Sosthenes was born at Chalcedon in Bithynia, the city on the Asian shore opposite Byzantium, and he grew to manhood in the ranks of the imperial army. Tradition remembers him as a soldier under the Augustus Maximian, a man who won many victories for the empire and whose courage was never in doubt. He had seen the Christians hunted in the persecutions that ran from the days of Decius to those of Diocletian, and for a long time the blood of the martyrs meant nothing to him except the routine of obedience.
His conversion came not through argument but through the sight of a woman's fidelity. The virgin Euphemia of Chalcedon had been arrested and tormented for the name of Christ, and Sosthenes received the order to put her to death. Standing near enough to hear her prayers and to watch how she bore her agonies, he understood that a strength greater than the empire's was at work in her. Grace pierced him; and when the moment came he refused to obey. He would not lift his hand against the servant of God, and he declared himself a Christian before the very men whose orders he had carried out.
He was arrested at once. Priscus, the proconsul of Bithynia, knew the value of a proven soldier and tried first to buy him back, promising riches, favor and advancement if he would only abjure the faith he had just embraced. Sosthenes, who had counted the cost before he spoke, would not be purchased. When flattery failed, the proconsul turned to violence and had him tortured, but the same constancy he had admired in Euphemia was now given to him, and no pain could wring an apostasy from his lips.
Condemned to be torn apart by the wild beasts in the arena, he was, tradition relates, left untouched: the animals would not harm the man who belonged to Christ. Beaten but not conquered, the judge sentenced him at last to the flames. Sosthenes went to the fire in company with another Christian of Chalcedon, Saint Victor, and the two gave up their lives together in the ancient persecutions, their deaths placed by the tradition in the age of the imperial edicts against the Church. So the man who had once been sent to kill a martyr was crowned a martyr himself.
The Church of the East and of the West alike kept his memory, and his feast is observed on 10 September. He was numbered among the saints in the age before the formal canonical process, by the immemorial veneration of the faithful. His relics, together with those of Saint Euphemia, who had won him, and of Saint Victor, who died beside him, are preserved in the Basilica of Sant'Eufemia at Piacenza in Italy, where the three companions of one crown are honored side by side; his name is likewise held in devotion in Sicily, at Mili San Pietro near Messina.
The life of Sosthenes preaches that no heart is beyond the reach of God's mercy. He had been an instrument of persecution, and he became a witness; he had served an emperor, and he learned to serve the King of Martyrs; he had wielded the sword, and he chose to receive the fire rather than betray the truth he had seen shining in a young woman's endurance. His example teaches that the courage of one suffering Christian can convert the very executioner, and that a single act of refusal, made for God's sake, can redeem a whole past.
May Saint Sosthenes of Chalcedon obtain for us the grace to refuse, courageously and at whatever cost, whatever we know to be against God, and to bear witness today by one act of unhesitating fidelity.
