medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Today (20. February) is also the feast day of:
Leo of Catania (7th or 8th cent.). From 591 to 604, Gregory the Great
wrote a number of letters to a bishop of Catania of this name and also
referred to him in letters directed to others. In one of the latter
(_Ep._ 14. 1), L. is said to act severely against illdoers, possibly
magicians (_maleficos_). This L. is perhaps the historic referent of
the otherwise legendary saint Leo, bishop of Catania in the eighth
century, the hero of a somewhat truncated and seemingly early ninth-
century Italo-Greek Bios (BHG 981). That text, which has a Latin
translation in the _Acta Sanctorum_ and a modern critical edition by
Augusta Acconcia Longo in _Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici_,
n.s. 26 (1989), 3-98, makes L. an overseer of church property at
Ravenna who in the absence of acceptable local candidates was chosen to
fill the see of Catania, who struggled mightily with an evil
thaumaturge named Heliodorus (whom he eventually had burned alive), and
who cured a woman of a hitherto incurable bloody flux (cf. Luke 8:43-
48). Most of this Bios concerns the struggle with Heliodorus (a.k.a.
Liodorus), in which L. operates holy magic to overcome the achievements
of his diabolically inspired opponent. In the Latin version, which is
a bit fuller, L. also destroys a pagan cult statue surviving from the
days of the emperor Decius.
L.'s cult travelled to Constantinople (in Byzantine synaxaries he's
remembered on 21. February) and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world.
His Bios has an elegant expansion (BHL 981b) sometimes referred to,
from the location of the previously Athonite codex from which it was
published, as the Moscow version of L.'s Life; there are several other
reworkings and numerous other texts drawing upon this tradition,
including Greek hymns by the ninth-century Joseph the Hymnographer and
the eleventh-century Bartholomew of Grottaferrata and Latin hymns from
his late medieval Office at Catania.
Heliodorus has survived at Catania in the name (U Liotru) of the mostly
basalt late antique elephant which in the Middle Ages stood over one of
the city gates and led Arabic-speakers to refer to Catania as Medina el-
fil ('City of the Elephant'). The city's official symbol since 1239,
in the eighteenth century he was made part of a sculptural confection
adorning a fountain in the Piazza Duomo:
http://tinyurl.com/nr9mf
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT06.jpg
http://web.tiscali.it/andreacatania/catania/gallery/CT05.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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