¹ Skedros, James C., Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki: Civic Patron and Divine Protector 4th–7th Centuries CE (HTS 47; Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999).Google Scholar A summary of the dissertation may be found in HTR 89 (1996) 410-11. The book provides a thorough and long-overdue review of the growing, mainly foreign-language literature on this subject. Skedros is to be commended for the speed with which he has revised his dissertation and the readability of the final result. The appendices containing translations of two of the key sources will prove particularly useful for students. One minor criticism is that it does not contain a map of late antique Thessalonica such as may be found, for example, in Torp, H., “Thessalonique paléochrétienne. Une esquisse,” in Rydén, Lennart and Rosenqvist, Jan Olof, eds., Aspects of Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Transactions 4, 1993), 113–32. It is inconvenient also that Skedros never refers to his primary sources by their listings in the standard catalogues for such texts, either in theGoogle ScholarBibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (Subsidia Hagiographica 6; Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1898-1899)Google Scholar or in Halkin, François, ed., Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (Subsidia Hagiographica 8; Brussels: Société des Bollandistes; 3rd ed., 1957)Google Scholar.

² Rossi, G.B. de and Duchesne, L., eds., Acta SS 65: Novembris 2.1 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1894) L-LXIXGoogle Scholar.

³ For example, it includes two entries for Thessalonica (Fronto and three others on 14 March; Chionia and Agape on 2 April), two entries for Salona (Domnio on 11 April; Septimius and Hermogenes on 18 April), one entry for Bononia (Hermas on 30 December), and four entries for Sirmium (Irenaeus on 6 April; Demetrius on 9 April; Secundus on 20 June; Basilius on 29 August).

⁴ Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 14–17Google Scholar.

⁵ Ibid., 13-14. The inscription, from the Rotunda in Thessaloniki, is most conveniently found in Delehaye, Hippolyte, Les origines du culte des martyrs (Subsidia Hagiographica 20; Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933), 231–32.Skedros appears to slip when he claims that it contains 14 rather than 15 namesGoogle Scholar.

⁶ There is a serious problem in the text of the Syriac Breviary at this point. It attributes a large number ofmartyrs to June (from 6 June onward), which the Hieronymian Martyrology and other sources prove to have belonged to July instead (from 6 July onward). The result is that it omits the names of the martyrs whose feasts really fell after 5 June.

⁷ As noted by Delehaye, Les origines, 232Google Scholar.

⁸ For example, the encomium that Gregory of Nyssa delivered in honour of the military martyr St. Theodore of Euchaita on 17 February 380 suggests that he was a genuine martyr and that the Syriac Breviary ought to have included his name. In general, see Constantine Zuckerman, , “Cappadocian Fathers and the Goths,” Travaux et Mémoires 11 (1991) 473-86, esp. 479–86. This omission might seem all the more noteworthy in that he was actually executed at the provincial capital at Amasea and the Breviary does include one entry for martyrs at Amasea (Philanthes and three companions on 18 August). But Theodore was buried at Euchaita, and there is no evidence that his cult was celebrated at Amasea by the time of the composition of the Greek original of the Breviary ca. 362Google Scholar.

⁹ Add the article by Kazhdan, Alexander and Ševčenko, Nancy Patterson (“Demetrios of Thessalonike,” Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium [3 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991] 1. 605) to the other modern sources cited by Skedros, Saint Demetrios, 12–13Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Delehaye, Hippolyte, Les légendes grecques des saints militaires (Paris: Picard, 1909) 106–08Google Scholar.

¹¹ Skedros, (Saint Demetrios, 14) appears to accept the explanation offered by BHG 496 for the burial of St.Demetrius within the city, that it simplydid not occur to anyone to remove his body for a proper burial outside the cityGoogle Scholar.

¹² Skedros, Saint Demetrios, 85–88.Google Scholar

¹³ BHG 497 in Halkin, , ed.,Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 153.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Its use is attested by canons 22 and 23 of the Council of Laodicea (exact date disputed).See, for example, Hefele, Karl Joseph von, Histoire des conciles d'après les documents originaux (trans. Leclercq, Henri; 16 vols.; Paris: Adrien Le Cerf, 1870) 2. 151–52Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Skedros, Saint Demetrios, 17.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Passio altera (BHG 497) chs.15–16.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Vickers, Michael, “Sirmium or Thessaloniki? A Critical Examination of the St. Demetrius Legend,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 67 (1974) 337–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 26.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., 28.

