TECLA, saint, martyr. — Venerated above all in antiquity, she had the principal center of her cult at Seleucia, where there was an important sanctuary, a destination for frequent pilgrimages, mentioned by s. Gregorio Nazianzeno (PG 35, 1105) and rebuilt by the emperor Zeno (Evagrius, Hist. eccl., III, 8).
All the Greek and Latin martyrologies include her name under different dates. Churches dedicated to her existed in Constantinople, Rome, and Milan; her image is found in the mosaics of the cufrasian basilica of Parenzo. The historical figure of T., however, is shrouded in legend, which has her born at Iconium. The place of her burial is unknown; it was not, in fact, in the celebrated sanctuary of Seleucia, as can clearly be deduced from the biography of the Saint written in the 5th century by the city’s bishop, Basil. The various recensions of the Passio (BHG, 1710-19; BHL, 8020-25) all derive from the apocryphal Actus Pauli et Teclae (Enc. Catt., IX, 725), rejected as early as the so-called Decretum Gelasianum; its author, a presbyter of Asia, was exposed as a forger and deposed from office (Tertullian, De baptismo, 17).
Derived from the apocrypha, on the other hand, is the episode of Paul's arrest in the presence of T. on a sarcophagus from Marseille (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, p. 166, pl. 16, 3), while the relief on an Egyptian jewel preserved in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin alludes to the Saint's martyrdom, showing T. among the lions and, nearby, Daniel among the same beasts. A wholly unique representation of T. was executed on a Coptic stele in the Cairo Museum: the virgin is shown in the attitude of an orans, clothed only in a loincloth (H. Leclercq, V. Thècle, in DACL, XV, cols. 2225-36). On two ivories, the scene of Paul's preaching in the presence of T. occurs once again. The first, in the British Museum, shows the Apostle reading while seated, while the virgin leans out from the walls; the second, in the Louvre, essentially repeats the preceding one, but in a broader and more complex composition, discussed and variously interpreted by scholars (cf. R. Schlumberger, in Monuments Plot, 1 (1894), p. 165; id., in Mél. d'Arch. Byz., 1895, p. 193). On some ampullae (4th–5th centuries) of red clay, now in the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt, T. is associated with the martyrdom of S. Menna among the wild beasts (C. M. Kaufmann, La découverte des sanct. de Ménus dans le désert de Maréotis, Alexandria 1908, p. 71, fig. 67; id., Zur Ikonogr. der Menus-Ampullen, Cairo 1910, pp. 139-41 and passim, fig. 85).
In Rome, a small cemetery on the Via Ostiense bears the name of T.; but this concerns another saint buried a short distance from Paul's tomb, to whom the above-ground building, now vanished, was dedicated. It is mentioned by the Itineraries and was explored by M. Armellini in 1870; it comprises the historic crypt, « in qua corpus eius quiescit », and a short series of regularly excavated galleries. The inscriptions are extremely scarce, as are the paintings, found in two arcosolia: one with figures of Moses, Daniel, Jonah, an orans among saints, a Good Shepherd, the Savior with the book of the Gospels, and Abraham displaying the Lamb as a symbol of the divine sacrifice; the other, discovered recently and whose fragments are now in the Sacred Museum of the Vatican Library, with a debated representation in which episodes from the legend of T. of Iconium seem to be depicted. From the same cemetery comes the Lateran sculpture representing the deceased Marcus, seated in a cathedra with an olive branch in his hand.