Historical Context
The martyrdoms fall within the Diocletianic (Great) Persecution, the last and most severe imperial campaign against Christians. In the eastern provinces the persecution continued under Galerius and Maximinus Daia from 305 to 311. In Palestine it was enforced by the governor Firmilian (Firmilianus), whose measures included mutilation and condemnation to forced labor in mines.
Many Christians were deported to the copper mines of Phaeno (Pheno) in the Arabah, where they endured harsh conditions, and where executions also took place. Eusebius records in the same context that Silvanus, bishop of the churches about Gaza, was beheaded together with thirty-nine others at the copper mines of Phaeno. The clergy were imprisoned in such numbers during this period that, by the accounts of the persecution, ordinary criminals were displaced to make room for them.
The tradition behind the calendar accounts relates that Nilus led services for persecuted Christians laboring in the Palestinian quarries; when these clandestine gatherings were discovered, the Christian leaders among them were put to death, and the surviving faithful were dispersed to further mines.
The Named Martyrs
Peleus and Nilus are named in both the Orthodox calendar accounts and in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History as Egyptian bishops who suffered death by fire. The presbyter Zeno and the noblemen Patermuthius and Elias are named alongside them in the Orthodox synaxaria for September 17.
The full number of 156 is preserved in the Orthodox commemoration. The named figures are the company's leaders; the remainder are commemorated collectively as part of the same body of martyrs of Palestine.
Sources and Uncertainty
The principal primary-source attestation is Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History, Book VIII, chapter 13, which names Peleus and Nilus among the martyrs by fire. The wider witness to Phaeno comes from Eusebius's work on the martyrs of Palestine and from Athanasius of Alexandria.
At the level of the group as a whole, the company is genuinely obscure: there is no extended biographical record beyond the names, titles, and the circumstances of the persecution. The figure of 156 is associated with the fuller recension of Eusebius's account of the martyrs of Palestine, which preserves a longer list than the shorter version; this specific detail is not independently verifiable from the available English sources, and the profile follows the Orthodox calendar count.
