Martyr Agapius and his Companions at Caesarea

Agapius was a Christian young man of Gaza in the early fourth century, one of seven companions — Plisius, Romulus, Timolaus, Dionysius, two named Alexander, and one Agapius (or, by some manuscripts, eight in total) — who together came down from their inland city to Caesarea in Palestine in the year 303 to give themselves up for the imperial confession when they heard that Christians were being brought before the governor Urbanus there for examination.

The young men — each in his early twenties, several of them brothers — were arrested at the public tribunal, examined in turn over the course of several days, and one by one refused the sacrifice. Urbanus, expecting to break them through the example of one another's deaths, applied a sequence of torments before finally condemning all of them to be thrown to the lions in the Caesarean amphitheater. The lions, by the synaxarion's account, refused to touch them; they were then beheaded together.

Eusebius of Caesarea, who was present in the city at the time, preserves the account of their suffering in his Martyrs of Palestine. Their joint feast falls on March 15.