²⁰ See Skedros, , Saint Demetrius, 60–70,Google Scholar on Aristotle Mentzos, Τό Πρσκύνημα τοῦ AYíου Δημητρíου Θεσσαλονíκηѕ στà βυζαντινà Xpóvια (Athens: Center for Byzantine Studies, 1994).

²¹ BHG 497, chs. 12-13. I follow the translation of Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 153, except that he transliterates òpápιον as orarionGoogle Scholar.

²² BHG 497, chs. 16-17. Translation from Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 154.Google Scholar

²³ Skedros's position on these contact-relics remains unclear. He accepts (Saint Demetrios, 66 -67) that the story of their use as preserved by the Passio altera was probably in circulation by the early seventh century, when bishop Johnof Thessalonica composed his Miracula S. Demetrii, but he doesnot make it clear whether he accepts that the relics themselves had ever really existed. On the whole, it does not strike me as very convincing that any Christian community should have preserved some former possessions of a martyr while losing track of where exactly they had buried the martyr himself. Knowledge of the exact location of the martyr's burial ought to have been passed down through the same channels as the possessions themselves.

²⁴ Of the military martyrs, the African martyr St. Typasius left a shield (scutum), which was used to mark hisgrave, and the faithful used to tear pieces off it for use as relics (Passio Typasii 7). A fictitious martyr, his cult only developed ca. 397. See Woods, David, “An Unnoticed Official: The Praepositus Saltus,” Classical Quarterly 44 (1994) 245–51. Nothing similar can be found in the acts of any of the other military martyrs; for example, Christopher, Fabius, Florian, George, Marcellus, Maximilian, Menas, Theagenes, or Theodore, fictitious or not.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁵ Petruccione, John, “Prudentius Use of Martyrological Topoi in Peristephanon,”(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1985), 58–59, compares the appearance of an orarium in Prudentius'sGoogle Scholar account of Emeterius and Chelidonius to the description of the use of“handkerchiefs” to bind the eyes of those about to be executed in other martyrial accounts. To refer to his examples, however, bishop Cyprian of Carthage's eyes were bound with laciniae manuales, not an orarium (Acta Cypriani 5.5 ), as were the eyes of his fellow Carthaginian Montanus (Martyrium Montani et Luci 15.2). While it is true that Julius's eyes were bound with an orarium (Passio Juli 4.4), he was a military veteranand may well have continued to dress in military style, with an orarium, after his retirement, unless his military executioner gavehim his own out of sympathy for a fellow soldier. The important points here, however, are, first, that neither Emeterius nor Chelidonius use the orarium to bind their eyes and, second, that none of these sources associates the “handkerchief” with a ring. There is no real comparison with the texts mentioned, and the presence of the orarium is not a martyrological topos. The above texts may all be found in Musurillo, Herbert, ed., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Prudentius, Perist. 1. 82–93. Translation fromGoogle ScholarThomson, H. J., ed., Prudentius (LCL 2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953) 2. 105–7, with the exception that he translates orarium as “handkerchief.” The description of the dress of a typical late fourth-century imperial guard in the poemThe Vision of Dorotheus (1. 332) reveals that the orarium was worn about the neck. SeeGoogle ScholarBremmer, Jan, “An Imperial Palace Guard in Heaven: The Date of the Vision of Dorotheus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 75 (1988) 82–88Google Scholar.

²⁷ In general on Prudentius's sources for his Peristephanon, see Palmer, Ann-Marie, Prudentius on the Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 227-77, esp. 237–79Google Scholar.

