medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
We first hear of Dorotheus (d. 362?) in the continuation of the Chronicle of George the Synkellos that goes under the name of Theophanes the Confessor. According to this text, put together in the very early ninth century from earlier sources, Dorotheus was a learned bishop of Tyre who had been exiled and tortured under Diocletian, who attended the First Council of Nicaea and who then regained his see, who left writings both in Latin and in Greek including a history of bishops of Byzantium and other places, and who at the age of 107 was martyred at Odyssopolis by officers of Julian the Apostate, then engaged in secret persecution of Christians.
Dorotheus is absent from Eusebius' _Chronicon_ as well as from the early list of the bishops of Tyre. A fairly widely held scholarly opinion seemingly not shared by the editors of the Roman Martyrology is that, as Cyril Mango and Roger Scott put it, "Dorotheos of Tyre does not seem to have ever existed" (Mango and Scott, tr., _The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor_ [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], pp. 40-41). There are brief accounts of Dorotheus in Greek liturgical manuscripts of the ninth or tenth century onward and he has the first entry under 6. June in the originally tenth-century Synaxary of Constantinople (as well as the tenth entry under 9. October); most medieval Byzantine-rite calendars have him under 5. June, as do also modern Byzantine-rite churches. Today is Dorotheus' day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Some period-pertinent images of St. Dorotheus of Tyre:
a) as depicted (martyrdom) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 101 [9. Oct.]):
http://tinyurl.com/grmauk6
b) as depicted in a June calendar portrait in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) 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/2doxaof
c) as depicted (lower register in the panel at upper left [5. June]; martyrdom) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 42v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/42v.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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