Description
St. Artemios was a general in the Imperial Roman Army of the Emperor Constantine the Great. Seeing with Constantine the vision of the Cross, he, too, was converted to belief in Jesus Christ, and was later baptized into the Church. After Constantine united the Roman Empire and founded New Rome at the Straits of the Bosphorus, which connect the Black Sea through the Sea of Marmara with the Mediterranean, St. Artemios brought the relics of St. Andrew and St. Luke to Constantinople. He was later appointed the Governor to Egypt by Constantine’s son Constantius.
Julian the Apostate (331-363), through political intrigue, assumed the rulership of the empire in 355 and attempted to return it to paganism, persecuting with much energy the faithful at that time. Although St. Artemios came to the call of the Emperor to assemble the army in Antioch to fight the Persians, he defended two innocent priests, complaining to the Emperor about this unjust persecution of Christians. For this St. Artemios was stripped of his military rank, flogged, crushed under a great stone, and finally beheaded in 362. St. Artemios is one of the great military saints.