Straton

Straton is numbered among the early Christian martyrs of Nicomedia and is commemorated together with three companions, Philip, Eutychian, and Cyprian. Almost nothing can be established about his family, occupation, clerical or lay status, or the course of his life before his death. The principal witness to his existence and cult is a brief notice in the Roman Martyrology, with corresponding entries in Eastern synaxaria, which place the four men at Nicomedia and state that they were burned to death. No contemporary trial record, imperial rescript naming them, securely identified inscription, or full ancient passion narrative has survived. He therefore belongs to the large class of martyrs of the Diocletianic period whose names were kept in the calendar but whose biographies were never written in detail, or else were lost.

Nicomedia, on the eastern shore of the Propontis in Bithynia, was the principal eastern residence of the emperor Diocletian. It was there, in February 303, that the first edict of the Great Persecution was posted, the cathedral was destroyed, and pressure was applied to Christians in the city and the imperial household to sacrifice. The city consequently furnished many names to the martyrologies, including Bishop Anthimus and the soldier Adrian. The four companions Straton, Philip, Eutychian, and Cyprian are listed among those who suffered in this setting. The Latin martyrological notice records that they were handed over to the fire and completed their martyrdom in the flames. Burning was one of the penalties used against Christians who refused to recant, but the surviving entry does not describe a trial, the wording of any confession, or the precise year within a persecution that lasted, with interruptions, from 303 until the settlement commonly associated with 313.

Later hagiographical collections did not expand this kernel into a developed legend comparable to those of more famous Nicomedian saints. Claims about whether Straton was a native of the city or a visitor, whether he died in 303 or in a later year of the same persecution, and whether the four men were executed on a single occasion therefore remain unverifiable. The grouping of the four names in the calendar suggests that they were remembered as having suffered together, but even that inference goes a little beyond what the terse notice strictly says. His burial place is unknown.

Liturgical veneration is attached to 17 August in the Roman Martyrology, which locates the holy martyrs Straton, Philip, Eutychian, and Cyprian at Nicomedia and records their death by fire. Eastern calendars likewise preserve the four names, sometimes on the same date or on the corresponding date of the Julian calendar. Straton was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type; like other martyrs of the ancient church he was recognized as a saint by reception into the martyrology and by cult. No distinctive patronage of a city, trade, illness, or social group is attached to him in the standard repertoires of patrons.

The historical value of the notice is that it attests a cult of these four names connected with Nicomedia by the time the martyrological tradition was compiled and circulated in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Beyond that cultic fact, the life of Straton cannot be reconstructed. He stands as one of the many otherwise undocumented Christians who died in the eastern imperial capital during the last systematic pagan persecution and who were thereafter commemorated annually in East and West.