The life of St Mamas of Caesarea in Cappadocia
As a young man Mamas openly professed Christ under the emperor Aurelian and, refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, was tortured and driven from the city to the mountains, where he lived as a hermit and, tradition says, was fed by the milk of wild deer and goats which he tamed. Soldiers sent to arrest him found him living simply as a shepherd, and he went with them willingly, accompanied, the story holds, by a lion he had befriended. He was thrown to wild beasts, who would not harm him, and finally died of a wound from a trident.
The fullest form of this story, combining an earlier account of Mamas as a shepherd-martyr with a later, separate legend of him as a nobleman's son, was not written down until centuries after his death. What is certain and much older is the martyr's shrine at Caesarea itself, where Basil the Great preached in his honor within a few generations of the fourth century, describing him as a source of healing still sought by the people of the city.
