1. Leontius of Neapolis and Seventh-Century Cyprus

Of the hagiographical writings which survive from Late Antiquity, perhaps none has more potential to amuse and scandalize the reader, ancient or modern, than the Life and Conduct of Abba Symeon Called the Fool for the Sake of Christ, written by Leontius, the bishop of Neapolis on Cyprus (modern Limassol) near the middle of the seventh century.^[1] Pretending to be insane, Symeon the monk walks about naked, eats enormous quantities of beans, and defecates in the streets. Although Leontius was not the first to relate a tale of a Christian saint who pretended to be crazy, the Life of Symeon is the first full-length vita of a holy fool.

Modern scholars considering the Christian saints of the Late Ancient world tend to think of holy people set apart from the rest of humanity by their outstanding virtue, mortifying their flesh in a constant fight against passion and desire. Paradigmatic cases include the legendary ascetic Antony, progressing ever farther into the Egyptian deserts to do battle with the demons, and the Syrian Symeon the Stylite, standing day and night upon a pillar, mediating between God above and humanity below. These figures, together with many other Late Antique saints, embody virtues highly valued in early Christian society. Showing the faithful how they too might achieve holiness, the narration of their extraordinary lives maps a journey away from quotidian cares toward communion with the divine. At the same time, the pursuit of the life of abstinence, of withdrawal from society—anachōrēsis—to live as a hermit in the desert, a solitary on the fringes of society, was not an option for most Late Ancient Christians. Thus, when most of the laity heard of saints, their life was not one to be pursued. Rather hagiography encapsulated the values of society as a whole, clarifying what was important, instructing implicitly how one was to live an ordinary life.

But suppose a saint was not an exemplar, was not a model to be emulated? Reading the lives of Late Ancient saints, we occasionally come across those who challenge our sometimes sanctimonious notions of early Christian piety. That such figures as holy fools were held in high regard by clergy and laity leaves us puzzled. These saints are clearly deviants—outside the structures of society, and more importantly, outside the conventions for fleeing that society.

Reading such works as the Life of Symeon the Fool one wonders whether some Late Ancient Christians sanctified deviance. But why? Moreover, an unmistakable feature of these tales of holy fools is the comedy. Is it possible that early Christians had a sense of humor? And to what use did they put this humor? These stories surely challenge our unexamined conception of Late Ancient Christians as a dour lot.

Ironically the legacy of Leontius’s holy fool has received more attention than the Life itself. For the most part, scholars have seen the significance of the Life of Symeon the Fool in retrospect; its value for understanding Orthodox piety is established by what came later. The Life of Symeon the Fool has received attention in studies of holy folly in the Greek Orthodox, and especially the Russian Orthodox traditions, as well as in Western traditions.^[2] The holy fool tradition can be traced from Symeon to the patron of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square in Moscow and in literary form to the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.^[3] In the West an interest in holy folly can be seen to thrive among the French Jesuits of the seventeenth century.^[4]

Leontius, of course, did not intend to initiate such a trajectory; his work only became part of a “tradition” about three hundred years later when, sometime in the tenth century, the second author of a full-length fool’s vita decided to make extensive use of Leontius’s work in composing the Life of Andrew the Fool.^[5] In fact, it was the Life of Andrew, not the Life of Symeon, which would be so important for Russian culture. Thus, those elements of the Life of Symeon the Fool which are found to have analogues in later sources have received attention while aspects of the work which do not have an afterlife in later Byzantine and Russian sources have been largely ignored. This study corrects this imbalance, seeing the Life of Symeon the Fool not as the beginning of a long, later tradition, but as the product of a Late Antique world, understanding the traditions on which it draws, and interpreting its relationship to texts which had come before.

