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Biography

Short Description

Cyriacus (also Cyriac, Cyriakus, or Ciriaco) is venerated as a Christian deacon and martyr of Rome. No contemporary document records his birth, and the year of his death is known only from later tradition, which places his execution in 303 during the persecution begun by the emperor Diocletian. The earliest substantial narrative is a Latin Passio, generally assigned by scholars to the fifth or sixth century and not treated as a reliable historical source in its details. In that account he appears as a Roman of high rank who converted to Christianity, distributed his property, and was ordained deacon, an ordination sometimes associated in later retellings with Pope Marcellinus. He is described as ministering to Christian slaves and forced laborers employed on the Baths of Diocletian.

The same legendary cycle credits him with two celebrated exorcisms that shaped his later cult. He is said to have delivered Artemisia (Artemia), a daughter of Diocletian, from a demon and thereby to have brought about her conversion, and subsequently to have freed Jobias, daughter of the Sasanian king Shapur, under similar circumstances. After imprisonment and torture he was beheaded, according to the Passio, on the Via Salaria together with companions named Largus and Smaragdus, and in some recensions further martyrs. A priest named John is said to have recovered the bodies and buried them on the Via Ostiense, a location still pointed out in seventh-century Roman itineraries of the martyrs' tombs.

A cemetery and a church of San Ciriaco in Thermis, near the Baths of Diocletian, became the principal Roman foci of his cult. Relics attributed to him were later claimed by a number of churches north of the Alps; the most influential of these translations was to the women's collegiate foundation at Gernrode in Saxony, which made him a prominent saint in medieval Germany. In the later Middle Ages he was numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, a group of intercessors invoked against plague and sudden death. Within that company he was especially called upon in cases of disease of the eyes, of diabolical possession, and of temptation at the hour of death. His feast is observed on 8 August, the date under which the Roman Martyrology commemorates Cyriacus, Largus, Smaragdus, and their companions.

Critical hagiography distinguishes this Roman cult from several other early Christian figures of the same name, including Cyriacus the Anchorite of Palestine, Judas Cyriacus associated with Jerusalem and the finding of the True Cross, and various bishops and martyrs listed in Eastern synaxaria. The historical kernel behind the Roman deacon-martyr cannot be reconstructed with confidence beyond the existence of an early tomb-cult on the Ostian road and a name in the martyrological tradition. No reliable evidence survives concerning a wife or children, and he is not recorded as a member of a later religious order, as pope, or as patriarch.

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