Historical Context
The episode is set during the persecution under the emperor Diocletian, conventionally dated to about 302, which places Domnina and her daughters in the early fourth century. According to the tradition, the family fled Antioch and sought refuge in Edessa to escape the pressure of their pagan kin.
Berenice's father and her husband, who were pagans, took the women from their refuge toward Hieropolis in Syria. The soldiers escorting them stopped to rest and to drink wine, and the women used the interval to escape their guards. To avoid capture and violation, they went down to a river that flowed nearby and drowned themselves in its current.
Sources and Transmission
The memory of the three women rests on early patristic testimony. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Church History (Book VIII, chapter 12), recounts the death of a holy woman of Antioch and her two daughters who, warned that they would face sexual assault, asked their guards for a little time apart, arranged their garments, stepped aside from the road, and cast themselves into a river flowing by. Eusebius does not give their names, but later patristic tradition identifies them as Domnina, Vernike, and Prosdoce.
Saint John Chrysostom devoted a homily to them, preserved in the Patrologia Graeca (volume 50, columns 629-640). In his account Domnina stood in the middle of the river and drew her daughters under the water with her, fearing that the soldiers would rape them; he praises her courage in protecting her daughters and the daughters' willing obedience. A homily by Eusebius of Emesa is also counted among the ancient sources for their lives. A verse in the Byzantine Synaxarium marks their death poetically, describing the three maidens as washed in the current of the river, heedless of their lives.