At the same time, I have not undertaken an exhaustive study of the Life. I have chosen instead to highlight the more distinctive aspects of the Life of Symeon, emphasizing Symeon’s shamelessness, and therefore focusing on the second half of the Life, in which Symeon behaves as a fool, rather than on the first half of the Life, which presents a more conventional portrait of Symeon’s ascetic preparations. Moreover, I have chosen to emphasize the literary and intellectual aspects of the Life. In recent years, much scholarship has been produced on ascetic traditions and practice, while little attention has been paid to the literary models which shaped these traditions.

The approach of this study depends on the idea that the meaning of a particular literary text depends on its context, on its situation in time and space. For this reason I have chosen to flesh out a broad picture of the religious, intellectual, and social environment in which a single work was created. Since the focus of this investigation is Leontius of Neapolis’s Life of Symeon the Fool, a text which we know to have been composed at the end of Late Antiquity on the island of Cyprus, this chapter presents a portrait of Leontius’s Cyprus. The next chapter will take up a number of problems posed by the text, especially the question of which, if any, sources Leontius might have used in his composition of the Life of Symeon. I will suggest that Leontius’s text is loosely based on a brief description of a certain Symeon of Emesa in Evagrius Scholasticus’s Ecclesiastical History, but that the Life of Symeon should be treated as the work of Leontius. Chapters 3 and 4 consider literature with similar themes written before the Life in order to gain a sense of Leontius’s literary environment. The study would be incomplete unless it takes into account its non-Christian precursors. While Leontius’s text can be seen to have precursors in Christian hagiography, it also betrays a strong debt to traditions about Diogenes the Cynic philosopher; chapter 5 therefore traces the reception of traditions about Cynicism in Late Antique Christianity. Chapters 6 and 7 return to the Life of Symeon to establish Leontius’s allusion to Cynicism and his use of biblical types in order to assess their significance for a reading of the text. The appendix to this volume contains the first English translation of Leontius’s Life of Symeon the Fool.

The Life of Symeon and Seventh-century Cyprus

Scholars have reasonably assumed that the Life of Symeon was written after Leontius’s other extant hagiographical work, the Life of John the Almsgiver, which can be dated with some certainty to 641/2.^[6] Moreover, nothing in the Life of Symeon betrays knowledge of Mu‘awiya’s devastating attack on Cyprus in 649 or its effects. On the contrary, Leontius’s relatively sanguine portrayal of urban life assumes prosperity, not crisis. Therefore we can date the Life of Symeon to the period between 642 and 649.^[7]

The fact of the Cypriot provenance of the text in itself justifies a consideration of the world in which it was produced. While the evidence for life on Cyprus in the first half of the seventh century is admittedly limited, the portrait which emerges is of an environment of relative prosperity, cultural diversity, and religious conflict. Despite Leontius’s explanation in the prologue of his Life of John the Almsgiver that he has written in a “prosaic, unadorned, and humble style so that even the unlearned and illiterate will be able to take profit from these words,” both the Life of John and the Life of Symeon betray Leontius’s rhetorical training.^[8] Chapter 6 will show that in the Life of Symeon, Leontius makes sustained allusion to anecdotes about Diogenes of Sinope, a figure prominent in the school exercises common in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. This evidence points toward the availability of formal grammatical and rhetorical schooling on Cyprus and the likelihood that Leontius had received such a formation. As for the separate though related issue of audience, economic conditions were such that Cyprus could indeed have provided an educated readership. At the same time, we should not expect that Leontius wrote with only local readers in mind.

