Priest Artemon

According to the hagiographical tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Artemon (also spelled Artémon) was a Christian priest of Laodicea in Syria who was put to death in the Great Persecution under the emperor Diocletian. The Byzantine synaxaria and later Orthodox menologia place his birth at Laodicea in the first half of the third century and describe him as the son of Christian parents, raised in piety from childhood. No contemporary civil or ecclesiastical document naming this priest is known to survive; the narrative of his career and passion is known only from liturgical lives of late antique and medieval date. Those lives mix a plausible picture of long clerical service in a Syrian city with miracle episodes that belong to the conventional repertoire of martyr acts. He is not to be confused with Saint Artemon of Seleucia in Pisidia, a bishop associated in legend with the Apostle Paul, nor with the third-century Roman Adoptionist teacher also called Artemon.

The traditional Life states that he served the church of Laodicea for many decades in successive orders: as a reader for sixteen years, then as a deacon for twenty-eight years after ordination by Bishop Sisinnius of Laodicea, and finally as a priest for thirty-three years. In the priesthood he is said to have preached among pagans as well as to have cared for the local Christian community. By the time imperial edicts against the Church were enforced in the region, the sources already depict him as an old man. When a military commander named Patricius (the name varies slightly in the manuscripts) arrived to compel sacrifice to the gods, Bishop Sisinnius, the priest Artemon, and other Christians are said to have entered the temple of Artemis at Laodicea, smashed the cult images, and wrecked the shrine. Whether or not that episode is historical, it is the narrative explanation given for their arrest.

The same accounts relate that Bishop Sisinnius was beheaded, while Artemon was held and later taken by the governor in the direction of Caesarea. On the road and at the place of interrogation the martyr acts attribute to him a series of wonders: the conversion of soldiers, deliverance from wild beasts, and remaining unharmed in a cauldron of boiling pitch or oil. These motifs are stock features of the genre and cannot be verified historically. The tradition concludes that he was finally executed by the sword. Orthodox sources commonly date the martyrdom to the year 303, in the opening phase of the Diocletianic persecution; the precise place of death is not established with certainty, and no reliable notice of his burial survives.

Artemon is venerated as a hieromartyr, that is, a martyr who belonged to the clergy, in the Orthodox Churches. His principal feast is kept on 13 April. Like other pre-Constantinian martyrs he was not the object of a later formal papal canonization; his name entered the calendar through local cult and the reception of his acts into the liturgical books. No historically secure information survives concerning a spouse, children, a religious order, or later patronages attached to his name. The outline of a long ministry at Laodicea under Bishop Sisinnius, followed by arrest in the Diocletianic persecution, is the core of what the tradition preserves; all further narrative detail remains in the realm of hagiography rather than independently attested history.