Notes
1. Réginald Grégoire’s Manuale di agiologia: introduzione alla letteratura agiographica (Fabriano: Monastero San Silvestro Abate, 1987), with a subchapter entitled “L’itinerario delle tipologie” (pp. 249–303), provides a general overview of the subject. See also Henri Crouzel, “L’Imitation et la ‘suite’ de Dieu et du Christ dans les premiers siècles chrétiens ainsi que leurs sources gréco-romaines et hébraïques,” JAC 21 (1978): 7–41.
2. Evelyne Patlagean, “Ancient Byzantine Hagiography and Social History,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. S. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 105, 106–7.
3. Thdt., HR 26.12. The same figures are mentioned in the Syriac Life of Symeon Stylite 117. Cf. R. M. Price, trans., A History of the Monks of Syria (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1985), p. 174 n. 16. Cf. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “The Sense of a Stylite: Perspectives on Symeon the Elder,” VC 42 (1988): 376–94; and David T. M. Frankfurter, “Stylites and Phallobates: Pillar Religions in Late Antique Syria,” VC 44 (1990): 188.
4. Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1966), p. 19: “Le Christ est le modèle du chrétien; son parfait imitateur est le martyr qui suit dans la voie douloureuse. Cette idée était si familière aux premières générations chrétiennes que toute ressemblance plus étroite avec le Maître soutait immédiatement aux yeux et ne pouvait manquer d’être signalée.” Cf. Etienne Leduer, “Imitation du Christ: II. Tradition Spirituelle,” DS, esp. cols. 1563–67.
5. Martyrdom of Polycarp, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. Herbert Musurillo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 2–21.
6. Athanasius, Life of Antony 47. Shortly before Antony’s death a military commander, recalling the Roman centurion at Jesus’ crucifixion, exclaims, “Truly this was a servant of God” (85). In fact, Athanasius displays some discomfort with the degree to which the Life of Antony adheres to the patterns of the life of Jesus. He stresses that God performs the miracles, not Antony, and makes a point to inform his readers that Antony could not walk on water (59, 60). This form of “antitypology,” of course, serves to highlight the degree to which Antony is modeled on Jesus.
7. Han Drijvers has pointed to the significance of the Syrian holy man, particularly the anonymous Man of God of Edessa, as an alter Christus. See Han J. W. Drijvers, “Hellenistic and Oriental Origins,” in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel (San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1983), pp. 26–28, and “Die Legende des heiligen Alexius und der Typus des Gottesmannes in syrischen Christentum,” in Typus, Symbol, Allegorie bei den östlichen Vätern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter, ed. Margot Schmidt and Carl Friedrich Geyer (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982), pp. 187–217.
8. A similar point is made eloquently with regard to Athanasius’s Life of Antony by Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh (Early Arianism—A View of Salvation [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981], pp. 131–59).
9. Alexander Y. Syrkin, “On the Behavior of the ‘Fool for Christ’s Sake,’ ” History of Religions 22 (1982): 165. Such parallels are also noted by Lennart Rydén (Bermerkungen zum Leben des heiligen Narren Symeon von Leontios von Neapolis [Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell, 1970], passim).
10. Syrkin does not discuss Leontius’s intentions in constructing such parallels.
11. This impossible feat of riding two beasts at once is the result of the author’s attempt to present Jesus’ activities as a very literal fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9; in Mark 11 and Luke 19 he rides only a colt, while John 12 has him riding on an ass’s colt.
12. Other scholars have noted some of these parallels in passing. Rydén (Bemerkungen, pp. 89–90) associated Symeon’s entry with his dead dog with Jesus’ riding on his ass. (Cf. Syrkin, “The ‘Fool for Christ’s Sake,’ ” p. 165; Ewald Kislinger, “Symeon Salos’ Hund,” JöB 38 [1988]: 165.) Festugière briefly entertained the notion that Symeon was imitating Christ in overturning the tables, but rejected the possibility, arguing that Symeon acted in this way, “Plus probablement parce qu’on le bouscule” (Vie de Syméon le Fou, pp. 187–88). Of course, Festugière’s observation (which is motivated by a desire to recover a historical Symeon) should hardly rule out the possibility that Leontius’s Symeon is “imitating” Christ.