This study treats the Life of Symeon as an integral whole; this is an approach which I feel is not merely expedient, but appropriate. The next chapter addresses questions of earlier versions of the text and hypothesized sources for the narrative. As I shall discuss, Leontius reports that the text we possess is his second edition and that he had wanted to revise his first version of the text. While we can posit some reasons why Leontius might have felt compelled to revise the narrative, it is unlikely that we can distinguish newer material from earlier material with certainty. Furthermore, some scholars have attempted to see a major literary source standing behind the work, a collection of anecdotes about the holy man deriving from Syria in the 560s or so. While we cannot rule out this possibility, I will argue that this solution to various textual problems is not likely. Moreover, even if Leontius did rely on an extensive written source, we must agree that Leontius’s final product represents his choices regarding the presentation of the narrative as a unified text. In a parallel case, New Testament scholars regard the integrity of the Gospel of Matthew while at the same time acknowledging its author’s reliance on at least two extant written sources; these scholars have fruitfully studied the author’s intent, point of view, theological concerns, and literary merit. Thus whether Leontius relied on sources or not, his work merits attention in the form in which he crafted it.

From the outset, this inquiry jettisons the notion that one can gain access to a historical figure named Symeon, a “real” person in Emesa who pretended to be a fool. Such an endeavor confuses the modern purposes of biography and history with those of hagiography in the early Byzantine world. This is not to deny the existence of a man who appeared to be crazy but was regarded in retrospect as a saint; it is merely to stress that the study of the Life of Symeon cannot establish reliable information about him. In ways that will become clear, Leontius constructed his own portrait of such a man when he composed the Life of Symeon, motivated by literary, pedagogical, and ultimately theological concerns. Modern readers must remind themselves that Leontius’s purpose in creating the Life was not to relate “historical truth” as we might now think of it, but rather, in his own words, to “unveil . . . a nourishment which does not perish but which leads our souls to life everlasting” (p. 121).^[9] In creating his narration, Leontius intended not to deceive, but to edify. Ultimately Leontius, like the Symeon about whom he writes, was trying to save souls.

The richly constructed, heavily allusive character of the Life of Symeon makes it impossible to reach a “real” figure behind this powerful text. As a literary work the Life is a fictio, in the sense of “something fashioned.” By remaining agnostic regarding a “historical person,” this study is able to open a window onto the religious imagination of the seventh century. But bracketing claims for historical reference in the account of this holy fool does not diminish the value of the work for the student of history. Recent assessments of the historical value of saints’ lives have pointed this out. In the introduction to their recent volume of translations of Syriac lives of women saints, Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey have written that “variation in historicity does not detract from the worth of these texts as social documents for their period of composition, offering us insight and information on the world from which they come.”^[10] When such works are considered as the literary output of given individuals, produced in a specific time and place, they reveal something of their authors’ hopes and concerns.

Although set in the Syrian city of Emesa during the sixth century, the “Emesa” in the Life of Symeon reveals much about seventh-century Cyprus. Leontius wrote the Life on Cyprus in the 640s, a period for which we have little other information, although a portrait of Cyprus in the preceding decades can be drawn with the help of surviving literary, archeological, and art-historical evidence. The seventh century was a period of tremendous change in the Byzantine empire, and the decades of the 630s and 640s saw much of Byzantium fall into Arab hands. Leontius’s Life of Symeon was composed on the eve of the Arab invasion of Cyprus, after the fall of Symeon’s Emesa (in 635/6) and John the Almsgiver’s Alexandria (641).^[11] The composite image of Cyprus which emerges from the evidence may account for why Cyprus sustained such a level of literary production in an era proverbial for its upheaval, denigrated for its cultural decline, and bemoaned for its paucity of literary sources. The Life in turn reflects certain aspects of social and cultural life on Cyprus at the end of Late Antiquity, particularly the economy of the city and the preservation of Greco-Roman secular culture through traditional systems of education. The Life of Symeon suggests that in many ways, regardless of the state of the rest of Byzantium, seventh-century Cyprus continued to preserve the markers of a Late Antique society.