²⁸ He has based his description of their dress and status on the dress and status of imperial guardsmen in his day. See, for example, Speidel, Michael, “The Master of the Dragon Standards and the Imperial Tore: An Inscription from Prusias and Prudentius's Peristephanon,” TAPA 115 (1985) 283–87. On the donation of gold rings by late antique emperors to higher ranking soldiers at least, seeGoogle ScholarJohansen, Ida Malte, “Rings, Fibulae, and Buckles with Imperial Portraits and Inscriptions,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 7 (1994) 223–42. Although it does not directly affect my argument in this note, I believe that Prudentius was inspired to describe Emeterius and Chelidoniusas imperial guardsmen by his reading of, if not the passion of Sergius and Bacchus itself, another pair of military martyrs, then of a common source which described the trial of two military confessors underthe emperor Julian (360-63). See my paperCrossRefGoogle Scholar“The Emperor Julian and the Passion of Sergius and Bacchus,” JECS 5 (1997) 335–67.Google Scholar

²⁹ His poem on Emeterius and Chelidonius is the first of a collection of fourteen poems dedicated to various individual martyrs or groups of martyrs, known collectively as the Peristephanon. Palmer, (Prudentius, 88) argues that Prudentius wrote the poems at different stages in his career, and only brought them together as a collection at a later date. Insofar as Prudentius refers to poetry dedicated to the martyrs in his Praefatio, which he wrote in the 57th year after his birth in 348, it is usually assumed that he composed the Peristephanon before 405Google Scholar.

³⁰ The strength of its impact upon the reader isillustrated by the fact that it is this passage that Gregory of Toursquotes when he describes these martyrs (Liber in gloria martyrum 92).

³¹ In general, see Errington, Robert Malcolm,“The Accession of Theodosius I,” Klio 78 (1996) 438–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² See Seeck, Otto, Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste für die Jahre 311 bis 476 n. Chr. (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1919) 251-55.Google Scholar

³³ For a detailed study of Theodosius's activities and intentions at this period, see Errington, Robert Malcolm, “Church and State in the First Years of Theodosius I,” Chiron 27 (1997) 21–72Google Scholar.

³⁴ See Palmer, , Prudentius, 24–31. Prudentius was provincial governor twice before being promoted to a post at the imperial court. Unfortunately, he does not reveal of which provinces he was governor. Nor does he reveal the nature of his appointment at the court.Google ScholarHarries, Jill (“Prudentius and Theodosius,” Latomus 43 [1984] 69–84), argues that the lack of references to the East in Prudentius' poetry suggests that he attended the court only when Theodosius was in the West (388-91). It does not seem likely that he himself had ever actually visted ThessalonicaGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ In general, see Hunt, E.D., “The Traffic in Relics: Some LateRoman Evidence,” in Hackel, Sergei, ed., TheByzantine Saint: University of Birmingham 14th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies (London: Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1981) 171–80. It is worth noting that the praetorian prefect Fl. Rufinus, who created a shrine at Chalcedon for the relics of Peter and Paul, which he had acquired during his visit to Rome in 389, was from Elusa in the province of Novempopulana in south-western Gaul, a short journey across the Pyreneesfrom Calagurris. Unfortunately, we know nothing concerning his careerbefore his appointment as magister officiorum in 388, but he must emerge as a strong candidate in any attempt to identify the author of the translation of these relics from Spain to Thessalonica. His assassination on 27 November 395, and subsequent disgrace, might wellexplain why Prudentius dared to attack the authenticity of these relics in the way he did. On the pious activities of many at Theodosius's court, seeGoogle ScholarMatthews, John, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court AD 364-425 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) 127–45Google Scholar.

³⁶ The earliest evidence that 26 October was celebrated as the feastday of St. Demetrius occurs in the Miracula S.Demetrii by bishop John of Thessaloniki (ca. 610-49). See Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 10–11, who seems inclined to accept it as the genuine date of his martyrdom, while Vickers (“Sirmium or Thessaloniki?,” 349) identifies itas the date of the translation of the relics of St. Demetrius from Thessalonica to SirmiumGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ BHG 496, ch. 8. Translation from Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 157Google Scholar.

³⁸ BHG 497, ch. 15. Translation from Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 153–54Google Scholar

³⁹ Skedros, , Saint Demetrios, 29–37Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Compare Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 11.

⁴¹ The fact that the Passio altera (BHG 497, ch. 16) records that Leontius took as relics for the church at Sirmium a chlamys as well as part of the orarium raises a question as to the origin of this chlamys. Dare one suggest that, alarmed at the prospect of losing relics that had only just demonstrated their power once more, some enterprising locals, cleric or otherwise, “remembered” that they also possessed Demetrius's chlamys, which they then fobbed off on a grateful Leontius in an effort to retain more of the real things?