13. In the account of her travels, the Spanish pilgrim Egeria (Itinerarium 31.2; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land [London: S.P.C.K., 1971], p. 133), writing in the 380s, describes the celebration of Palm Sunday which she observed in Jerusalem. “At five o’clock the passage is read from the Gospel about the children who met the Lord with palm branches, saying, ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.’ ” A similar identification of the children as those who first proclaim Jesus’ identity is found in the early-sixth-century kontakion of Romanus the Melodist, Eis ta Baia, written for Palm Sunday, still used today in the Orthodox Church:
In Heaven on Thy throne; on earth carried on an ass, O Christ, God,
Receive the praise of the angels and the song of the children crying out to Thee:
“Thou art the blessed One who comest to call up Adam.”
. . . . . . . . . .
Since Thou hast conquered Hades and put to death Death, and resurrected the World,
The children, with palm branches shout aloud to Thee, Christ as victor,
And today, they are crying to Thee: “Hosannah to the Son of David.”
The hymn is edited by Helle Kyriakaki in N. B. Tomadakis, Rōmanou tou Melōdou Hymnoi, vol. 3.2 (Athens: Typographeion Mēna Myrtidē, 1957), pp. 179–206; English translation by Marjorie Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist I: On the Person of Christ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970), p. 159. For an excellent study of this kontakion see E. Catafygiotu-Topping, “Romanos, On the Entry into Jerusalem: A Basilikos Logos,” Byzantion 47 (1977): 65–91. The children’s acclamation of Jesus also figures prominently in the dramatic homily for Palm Sunday attributed to Eulogius (PG 86/2.2913–2937), Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria from 580 to 607.
14. Symeon appears to apply the wrong cure in the second instance as well, but the double attempt at healing mirrors the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida in Mark 8. In addition to the parallel to Jesus, the episode with the man with leucoma bears a resemblance to the story of how Elisha cured the leprosy of Naaman the Syrian (2 Kgs 5). In both stories when the victim is told to wash he becomes angry because he was not cured immediately. Only later does he wash as he had been instructed and become cured.
15. Loaves and fishes: Mk 6:30–44 and parallels; Mk 8:10ff. and parallels; Jn 6:1–13. Wine: Jn 2:1–11. Like Jesus in the gospels, Symeon performs not one miraculous feeding but two. Leontius has mimicked the doublet of feedings in Matthew and Mark (Mt 14:13–21, 15:32–38; Mk 6:32–44, 8:1–10). The first instance of miraculous feeding is played straight enough. An Emesan merchant on pilgrimage to Jerusalem meets Symeon’s companion, Abba John, in the desert and requests his blessing. Welcoming the merchant into his cave, John sets before him a table of fish, bread, and wine, the very things which Jesus feeds to the multitudes. When the merchant returns to Emesa, Symeon sets precisely the same table before him (p. 159).
16. These passages have a further biblical parallel in the account of Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, who is struck dumb and is unable to speak about the things the angel has revealed to him concerning his son “until the day that these things come to pass” (Lk 1:20).
17. Leontius relates of Symeon, “Symeon had extraordinary compassion for those possessed by demons, so that from time to time he went off to make himself like one of them, and passed his time with them, healing many of them through his own prayer, and therefore some demoniacs cried out and said, “O violence, Fool, you jeer at the whole world. Have you also come near us to give us trouble? Retreat from here; you are not one of us” ” (p. 162; cf. pp. 152, 156. Cf. Mk 1:34, 3:11).
18. On the dichotomy between desert and city in ascetic literature see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 213–24; James Goehring, “The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt,” JECS 1 (1993): 281–96; Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 80. Nevertheless, much ascetic literature points out that the laity are as acceptable to God as monks. Cf. Price, History of the Monks of Syria, p. xxvi, and the story of Patermuthius in HME 10.