The seventh century was a decisive period in the slow transformation which, for scholars, marks the vague boundary between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The first half of the century was a time of military upheaval in Byzantium, under threat first from the Persians and then from the Arabs. By the midpoint of the century, Syria, Egypt, and Cyprus were forever severed from the empire. Imperial ideology held that loyalty to the Orthodox Church meant loyalty to the emperor. The Emperor Heraclius’s attempts to forge a unity between Chalcedonians, who held that Christ was of two natures, divine and human, and Monophysites, who held that Christ was of a single nature which was both divine and human, were also attempts to hold together an ethnically and linguistically diverse empire in the face of external threats.^[12] The desire for religious conformity is also reflected in Heraclius’s decree of 634 demanding the baptism of Jews.^[13] The Life of Symeon reflects several of these tensions.

The Urban Context

Unlike much of the classic hagiography of the preceding centuries which celebrates withdrawal to the desert, the Life of Symeon is above all an urban saint’s life, exploring the potential for sanctity within the city. Debate continues over the fortunes of cities in the course of the seventh century. However, it is generally agreed that, on the whole, the cities and towns of the Byzantine empire experienced a decline beginning in the second half of the sixth century and continuing through the seventh. Many factors contributed, including natural disasters, famines, plagues, and war. Despite regional variation, the overall trend was toward the eclipse of the Late Roman polis. During the late sixth century structures of taxation and government gradually evolved, with administrative power taken increasingly away from local authorities and concentrated in a centralized imperial government. Moreover, beginning with the Persian wars during the reign of Heraclius, towns lost their role as economic centers and tended to function more as military fortifications.^[14] Literary evidence from the period suggests that the Byzantines themselves perceived that their society was in crisis.^[15]

Did this general decline interrupt Late Roman modes of life on Cyprus? Apparently not. During the 640s, Leontius, the bishop of Neapolis on Cyprus, composed two saints’ lives which stand among the greatest literary achievements of Early Byzantium. That these works were produced in a period known for its military, political, theological, and economic upheaval should give the historian pause. Seventh-century Cyprus cannot be dismissed as a backwater.^[16] Its situation on vital shipping routes provided a constant influx of goods and visitors from Syria and Egypt. Given the economic difficulties experienced throughout the Eastern Mediterranean in this period, Cyprus appears to have been relatively prosperous. The lavish objects of the Cyprus treasures discovered near Lambousa, which include nine silver plates depicting scenes from the life of David, bear stamps dating from the late sixth century and first half of the seventh and attest to the tremendous wealth of at least one Cypriot family during Leontius’s life.^[17] Cyprus enjoyed imperial favors due to its great copper reserves, which presumably helped finance the Emperor Heraclius’s military efforts against Persia.^[18] The victorious emperor seems to have understood his debt to Cyprus. In exchange, in the late 620s, Cyprus received a massive (thirty-five-mile) aqueduct carrying water from the Kyrenia range across the Mesaorian plain to Constantia (Salamis, near modern Famagusta). This building project was overseen, at least in part, by Archbishop Arcadius, who later commissioned Leontius’s Life of John the Almsgiver.^[19]

While the Life of Symeon reflects larger political and social changes, it is particularly rich with evidence of daily life. Although set in Syria in the late sixth century, the small-town life which Leontius recreates in the Life of Symeon would have been quite familiar to his Cypriot audience.^[20] The town includes an agora with food stalls, a bath complex, a glass workshop, and a tavern, and it is peopled with rich and poor, with merchants, artisans, a sorceress, a schoolmaster, and with monks. The portrait in the text is one of economic well-being, not decline. Moreover, there is no trace of wistfulness in the text for such prosperity. While there are references to earthquake and plague—natural realities of life in this era—there are no references to famine or economic collapse. That Leontius presented such an ordinary portrait of urban life to his audience contradicts the notion of general economic decline in early-seventh-century Byzantium illustrated by many economic and social historians and contributes to the general sense that in this period Cyprus remained relatively more prosperous.

