medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On 09/07/11, Terri Morgan sent:
> Anastasius the Fuller (d. c304) was a native of Aquileia and lived in Split (Dalmatia), where he worked as a fuller. During Diocletian's persecution he openly declared his faith by painting a cross on his front door. He was thrown into the sea with a rock tied to his neck. Although the Roman Martyrology says this saint died on this date in Aquileia, he really died on August 26 in Split.
>
See also under 26. August (<http://tinyurl.com/3ovurae>), where one will find not only a little illustrative matter but also ample reason for doubting the assertions that A. was a native of Aquileia and that his place of martyrdom was Split. And, of course, since its revision of 2001 the Roman Martyrology (which now places A.'s death in Salona) no longer has A. dying on 7. September.
> Sozon of Cilicia (d. c304) was a shepherd. After a vision, he left his flock, went to the nearby town of Pompeiopolis, and there broke a hand off the golden cult statue in the temple (he broke it up and gave it to the poor). His guilt was not immediately discovered but when others were falsely accused he came forward and confessed his deed. After his trial, Sozon was taken to the amphitheater, forced to walk there with nails driven through the soles of his shoes, and then burned. When Sozon marched in front of the magistrate in the arena, he called up to him: 'I have finer red shoes than you!'
>
For the martyr Sozon (whose name means "Savior" and who is also known as Sozontius and as Sostis or Sostes) we have a brief pre-metaphrastic Passio (BHG 1643) and its metaphrastic expansion (BHG 1644), as well as some briefer synaxary accounts in which instead of suffering death by fire Sozon dies after being strung up on a tree and then beaten. According to this at least largely legendary tradition he suffered under an historically unattested governor of Cilicia named Maximianus or Maximus, the persecutor in the likewise legendary Passiones of the also Cilician martyrs Calliopius, Doulas, and Tarachus, Probus, and Andronicus. None of these texts specifies, either by an emperor's name or by some other ready indication, a greater persecution in which this Cilician one will have taken place. If the rather shaky assumption that these saints suffered in the Great Persecution is correct, then a better date for Sozon's death would be "ca. 304, supposedly" (ditto for Calliopius [7. April], where in the past I was too accepting of others' summaries).
That Sozon gave the idol's hand to the poor is of course not to be taken literally. In the different medieval representatives of the aforementioned tradition it is made clear in varying ways that Sozon sold this object and then used the proceeds of that sale to benefit the poor. To judge from the two Passiones as well as from a quotation from a synaxary account given by Stiltingh in his treatment of Sozon in the _Acta Sanctorum_, the riposte about the governor's shoes as formulated above may well be a modern re-working of the medieval texts, in which the comparison is rather to the red of the governor's cloak (_chlamys_).
Sozon's feast today is recorded in the early (pre-Byzantine) liturgical calendar from Palestine preserved in a Georgian-language version in the tenth-century _Codex sinaiticus_ 34. It is widely entered, also under this day, in Byzantine synaxaries. In most places that celebrate him today this is also his feast day, though at the Agios Sostis on Sifnos and at the one on Tinos his feast occurs on 6. September. In southern Italy S. is the eponym of today's San Sosti (CS) in Calabria, whose originally early medieval abbey of Aghios Sostis (the Greek form reported as occurring in eleventh- and twelfth-century charters), later San Sozonte and now a ruin, is thought on the basis of recent archeological investigation to have been founded by monks from Tinos.
S. as depicted (at left; at right, St. Gerontius) in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the north-east little dome of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/3bsslyn
S. as depicted (at left; at right, St. Hippolytus, bp. of Rome) in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the north-east little dome of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/3jnm2as
S. as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) of the nave in the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/3uyo5xc
S. (upper roundel) as depicted in a mid-fourteenth-century fresco in the church of the Holy Apostles in the Patriarchate of Peć at Peć in, depending on one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://tinyurl.com/2cptmk8
S. as depicted in a later fourteenth-century fresco in the church of the Taxiarches in Kastoria (Kastoria prefecture) in northwestern Greece:
http://tinyurl.com/3geo7lm
Best,
John Dillon
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