medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Leontius of Tripolis (?). As is the case with other Eastern martyrs of note, Leontius' cult is attested well before the appearance of his hagiography. The latter begins with two early sixth-century sermons by Severus of Antioch, who claims to have been informed about the saint by an old man of Tripolis (today's Tripoli in northern Lebanon) whom he encountered in the year 488. According to Severus, Leontius was an upright resident of that city who during a persecution surrendered himself voluntarily to the Roman authorities and who behaved charitably and fearlessly as he was awaiting execution.
Another tradition makes Leontius a soldier martyred under Diocletian with a companion, the monk Publius. Witnesses here include a Georgian-language Passio (and under today's date the pre-Byzantine liturgical calendar from Palestine preserved in a Georgian-language version in the tenth-century _Codex sinaiticus_ 34 records Publius' commemoration after Leontius') as well as Leontius' Syriac-language Passio BHO 563. Yet another tradition -- and this version is perhaps no older than the ninth century -- describes him as a military martyr under Vespasian with also military companions named Hypatius and Theodulus (BHG 986-987d). In Byzantine synaxaries Hypatius and Theodulus are commonly commemorated along with Leontius and in present-day Orthodox churches they are celebrated with him on this day as his companions.
Leontius' martyrial church at Tripolis, where his relics worked wonders, was already famous in 417 when St. Melania the Younger visited it. Severus of Antioch was baptized there. At Antioch itself (Antioch on the Orontes, that is) during the Circus riots of 507 a mob of Greens raided the local synagogue and converted it into a Christian church dedicated to Leontius. Other late antique dedications to him are recorded from Constantinople to Arabia. The ruins of the centrally planned church dedicated to Sergius, Bacchus, and Leontius at Bosra in Syria in 512/13 were until recently still visible and may yet be so, though conditions were already parlous enough in 2013 that UNESCO placed Bosra on its World Heritage in Danger list then.
Some medieval images of St. Leontius of Tripolis:
a) The martyrdom of Leontius and his companions (lower register, second group from the left) in an unfortunately damaged June calendar composition in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending upon one's view of the matter, either the Republic of Kosovo or Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija:
http://srpskoblago.org/Archives/Gracanica/exhibits/digital/little-nw/large/little-nw-38.jpg
b) The martyrdom of Leontius (upper right, lower register) and his companions (upper right, upper register) as depicted in an earlier fourteenth-century set of miniatures from Thessaloniki for the Great Feasts (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 44r):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/44r.jpg
c) The martyrdom of Leontius and his companions Hypat[i]us and Theodulus as depicted in the earlier sixteenth-century frescoes (1546/47) by George / Tzortzis the Cretan in the Dionysiou monastery on Mt. Athos:
http://tinyurl.com/p348vcb
Best,
John Dillon
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