The Martyrdom of Eusebius, Nestabus and Zeno at Gaza

Since I have come this far in my history and have told of the deaths of George and of Theodoritus, I think it right to give some account of the death of the three brothers Eusebius, Nestabus and Zeno. The people of Gaza, burning with rage against them, dragged them out of the house where they had hidden themselves, threw them into prison and beat them. Then they gathered in the theater and shouted loudly against them, declaring that they had committed sacrilege in their temple and had taken advantage of the years before to injure and insult paganism. With these shouts, and by urging one another on to murder the brothers, they worked themselves into a fury; and when they had stirred one another up, as a rioting crowd will, they rushed to the prison. They handled the men very cruelly. The victims were dragged along, sometimes face down and sometimes on their backs, and were torn to pieces on the pavement. I have been told that even women left their distaffs and stabbed them with their weaving spindles, and that the cooks in the markets snatched their boiling pots, foaming with hot water, off their stands and poured them over the victims, or ran them through with spits. When they had torn the flesh from them and crushed their skulls, so that the brains ran out on the ground, they dragged their bodies out of the city and threw them on the place generally used for the carcasses of animals. Then they lit a large fire and burned the bodies, and the remains of the bones that the fire had not consumed they mixed with those of camels and donkeys, so that they could not easily be found. [a]

But they did not stay hidden long. A Christian woman who lived in Gaza, though she was not a native of it, gathered the bones at night at God’s direction. She put them in an earthenware pot and gave them to Zeno, the brothers’ cousin, to keep. God had told her to do this in a dream and had also shown her where the man lived. He was shown to her before she ever saw him, for she had not known Zeno before, and since the persecution had lately been stirred up he had been in hiding. He had come within a little of being seized and put to death by the people of Gaza, but he had made his escape while the people were busy murdering his cousins, and had fled to Anthedon, a seaside town about two and a half miles from Gaza, which was likewise attached to paganism and given over to idolatry. When the people of this town found out that he was a Christian, they beat him terribly on the back with rods and drove him out of the town. He then fled to the harbor of Gaza and hid there, and it was there that the woman found him and gave him the remains. He kept them carefully in his house until the reign of Theodosius, when he was ordained bishop. Then he built a house of prayer outside the city walls, set up an altar there, and laid the bones of the martyrs beside those of Nestor the confessor. Nestor had been on close terms with Zeno’s cousins, and had been seized with them by the people of Gaza, imprisoned and scourged. But those who were dragging him through the city were moved by his good looks, and, struck with pity, they threw him out of the city before he was quite dead. Some people found him and carried him to Zeno’s house, where he died while his cuts and wounds were being dressed. When the people of Gaza began to think over how monstrous their crime had been, they trembled for fear that the emperor would take vengeance on them.

It was reported that the emperor was furious and had decided to punish the city council. But this report was false, and had no foundation except in the fears and guilty consciences of the criminals. Julian, far from showing as much anger against them as he had shown against the Alexandrians over the murder of George, did not even write to rebuke the people of Gaza. On the contrary, he removed the governor of the province from office, kept him under suspicion, and gave out that only his clemency kept the man from being put to death. The crime laid to the governor’s charge was that he had arrested some of the people of Gaza who were said to have started the riot and the murders, and had held them in prison until judgment could be passed on them according to the laws. “For what right had he,” the emperor asked, “to arrest citizens merely for paying back a few Galileans for the wrongs done to them and to their gods?” This, it is said, is how the matter stood. [d]