Philemon (Greek Philēmōn, 'affectionate') and his wife Apphia (Greek Apphia, perhaps from a Phrygian original) were wealthy Christians of Colossae — a small Phrygian town in the upper Lycus Valley of Asia Minor, west of the larger Christian centre of Laodicea. Philemon owned the substantial slave-staffed estate at which the runaway slave Onesimus (see his entry above) had been a household servant; Paul's Epistle to Philemon is addressed jointly to Philemon, to Apphia his wife, and to Archippus (probably their son, possibly the local deacon-presbyter of the Colossian house church).
The couple hosted 'the church that meets in your house' (Philemon 1:2) — one of the earliest documented house churches of the Asia Minor mission. They had been converted by Paul (Philemon 1:19), almost certainly during Paul's Ephesian mission of AD 52–55 (Colossae was a relatively short journey east from Ephesus through the Phrygian highland route).
Tradition holds — preserved in the Byzantine menologia — that Philemon and Apphia and their household were martyred at Colossae during the persecution under Nero, killed for their refusal to participate in pagan worship of the Phrygian Cybele cult. They are venerated jointly with Onesimus and Archippus in the November 22 Byzantine Synaxis of the Companions of the Pauline Epistle.