Confession and Trial
According to the synaxarion, Anicetus was provoked to open confession when Diocletian set up an implement of execution in the public square of Nicomedia to frighten the city's Christians. Rather than be intimidated, Anicetus denounced the emperor, and this public stand led to his arrest and to that of his nephew Photius.
The accounts of the saints' background differ. One tradition presents Anicetus as a military official of the city; another describes both men as physicians from a wealthy Christian family who practiced medicine without accepting payment or gifts, an 'unmercenary' manner of healing, on account of which Anicetus is numbered among the Holy Unmercenaries.
Tortures and Death
The lives relate a sequence of tortures that the martyrs are said to have survived: lions released against Anicetus are described as becoming gentle, an executioner who attempted a beheading is said to have collapsed, and attempts to break him on a wheel, to burn him, to immerse him in boiling tin, and to drag both men by horses are all recounted as having failed to harm them.
By these accounts the two martyrs, together with many other Christians who were moved by their example and confessed themselves Christians, were finally cast into a great furnace. There the martyrs gave up their spirits, while their bodies — and, the synaxarion adds, even their hair — are said to have remained whole and unharmed by the fire.
Relics and Veneration
By tradition the bodies of Anicetus and Photius were taken in secret by Christians and buried, and in a later time, when Christians could worship freely, a church was built beside their tombs.
Saints Anicetus and Photius are named in the prayers for the Blessing of Oil and the Lesser Blessing of Water, and they are commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on August 12.
Historical Context
The persecution at Nicomedia, the eastern imperial capital, was among the most severe of the Diocletianic period. Its intensity has been linked to fires in the imperial palace in early 303, after which executions of Christians followed; clergy were subject to arrest and execution, and named martyrs of the city from this period include the bishop Anthimus and the palace officials Dorotheus and Gorgonius.
This profile follows the saints' anchor record in dating their martyrdom to about 305 and assigning them to the pre-Nicene era; some external accounts give an earlier date, but the precise year cannot be fixed with certainty from the surviving lives.
