The Pagan Priest’s Son

About this time a young man who was the son of a priest, and had been brought up in ungodliness, came over to the true religion. A lady known for her devotion, who had been admitted to the order of deaconesses, was a close friend of his mother. When he came to visit her with his mother as a tiny boy, she used to welcome him warmly and urge him toward the true religion. After his mother died, the young man used to visit her and enjoyed the benefit of her usual teaching. Deeply moved by her advice, he asked his teacher how he might both escape his father’s superstition and have a share in the truth she preached. She answered that he must flee from his father and honor instead the Creator of both his father and himself. He must look for some other city where he could hide and escape the violence of the ungodly emperor; and she promised to arrange this for him. “Then from now on,” said the young man, “I will come and entrust my soul to you.” [a]

Not many days later Julian came to Daphne to celebrate a public festival. With him came the young man’s father, both because he was a priest and because he usually attended the emperor. And with their father came the young man and his brother, who had been appointed to serve in the temple and given the duty of ceremonially sprinkling the emperor’s food. It is the custom for the festival at Daphne to last seven days. On the first day the young man stood by the emperor’s couch and, as the rite required, sprinkled the food, and so polluted it thoroughly. Then he ran at full speed to Antioch and made his way to that admirable lady. “I have come to you,” he said, “and I have kept my promise. Now see to the salvation of each of us, and keep your word.” At once she got up and took the young man to Meletius, the man of God, who told him to stay upstairs in the lodging for a while. His father searched all over Daphne for the boy, then went back to the city and combed its streets and lanes, looking in every direction and longing to find his son. At last he came to the place where the divine Meletius was lodging. Looking up, he saw his son peeping out through the lattice. He ran up, dragged him out, got him down, and carried him off home. There he first beat him with many blows; then he put hot spits to his feet and hands and back; then he shut him up in his bedroom, bolted the door from the outside, and went back to Daphne.

So I have heard the man himself tell it in his old age. He added that he was inspired and filled with divine grace, and smashed all his father’s idols and mocked how helpless they were. Afterward, when he thought about what he had done, he was afraid of his father’s return. He begged Christ his Master to give his approval to what he had done, to break the bolts and open the doors. “For it is for your sake,” he said, “that I have suffered this and done this.” “Even as I was speaking,” he told me, “out fell the bolts and the doors flew open, and I ran back to my teacher. She dressed me in women’s clothes and took me with her in her covered carriage back to the divine Meletius. He handed me over to the bishop of Jerusalem, who at that time was Cyril, and we set out by night for Palestine.” After Julian’s death this young man led his father too into the way of truth. He told me this along with the rest. In this way these men were guided to the knowledge of God and were made sharers in salvation.