St. Ædesius, Martyr


HE was brother to St. Apian, who received his crown at Cæsarea, on the 2d of April, and a native of Lycia, had been a professed philosopher, and continued to wear the cloak after his conversion to the faith. He was long a scholar of St. Pamphilus at Cæsarea. In the persecution of Galerius Maximianus he often confessed his faith before magistrates, had sanctified several dungeons, and been condemned to the mines in Palestine. Being released from thence, he went into Egypt, but there found the persecution more violent than in Palestine itself, under Hierocles, the most barbarous prefect of Egypt, for Maximinus Daia, Cæsar. This governor had also employed his pen against the faith, presuming to put the sorceries of Apollonius of Tyana upon a level with the miracles of Christ, whom Eusebius confuted by a book entitled, Against Hierocles. Ædesius being at Alexandria, and observing how outrageously the judge proceeded against the Christians, by tormenting grave men, and delivering women of singular piety, and even virgins, to the infamous purchasers of slaves, he boldly presented himself before this savage monster, rather than a man, and reproached him with his crying inhumanity, especially in exposing holy virgins to lewdness. He endured courageously the scourge, and the greatest torments which the rage of such a tyrant was capable of inventing, and was at length cast into the sea, in 306, after the same manner as his brother, who obtained his crown a little while before, as the Chaldaic acts expressly inform us, though Henschenius is of the contrary opinion. See Eusebius on the martyrs of Palestine, ch. 5, and the martyr’s Chaldaic acts in Assemani, t. 2. p. 195.	1

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