Zenobius and his Sister Zenobia, in the Year 285

Not long after, under the same Emperor and Proconsul, in the same year, Zenobius, bishop of the church of Aegaea in Cilicia, and his sister were seized. On the one hand he was offered great wealth, honor, and position if he would serve the gods as the Emperor commanded; on the other, many torments. Zenobius answered: [n224-1] "I love Jesus Christ more than all the riches and honor of this world. Death and the torments with which you threaten me I do not consider a loss, but my greatest gain."

When Lysias received this answer from the martyr, he had him suspended on the rack and inhumanly tormented over his whole body.

While the executioners were busy with Zenobius, his sister Zenobia learned of it and came running, crying out with a loud voice: "You tyrant, what villainy has my brother committed, that you torment him so cruelly?"

Having spoken so to Lysias, and paying no heed to his pleading or his threatening words, she too was seized by the servants, stripped naked, stretched out, and roasted beside her brother on a red-hot iron bed, or roasting pan. The tyrant, mocking the martyrs, said: "Now let Christ come and help you, since you suffer these torments for Him."

Zenobius replied: "See, He is already with us, and cools with His heavenly dew the flames of fire on our bodies; though you, surrounded as you are with the thick darkness of wickedness, cannot see it upon us."

Lysias, almost beside himself, ordered that they be put naked into boiling caldrons. But seeing that the boiling water did not injure them, or at least that they could not by this be made to renounce their faith, he had them taken out of the city and beheaded. Their dead bodies were buried by Caius and Hermogenes in the nearest cave. This happened in the year 285, on the 30th day of October, in the city of Aegaea in Cilicia. The same author, in the same place, from the proconsular Acts of Zenobius, by Metaphrastes. [n224-2]