Lysias asked whether she had a husband, or whether she was a widow?
Theonilla replied: “I have been a widow now for over twenty-three years, and have remained thus single, in order to more zealously serve God with fasting, watching and praying; which God I did not know until after I had renounced the world and the idols.”
Lysias commanded them, in order to disgrace her the more, to shave the hair from her head, put bundles of thorns around her body, and stretch her out between four stakes, then, to beat her over her whole body, and put hot coals upon her, that she might be consumed. When Eulalius, the jailer, and Archelaus, the executioner, had done all this, death ensued, and they said to Lysias: “Sir, she is dead now.” Lysias commanded that her dead body should be sewed up in a leathern bag, and thrown into the water; which was done. Thus did these holy martyrs suffer, under Lysias, the Proconsul of Cilicia, in Aegæa, on the 23d of August, in the second year of Diocletian, when he was Burgomaster with Aristobulus, A. D. 285. These acts have for the most part been taken from the records of the clerk of the criminal court of the city of Aegæa, and were gathered by the ancient Christians. These court documents were called Acta Proconsularia. Compare this with A. Mell., 1st book, fol. 92, col. 3, 4, and fol. 93, col. 1.
ZENOBIUS AND HIS SISTER ZENOBIA, BEHEADED AFTER MANY TORMENTS, FOR THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS CHRIST, AT AEGÆA IN CILICIA, A. D. 285.
Not long afterwards, under the same Emperor and Proconsul, and in the same year, Zenobius, Bishop of the church of Aegæa in Cilicia, and his sister, were apprehended; and when there were held out to him on the one hand, great wealth, honor, and position, if, in accordance with the command of the Emperor, he would serve the gods, but on the other hand, manifold torments, Zenobius answered: “I love Jesus Christ more than all the riches and honor of this world. Death and the torments with which you threaten me, I do not consider a disadvantage, but my greatest gain.”
Having received this answer from the martyr, Lysias caused him to be suspended on the rack, and inhumanly tormented on his whole body.
While the executioners were busy with Zenobius, his sister Zenobia, having learned of it, came running, crying with a loud voice: “Thou tyrant, what villainy has my brother committed, that thou dost thus cruelly torment him?”
Having thus addressed Lysias, and set at naught his entreating as well as his threatening words, she, too, was seized by the servants, stripped naked, and stretched out, and roasted beside her brother on a redhot iron bed, or roasting pan. The tyrant, deriding the martyrs, said: “Now let Christ come and help you, seeing you suffer these torments for him.”
Zenobius replied: “See, he is already with us, and cools, with his heavenly dew the flames of fire on our bodies; though thou, surrounded as thou art with the thick darkness of wickedness, canst not perceive it on us.”
Lysias, almost beside himself, commanded that they should be put naked into boiling caldrons. But seeing that the boiling water did not injure them, or, at least, that they could not thereby be made to apostatize, he had them taken out of the city and beheaded. Their dead bodies were buried by Caius and Hermogenes in the nearest cave. This happened A. D. 285, on the 30th day of October; in the city of Aegæa in Cilicia. Idem. Ibidem. ex Actis Zenobii procons. per Metaphorast.