Martyr Chronides of Alexandria and those with him

The Holy Martyr Chronides of Alexandria is commemorated together with a group of fellow confessors of Christ whom the synaxarion names as Stratonicus, Serapion, Leontius and Seleucus. Chronides, Leontius and Serapion were from Egypt, while their companions came from other parts of the Roman East. They are remembered jointly on September 13 as martyrs who endured fierce torments before being put to death for their faith.

According to the tradition preserved in the synaxarion, Chronides, Leontius and Serapion were bound hand and foot and cast into the sea. Their bodies were afterward carried to the shore by the waves, where Christians recovered them and gave them burial. The other two named companions suffered in different regions: Seleucus came from and was martyred in Galatia, where, after many tortures, he and his wife were thrown to wild beasts; and Stratonicus, from Bithynian Nicomedia, was tortured by order of the local governor and then bound to two bent tree trunks, so that his body was torn in two.

The sources place these martyrdoms in the early Christian centuries, before the Council of Nicaea, during the persecutions of the Roman state. The exact dating is variously given: the synaxarion accounts assign the group to the third century, while another tradition connects their death to the reign of the emperor Licinius around the year 315. The Cloud of Witnesses record follows the pre-Nicene placement and keeps the named martyrs together as a single commemoration.