The Life of Symeon is not the only witness to this unexpected prosperity. A brief and curious text from the period, the Vision of Kaioumos, tells of a wealthy shipowner, merchant, and landowner of Constantia, a certain Philentolos son of Olympus. Philentolos supported the poor and orphans and built a hospital (νοσοκομεῖον). He was, however, prone to fornication. After he died, debate arose among the bishops of the various sees on Cyprus as to whether Philentolos had been saved. Since no agreement could be reached, Arcadius consulted the monks in monasteries, the stylites, and the hermits. Eventually God revealed in a vision to the hermit Kaioumos that Philentolos was neither in heaven nor hell, but was standing between the two, with the souls of unbaptized children, saved from the fires of Gehenna by his generosity.^[21] Apparently this vision guaranteed that there was nothing preventing the use of Philentolos’s generous legacy. Besides indicating the substantial wealth of some Cypriots in the period, the Vision of Kaioumos shares a major theme with the hagiographical works of Leontius of Neapolis, namely concern for donations to the poor and needy and most especially the role of the Church in engineering this effort.

Religious Life

The history of religious life in Cyprus provides a context for understanding many of Leontius’s concerns in the Life of Symeon. After the reign of Archbishop Epiphanius of Salamis-Constantia (died 402) in the late fourth century, the Church of Cyprus was able to establish itself as autonomous, independent of the patriarch of Antioch. From then on, the archbishop of Constantia was the head of the island’s bishops.^[22] In the early seventh century the island’s Christian population included Chalcedonians and Monophysites (Akephaloi and others). In addition to indigenous speakers of Greek, recent unrest in Syria had brought communities of Syriac-speaking refugees to the island. John of Ephesus reports that during the Persian invasion of 577, the Emperor Maurice relocated a group of Syrian Monophysites to Cyprus, granting them lands throughout the island.^[23] Another group of Syrian refugees arrived in 610.^[24] The Persian invasions also brought refugees from Alexandria.^[25] Because of its proximity to the mainland and its separation from it, Cyprus absorbed refugees of military conflicts throughout the Levant, a role which it has played also in recent times. Despite the decline of urban populations elsewhere in the empire over the course of the late sixth and early seventh centuries, the influx of people to the island may have contributed to the sustenance of urban life on Cyprus in this period. This immigration also maintained the island’s religious diversity.

The island also appears to have had a sizable Jewish population.^[26] Eutychius, patriarch of Alexandria during the first half of the tenth century, basing his accounts on earlier sources, reports that Jews from Cyprus were among those who mounted an attack on the Christian population of Tyre during the Persian invasions of 610.^[27] The tales attributed to Anastasius the Sinaite, himself a native Cypriot, composed late in the seventh century, include an account of a Jew named Daniel who was burned at the stake in Constantia in 637 for practicing magic and a Jew who sought baptism from the bishop of Amathus during the Arab invasion of 649.^[28] Cyprus’s varied religious life is reflected in the population of Leontius’s “Emesa” which included Monophysites and Jews.

Cyprus was important in the theological debates that shook Christianity in the seventh century. It was to Archbishop Arcadius that the Emperor Heraclius addressed an edict circa 625 or 626 proposing, as a sort of “experiment,” the doctrine of Monotheletism in an effort to unite the island’s Chalcedonians and Monophysites.^[29] This edict was a precursor to Heraclius’s Ekthesis of 638 by which he tried to use the formula of a “single will” to bring about religious unity throughout the empire.^[30]

During the first half of the seventh century many of the major figures of the Chalcedonian church visited Cyprus. John the Almsgiver, patriarch of Alexandria circa 610–17, was a native of Cyprus and returned to the city of Amathus, not far from Neapolis, before his death.^[31] John Moschus, the author of the Spiritual Meadow, and his friend Sophronius, later patriarch of Jerusalem, were part of John the Almsgiver’s circle in Alexandria, and from Moschus’s own testimony are both known to have visited Cyprus between 614 and 619.^[32] Together Moschus and Sophronius composed a Life of John the Almsgiver which was available to Leontius on Cyprus. After 633 Sophronius became one of the major opponents of the Monothelete doctrine. Another great opponent of Monotheletism was Maximus the Confessor, perhaps the greatest theologian of the seventh century. It can be inferred from his correspondence with Marinus, a Cypriot monk, that Maximus visited Cyprus, probably between 626 and 630.^[33]

