Saints Zenon and Zoilus (also Zeno and Zoilos) are two saints commemorated together by the Orthodox Church on March 3. Almost nothing is recorded of their lives: it is not known when or where they lived, and according to the Byzantine verse Synaxarion they died while living in the world rather than under formal persecution. Their commemoration survives chiefly as a pair of names attached to a liturgical couplet rather than as a developed narrative.
Their names and a couplet composed in their honor were preserved in the Greek Menaion printed in Venice in 1596 and in the Synaxaristis. When the Greek Synaxaria were translated into Slavonic, the pair and their couplet passed into the various Prologs, and from there into the Great Reading Menaion for March and the modern calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church. The couplet reads: "Released from this life, Zenon and Zoilos went forth to a better life."
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Sources and transmission
The earliest cited witness to Saints Zenon and Zoilus is the Byzantine verse Synaxarion (Paris. Coislin. 223), a manuscript dated to 1301 and held in the National Library of France. From the Greek liturgical tradition their commemoration entered the printed Greek Menaion (Venice, 1596) and the Synaxaristis, then crossed into the Slavonic Prologs and the Russian liturgical calendar. The paucity of biographical detail and the survival of the saints essentially through a single couplet are characteristic of the many obscure early commemorations preserved in the Synaxarion tradition.
