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The names of the Holy Maccabees are Abim, Anthony, Guria, Eleazar, Eusebona,
Achim, and Marcellus. They were Jews by race and exact keepers of the
Laws of the Fathers. They lived during the reign of Antiochus, who
was surnamed Epiphanes ("Illustrious"), the King of Syria and an implacable enemy of the Jews. Having subjugated their
whole nation and done many evil things to them, not sparing to assail
the most sacred matters of their Faith, he constrained them, among
other things, to partake of swine's flesh, which was forbidden by the
Law. Then these pious youths, on being apprehended together with their
mother and their teacher, were constrained to set at nought the Law,
and were subjected to unspeakable tortures: wrackings, the breaking
of their bones, the flaying of their flesh, fire, dismemberment, and
such things as only a tyrant's mind and a bestial soul is able to contrive.
But when they had endured all things courageously and showed in deed
that the mind is sovereign over the passions and is able to conquer
them if it so desires, they gloriously ended their lives in torments,
surrendering their life for the sake of the observance of the divine Law. The first to die was their teacher Eleazar, then all the brethren
in the order of their age. As for their wondrous mother Solomone, "filled with a courageous spirit, and stirring up her womanish thoughts with a
manly wrath" (II Macc. 7:21), she was present at her children's triumph over the tyrant,
strengthening them in their struggle for the sake of their Faith, and
enduring stout-heartedly their sufferings for the sake of their hope
in the Lord. After her last and youngest son had been perfected in
martyrdom, when she was about to be seized to be put to death, she
cast herself into the fire that they might not touch her, and was thus
deemed worthy of a blessed end together with her sons, in the year
168 before Christ.
Kontakion in the Second Tone:
The Wisdom of God's own seven pillars are ye all, a seven-branched lamp that
shineth with the Light Divine, ye Great Martyrs that were before the Martyrs,
O all-wise Maccabees, with them pray ye the God of all that we who now sing
your praises may be saved.
Source: http://www.goarch.org
Read lives of other Saints - https://www.truechristianity.info/en/saints_en.php
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