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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

According to Eusebius of Caesarea (_Historia ecclesiastica_, 8. 13. 2, 9. 6. 3), Lucian was a learned priest of Antioch who, after having at Nicomedia in the presence of the emperor Maximinus Daia affirmed his Christianity both with a speech on behalf of the faith and with his writings, was imprisoned and executed.  A tendentious and somewhat fanciful lost fourth-century Bios claiming him as an Arian has left traces in late antique church histories and apparently underlies both his earlier Passio (BHG 996z) and his metaphrastic one (BHG 997).  St. Jerome reports the existence of versions of the Septuagint and of the New Testament edited by Lucian.  The dying St. Constantine the Great was baptized at Helenopolis (the former Drepanum in Bithynia) in a church containing Lucian's remains; exactly when these arrived there is not known.  On the night before his own death the moribund St. John Chrysostom, reposing in the church of the local martyr St. Basiliscus near Comana Pontica, is said to have received a consoling vision of that saint and with him Lucian of Antioch, both of whom affirmed that Chrysostom would be with them on the morrow. 

Chrysostom's earlier Ecomium of Lucian (BHG 998) shows that in late fourth century Antioch (of which Chrysostom was then bishop) his feast was kept on 7. January.  That is also where Lucian is entered in the (pseudo-)Hieronymian Martyrology and the ninth-century historical martyrologies of Florus of Lyon, St. Ado of Vienne, and Usuard of Saint-Germain.  Byzantine synaxaries, whose notices of him transmit legendary details, enter Lucian under 15. October.


Some period-pertinent images of St. Lucian of Antioch:

a) Lucian of Antioch in prison and (second scene) his martyrdom by drowning as depicted in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 115):
http://tinyurl.com/nm98xmz

b) Lucian of Antioch (almost certainly) as depicted in a perhaps late thirteenth-century fresco in the ex-chiesa abbaziale di San Mauro at San Mauro sulla Serra in Sannicola (LE) on Apulia's Salentine peninsula:
http://tinyurl.com/2g7us2g
http://tinyurl.com/2789zur

c) Lucian of Antioch's martyrdom by drowning (bottom register at lower left; above, St. Sabinus of Catania; at right, St. Longinus the Centurion) as depicted in an October calendar composition in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1313 and 1318; conservation work in 1968) by Michael Astrapas and Eutychios in the church of St. George at Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://cp14.nevsepic.com.ua/217/21667/1390000850-84.jpg

d) Lucian of Antioch's martyrdom by drowning as depicted in an October calendar scene in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1335 and 1350) in the narthex of the church of the Holy Ascension at the Visoki Dečani monastery near Peć in, depending upon one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/28us2xk

e) Lucian of Antioch's martyrdom by the sword as depicted (panel at lower right) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. fol. 13r):
http://tinyurl.com/mt7j8gy

f) Lucian of Antioch (second from left) on trial under allegation of heresy as depicted in a mid-fifteenth-century copy of Giovanni Colonna's _Mare historiarum_ (betw. 1447 and 1455; Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 4915, fol. 252r):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000905v/f573.item.zoom

Best,
John Dillon

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