbages, and if the envoy could see the monster cabbages Diocletian was growing these days the envoy wouldn’t want to go back to politics either. Without Diocletian’s careful guidance, the world he had built fell apart. The system of two emperors with designated successors failed immediately. Less than ten years after the deaths of Didymus and Theodora, the Christian Emperor Constantine would sit on the throne.
As Europe Christianized, Christians would continue to be puzzled and inspired by the story of the Saints Didymus and Theodora. But what kind of story was it, really? In the 17th century, the French playwright Pierre Corneille would tell it as a tragedy, Theodore. The play was not well received. Maybe part of the problem was that it was not really a tragedy.
But what kind of story, then? Is it a love story? About a hundred years after Corneille, the composer George Frideric Handel presented Theodora as an oratorio.
In Handel’s Theodora, Didymus and Theodora are in love, and Didymus springs into action to save her. Once again, the work was poorly received, perhaps in part because it is missing something in the original tale. Didymus had probably never met Theodora before he came into her room in the brothel. Turning this into a story about romantic love seems to me to miss the heart of the issue.
Fifty years after Handel’s Theodora, the late 18th century poet and author Mary Deverell tried her hand at telling the story, in her very long poem Theodora & Didymus, or, The Exemplification of Pure Love and Vital Religion: An Heroic Poem in Three Cantos. Today the poem seems a little overwrought, even if Deverell has some beautiful turns of phrase, such as when Theodora views upcoming martyrdom as “the vesper of eternity”, last night prayers before the dawning of an endless day. Still, something about the Heroic Poem seems to me to come close to the truth. The story of Saints Didymus and Theodora is a story of heroism. It is the story of a woman of great courage and faith suffering a terrible injustice. And it is the story of a man who saw a great injustice and gave his life to put an end to it. In this way, it is a story of a man who was all that a man should be - a manly saint.
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