medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Here are Phyllis' two African burnings again. The similarities between them are interesting and, I think, revealing. Though not about Roman criminal procedure.
>
>Nemesius of Alexandria (d. 250) Nemesius was a native of Egypt. Under
>Diocletian, he was burned to death between two thieves.
>
>Timothy of Africa (d. c. 250) Timothy was a north African deacon. I
>>thought Nemesius' burning was an oddity, but Timothy was burned at the
>stake also. An African habit?
>
Notice that Nemesius is said to have been put to death under Diocletian but that the date of his martyrdom is given as 250. That is actually the date of the Decian persecution; Diocletian's was later. Our only source for this martyrdom, Eusebius' _Ecclesiastical History_ (quoting from a lost work of Dionysius of Alexandria), places it under Decius. So the date is correct. Phyllis' source seems either to have confused the persecutions of the two somewhat similarly named emperors or to have been influenced by some other work exhibiting such a confusion. The date of his commemoration (19 December) is that of the _Roman Martyrology_, a frequently updated work of scholarship that first appeared in 1584.
Timothy the north African deacon is unknown either to the Thurston/Attwater revision of Butler's _Lives of the Saints_ or to the Roman Catholic _Bibliotheca sanctorum_ (1961-71). The former has no Timothy at all under 19 December, while the latter's St. Timothy of that day is an Egyptian hermit not said to have undergone martyrdom. This Timothy is known to us only from the _Synaxary of Alexandria_, where in one version he occurs on 23 kihak (= 19 December).
The two accounts in question would seem to be doublets; both probably derive from incomplete conflations of the martyr Nemesius (day of martyrdom unknown) with the Timothy of 19 December. At least one of these conflations would seem to have occurred in some edition of the _Roman Martyrology_. Where the deacon bit in the account of Timothy comes from is a puzzle: possibly one of the martyrs associated with Nemesius in the modern martyrologies was a deacon.
The sources Phyllis uses have come to us though processes of revision and emendation of varying quality and include identifications no longer widely accepted by scholars. They offer potentially inspirational exempla whose grounding in recorded history is not always evident and which for this reason should be treated with caution when one attempts to understand their purported historical contexts.
A useful but unsourced paragraph on the criminal proceedings of Roman provincial governors and on the range of punishments employed occurs in D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly's introduction to their edited volume _Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire_ (Michigan, 1999), pp. 8-9. For the political and legal contexts of official Roman judicial proceedings against Christians _qua_ Christians, there is a very good discussion in J. B. Rives, _Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine_ (Clarendon Press, 1995), ch. IV, "Religious Authority and the Roman State", section 1, pp. 250-61. For criminal offenses and punishments in the imperial period, see Richard A. Bauman, _Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome_ (Routledge, 1996), esp. pp. 124-60. Bauman's citation of Dig. 48.19.8.2 for vivicombustion is indeed correct; see his pp. 150-52 for context.
Best,
John Dillon
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