The earliest, and the only apostolic-period, notice of Hermione is in the twenty-first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Saint Luke is travelling with Saint Paul on the journey up to Jerusalem that will end with the Apostle's arrest. They put in at Caesarea on the coast of Judaea and are lodged for some days in the house of one of the Seven appointed by the apostles to wait on tables, Philip the Evangelist. The verse reads, in the wording of the Authorized Version: 'And the next day we that were of Paul's company departed, and came unto Caesarea: and we entered into the house of Philip the evangelist, which was one of the seven; and abode with him. And the same man had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy.'

Saint Luke names neither the daughters nor the gift of prophecy that came upon them, beyond the bare fact; the giving of names is the work of the later witness, of Polycrates of Ephesus and of the Synaxarion that depends on him.

Late in the second century, when the calendar of Pascha was disputed between the churches of Asia Minor and the church of Rome, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, wrote a letter to Pope Victor in which he listed the great lights of Asia whose tradition he claimed. Eusebius, three generations later, preserved the letter in two places of his Ecclesiastical History. Polycrates names, among the lights, Philip and his daughters. The wording, in the Greek of Polycrates as McGiffert renders it in English: 'Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis; and his two daughters, who grew old in virginity, and his third daughter, who, having lived in the Holy Spirit, rests at Ephesus.'

The witness is sober. It says only what it says: three of Philip's daughters were known to the church of Asia Minor in the time of Polycrates; two had spent their lives as consecrated virgins at Hierapolis, where the father was also buried; the third had 'lived in the Holy Spirit' and was buried at Ephesus, the see Polycrates himself occupied. Polycrates says nothing of a fourth daughter, nothing of martyrdom, nothing of the names of any of them.

An old difficulty stands at the head of every modern account: which Philip is intended? Polycrates calls his Philip 'one of the twelve apostles,' i.e. Philip of the Twelve, who appears in the Gospels among the disciples of the Lord (Matt. 10:3; John 1:43-48; John 14:8-9). Saint Luke in Acts calls the father of the four daughters 'Philip the evangelist, which was one of the seven,' i.e. Philip the Deacon, one of the Seven appointed in Acts 6. The two Philips are clearly distinguished in Acts; whether Polycrates's church at the end of the second century had collapsed the memory of them into one figure has been debated since at least the time of Eusebius himself, who notes the difficulty in passing.

The Orthodox calendars have taken different paths on this question. The Russian Menaion under September 4 names the holy virgin-martyr Hermione as the daughter of Philip the Deacon, that is, of the Philip of Acts; this is the identification observed at Purify. The Greek Synaxarion records the same commemoration but without making the choice explicit. The Western Roman martyrology, perhaps following Eusebius's wording more literally, sometimes attaches her to Philip of the Twelve. Our own choice follows the older Acts identification and is the prudent one; the daughters whom Luke names were prophetesses in their father's house at Caesarea, and the daughters whom Polycrates remembers in Asia Minor are most plausibly the same women, even if Polycrates's later phrase has produced the difficulty.

The Synaxarion of Constantinople, the oldest of the Eastern liturgical menologia, keeps the commemoration of the holy Hermione on the fourth day of September. Its entry is brief: she is named as the daughter of the holy Apostle and Deacon Philip; she is paired with her sister, Eutychia (in some manuscripts spelled Eutychis), as 'virgin daughters of Philip the deacon, who prophesied'; the bare fact of her endurance under persecution is mentioned, and her repose at Ephesus is recorded. The Synaxarion gives no death year, no manner of death, and no narrative.

A much fuller account survives in the Byzantine-period Passion known as the Acts of Hermione, a hagiographical narrative of unknown date but plainly of the seventh century or later, in which the holy virgin is brought before the emperor Trajan, is examined and tortured, is preserved miraculously through a boiling cauldron of pitch, and is at last beheaded; some recensions report instead that she was preserved through every torture and at length fell asleep peacefully in Ephesus. The Passion belongs to the genre of later expansion of the bare synaxarion entry into devotional narrative; the Orthodox tradition has received it without insisting that every detail in it be reckoned as a chronicler's record. The present life follows the older sources and stops here.