May 11 is the feast date in the Orthodox confession* of Saint Mocius or Mucius, Hieromartyr of Amphipolis, Macedonia.
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A hieromartyr is someone who was clergy when he died for the faith; Mocius, as a Christian presbyter, rallied his flock against a public festival for the wine-god Bacchus, allegedly destroying an icon of that hedonic deity.
Since this occurred during the anti-Christian crackdown under the Emperor Diocletian, Mocius got what what was coming to him from this behavior although not until they were able to take him to Byzantium for beheading: attempts to punish him by fire and by throwing him to wild animals were divinely interdicted.
He’s not to be confused with the quasi-mythical Gaius Mucius Scaevola, a hero of Rome’s Etruscan Wars whose legendary steel in the face of execution in the Etruscan camp — “Watch so that you know how cheap the body is to men who have their eye on great glory,” he declared as he thrust his right hand into a brazier without flinching in pain — led his astonished enemies to release him instead. “Scaevola”, meaning “lefty”, is the honorary cognomen his countrymen bestowed upon him thereafter; the feat has inspired later harm-seeking imitators ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Friedrich Nietzsche to Paul Atreides.
* Catholics mark the feast on May 13.
On this day..
- 2012: Zhang Jianfei, job-seeker
- 1748: Arthur Gray and William Rowland, Hawkhurst Gang smugglers
- 1528: Eitelhans Langenmantel, Thomas Jefferson ancestor
- Corpses Strewn: New York's slave conspiracy of 1741
- 1741: Caesar and Prince, leaders of a plot to burn New York?
- 1915: Basanta Kumar Biswas, bomber
- 1928: Clarence "Buck" Kelly, testicle donor
- 1858: William and Daniel Cormack, for murdering John Ellis
- 1958: Khosrow Roozbeh
- 1744: Jan, of Johonnes Van Houten
- 1939: Evgeny Miller, White Russian
- 1891: The Namoa pirates
- 1685: Margaret McLachlan and Margaret Wilson, the Solway Martyrs