19. For specific statements in these texts see Athanasius, Life of Antony 8 and 14; Palladius, LH 66.2; HME, Prologue 2.10–11. Cf. Browning, “The ‘Low Level’ Saint’s Life in the Early Byzantine World,” in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel (San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1983), p. 118; and Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” JRS 61 (1971): 80–101. Robert Markus (The End of Ancient Christianity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], pp. 157–211) has suggested that in the West the initial fourth- and early-fifth-century movement away from the cities is reversed with an “ascetic invasion” of the city in subsequent decades. Such a trend is also observed in the East, although over a much longer period of time.
20. Cf. Syrkin, “The ‘Fool for Christ’s Sake,’ ” p. 165. In Byzantium, Jesus was held to have died at thirty. Cf. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on the Nativity 4, l. 157; trans. Kathleen E. McVey (New York: Paulist, 1989), p. 101.
21. On this point see John Haldon, “Some Considerations on Byzantine Society and Economy in the Seventh Century,” Byzantinische Forschungen 10 (1985): 77–78.
22. Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance 4e–7e siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1977), pp. 36–53, 101–2; Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 160–64; cf. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 810–11; Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 12; Brown, “The Problem of Miraculous Feeding in the Graeco-Roman World,” in Center for Hermeneutical Studies: Colloquy 42 (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1982), pp. 16–24.
23. Haldon, “Some Considerations,” p. 78; Hugh Kennedy, “The Last Century of Byzantine Syria: A Reinterpretation,” Byzantinische Forschungen 10 (1985): 141–83. On the other hand see Mark Whittow, “Ruling the Late Roman and Early Byzantine City: A Continuous History,” Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 24–25. Unfortunately Whittow’s argument for economic prosperity in the sixth century depends on the evidence of hagiographical texts which he dates to the periods they purport to describe rather than the periods in which they were produced. For example, he uses the Life of Symeon to argue for the economic vibrance of Syria during the reign of Justinian rather than for Cyprus in the mid-seventh century.
24. Origen, Commentary on John 16; English trans. ANF 10.393–94.
25. On evidence for these communities, see chapter 1.
26. See A. Sharf, “Byzantine Jewry in the Seventh Century,” BZ 48 (1955): 103–15. Carl Laga (“Judaism and the Jews in Maximus Confessor’s Works: Theoretical Controversy and Practical Attitude,” Byzantinoslavica 51 [1990]: 178–183) has recently pointed out that this passage suggests that in the “social view of the common man,” Jews were “simply part of the picture.” Leontius neither concerns himself with the Jew’s legal status, nor presents him in an “exclusive or specialized economic activity,” nor characterizes him as dressed in any distinctive way. Laga, however, uses this episode to argue against an atmosphere of anti-Judaism during the reign of Justinian. Laga attempts to contrast the Life of Symeon with texts produced during the reign of Heraclius reflecting the legislation of forced baptism of Jews between 630 and 632, including the Doctrina Jacobi, written in 634. A correct dating of the evidence of the Life of Symeon to the 640s would require a modification in Laga’s arguments.
27. The most striking example of this attitude is found in Procopius, Anecdota 17.5–6, where the prostitutes whom Theodora forces to live in a convent overlooking the Bosphorus hurl themselves over the cliff in order to escape the “unwilling transformation.” In Leontius’s Life of John the Almsgiver, Vitalius’s ability to convert a prostitute also attests to his sanctity (Life of John 38). Consider also the story of Sarapion and the harlot in Anan-Isho, Paradise of the Fathers 31. In the same vein, stories which focus on the sanctity of the reformed harlot regard her abandoning of her sinful ways as a testimony to her holiness. Consider the legends of Thaïs, Mary of Egypt, and Pelagia recently discussed by Harvey in her essay “Women in Early Byzantine Hagiography: Reversing the Story,” in That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity, ed. Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elisabeth W. Sommer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), pp. 46–48.
28. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of a Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 155–70.
29. Cf. Athanasius, Incarn. 54.