A polemical early Syriac Life of Maximus describes a synod on Cyprus convened to discuss the Monothelete doctrine. The meeting was suggested by Maximus and Sophronius to the Archbishop Arcadius, who summoned a number of bishops. The synod was attended by Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, by representatives of Pope Honorius and of Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, as well as by Sophronius and others. The biographer claims that Maximus did not attend because he was afraid.^[34] While the date of such a meeting cannot be established, and some aspects of the narration do not conform to what is known from other sources, it is quite possible that such a meeting did take place; and thus this Life of Maximus would be further evidence not only for the presence of major intellectual figures in Cyprus during the first half of the seventh century, but also for the centrality of Cyprus in the Monothelete controversy, as doctrinal reconciliation was viewed by Arcadius and others as crucial to the political unity of the eastern provinces and the security of the island.^[35] This concern is also reflected in the Life of Symeon where Symeon converts all religious nonconformists. If Leontius was already bishop of Neapolis when the synod was held, he may well have attended.

Further evidence of religious and intellectual activity on Cyprus is found in the work of the Syrian Paul, once Monophysite bishop of Edessa, who had escaped to Cyprus during the Persian invasion in 619. Connected to the monastery at Qennešrin, renowned for its scholars, Paul devoted himself to the massive project of preparing a Syriac translation of the sermons of Gregory of Nazianzus, which he completed in 624 while on Cyprus.^[36]

Leontius of Neapolis

Despite his important role in the Cypriot church, little is known about the life of Leontius of Neapolis. Given his literary activity in the 640s it is reasonable to assume he was born in the early decades of the century. He probably died sometime during the reign of Constans II (d. 668). In addition to the lives of John the Almsgiver and Symeon the Fool, and a no longer extant Life of Spyridon, he is probably the author of a treatise entitled Against the Jews which includes a defense of the veneration of images, perhaps the earliest defense of icons in the Byzantine world.^[37]

The circumstances surrounding the composition of the Life of John the Almsgiver shed light on Leontius’s role in Cypriot affairs of his own time. Commissioned by the prominent archbishop of Constantia, Arcadius, a benefactor of Cyprus, the Life of John was specifically designed to celebrate Cypriot pride and to honor the aristocratic Cypriot family of which John had been a member. The work attests to the continuing importance of cultural ties between Egypt and Cyprus. While it is impossible to say with certainty that the commissioning of the work postdates the conquest of Alexandria by the Arabs in 641, this seems most likely since refugees came from Alexandria to Cyprus in the aftermath of this event. The work may have served as a rallying cry for the reversal of affairs.^[38]

External evidence also provides clues. Leontius should probably be identified with the Leontius of Neapolis recorded to have been present at the Lateran council held in Rome in October 649. While a coincidence is possible, it seems unlikely that in 649 both Neapolis, Cyprus, and Naples, Italy, would have bishops with identical names. The dating fits nicely, so soon after the Arab invasion of Cyprus, and would make Leontius one of the numerous eastern clerics in attendance at the council who were refugees of the military upheaval in the Levant. Pope Martin hosted the council to condemn the Ekthesis and the teaching of Monotheletism; the drafting of the Acts themselves was carefully engineered by Maximus the Confessor, and they were quickly circulated, much to the displeasure of the Emperor Constans.^[39] No other Cypriot see was represented at the council, but a letter from Sergius, archbishop of Constantia, to Pope Theodore, written in 643 affirming the orthodoxy of the island and expressing his opposition to Monotheletism, was read out in the course of the meetings. It is likely that Leontius would have followed his superior in opposing the doctrine and would have found the proceedings of the council acceptable. Whether Leontius later returned to Cyprus, we do not know. In 649, Mu‘awiya and his troops raided the island of Cyprus, in the words of one chronographer “sacking Constantia and the whole island,”^[40] and with a second raid in 653 decisively removed Cyprus from Byzantine control. According to some Arab sources, the Cypriots negotiated a peace with the Arabs by which they were to pay tribute to their new overlords,^[41] but archeological evidence suggests that life along the coasts of Cyprus was disrupted and that Cypriots turned to the construction of numerous fortifications both along the coast and further inland.^[42] By 692, the archbishop of Constantia and a group of Cypriot refugees were living in exile in Cyzicus in the province of Hellespont near the sea of Marmara.^[43] Leontius may have died in exile.

