Vivianus and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste

They were forty soldiers of the Twelfth Legion, the Fulminata, garrisoned at Melitene. The Edict of Milan had guaranteed freedom of worship in 313; Licinius, master of the East, ceased to apply it and set out to force his troops to sacrifice. The forty declared themselves Christians. In March 320 they were taken near Sebaste in Lesser Armenia and exposed naked on a frozen pond through a winter night, with hot baths lit at the edge for any who would recant. One alone dragged himself there, and died in them. A guard named Aglaius, keeping watch on the bank, saw a light above the remaining thirty-nine, declared himself a Christian and stripped to take the empty place: they were forty to the end. In the morning their legs were broken, the bodies burned and the ashes thrown into the river, so that the Christians should have nothing of them. Basil of Caesarea was preaching their feast fifty years later, Gregory of Nyssa devoted two discourses to them, and the empress Pulcheria had their relics recovered at Constantinople. The forty names have come down to us, in lists that differ from one recension to another; Vivianus is among them.