The life of St Theophanes the Hymnographer
The Patriarch of Jerusalem sent the two brothers to Constantinople to confront the iconoclast emperor Leo the Armenian over his rejection of the holy icons, and in the years afterward they continued to resist the iconoclast emperors who succeeded him, Michael and then Theophilus.
Theophilus had verses of insult burned into both brothers' foreheads with hot needles, a punishment that gave them the name by which they are still remembered, the Branded. Theodore did not survive the imprisonment that followed; Theophanes lived through his own exile and returned once the veneration of icons was restored, becoming Bishop of Nicaea and serving there until his death in 845. In those years he composed roughly a hundred fifty liturgical canons, among them a hymn written in direct defense of the icons he had suffered to uphold.
He is remembered as a confessor who bore the scars of that defense in his own flesh, and as one of the Church's most fruitful hymnographers.