It is reasonable to assume that Leontius had firsthand knowledge of many of the theological disputes of his day and may have known personally such “international” figures as Sophronius. Distances on Cyprus are short, and travel by sea was easily accomplished. The journey from Neapolis (modern Limassol) to Constantia (Famagusta) took about twenty-four hours by sea.^[44] Leontius’s inclusion of Jews (pp. 145, 154, 163, 168), Monophysites (pp. 146, 154), and even the debate over the status of Origen (pp. 152–53) in the Life of Symeon reflects the diverse religious world with which he was familiar. His interest in pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the veneration of the True Cross on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross reflect the enthusiasm felt throughout the empire for Heraclius’s military successes, symbolized most effectively in his “recovery” of the Cross while on campaign to liberate Jerusalem from the Persians in 622. Heraclius personally restored the Cross to Jerusalem in 630 while on the first pilgrimage ever made to the city by a reigning Christian emperor.^[45] In Leontius’s narrative, composed while Jerusalem was in Arab hands, Symeon travels twice to the holy city to visit the sites connected to the life of Jesus. Whether Leontius’s information about the Holy Land came from his own experience or from travelers’ accounts, we do not know.

Leontius’s work not only reflects the Christian environment in which it was composed, it remains a witness to the survival of Greco-Roman literary and intellectual culture into the seventh century. The first half of the seventh century saw the composition of the last great hexameter epic, George of Pisidia’s Heracliad.^[46] And Theophylact Simocatta’s Ethical Epistles display a great concern with the texts traditionally studied in the educational curriculum. Similarly, the descriptions of Symeon’s shameless behavior, his defecation in public, his consumption of lupines (legumes which cause gas), his ingestion of raw meat, and his dragging a dead dog into the city are references to the anecdotes about Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher, preserved in large part in the rhetorical curriculum of Hellenistic and Late Antique schools, where they served to illustrate grammatical points and were utilized as building blocks for composing practice speeches. Allusion to these in Leontius’s text together with the rhetorical character of the introduction to the Life suggests not only that he had received a traditional education, but that he could assume such a level of education among at least a sector of his audience. Thus the Life of Symeon is evidence for the persistence of the Late Ancient educational curriculum and therefore a Christianized version of Greco-Roman secular culture on Cyprus into the mid-seventh century.

The text’s literary aspects as well as various theological concerns to be uncovered in the course of this study raise questions about Leontius’s intended audience. The use of tools derived from the educational tradition shows Leontius to have been a part of a broader Eastern Mediterranean intellectual culture. As we shall see, Leontius utilized literary skill deliberately and effectively. His art points not only toward a local Cypriot audience, but toward a more international readership as well. At the same time, the literary content of the text lies side-by-side with slapstick and bawdy. This diglossic character of Leontius’s work indicates that a text which aimed to manipulate the high cultural tradition also sought to please the common people.

On the eve of the Arab invasion of Cyprus, Late Roman culture was flourishing. Against this background of vibrant social, economic, and religious life, Leontius undertook to make his peculiar literary contribution, a saint’s life which challenged the conventional notions of sanctity and recast the problem of finding holiness in everyday life. To appreciate the significance of Leontius’s achievement, we turn next to the problem of his literary sources.

Notes