The life of St Eusignius of Antioch
He is remembered as a companion of the martyr Basiliscus, whose death he witnessed and later described, and as an eyewitness, in his younger years under Constantine, to the sign of the Cross that appeared in the sky before that emperor's victory. In old age Eusignius retired from the army and returned home to Antioch, where he lived quietly in prayer and fasting through the reigns that followed.
He lived on into the reign of Julian the Apostate, who sought to turn the empire back to the old gods. A man Eusignius had ruled against in a dispute, resentful of the judgment, denounced him to the emperor as a Christian, and Eusignius, remembered by the Church as by then well past a hundred years old, was brought before Julian himself. He spoke without fear, rebuking the emperor for abandoning the faith of his own kinsman Constantine and recounting again what he had seen in the sky decades before. Julian, unmoved by his age, ordered him beheaded in the year 362, and Eusignius is remembered as one of the last martyrs of that final pagan reaction against the Church.
