medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
An older notice revised:
Themistocles (d. 250 or 251, supposedly). According to his legendary, pre-metaphrastic Passio (BHG 2418), T. was a shepherd in Lycia who during the Decian persecution declined to disclose the hiding place of St. Dioscorides to soldiers who were searching for him. Having identified himself to the soldiers as a Christian, he was brought before the provincial governor in Myra, was interviewed, and maintained his Christianity under severe torture. Still resolute, he was put to death by being dragged through calthrops typical of his native countryside until he bled out (the writer of the Passio's epitome transmitted in the Synaxary of Constantinople seems to have confused these spiky plants with the iron carding combs familiar from the Passio of St. Blasius/Blaise; others mistake them for the spiked metal devices of the same name). Christians took T.'s body and buried it. His shepherd's staff, inserted upright into his grave, grew miraculously into an almond tree that was still fertile at the time of the Passio's writing. Thus far the Passio.
T. (twice? or with Dioscorides?) among many calthrops as depicted (in the lower of these two images) in an eleventh-century fragment of a copy of the Imperial Menologion (Athens, Benaki Museum, Μπ. 71, fol. 1r):
https://html2-f.scribdassets.com/1r767l9p3437kekz/images/28-21ab70093d.jpg
A larger view will be found in fig. 13 here:
https://www.academia.edu/5338577/Miniatures_of_the_Imperial_Menologia
T. being dragged as depicted at lower right in an earlier fourteenth-century set of miniatures from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340) for the Great Feasts (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. , fol. 21v:
http://tinyurl.com/noo5gax
Best,
John Dillon
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