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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N B Y Z A N T I U M
Editorial Board
JAŚ ELSNER CATHERINE HOLMES
JAMES HOWARD-JOHNSTON ELIZABETH JEFFREYS
HUGH KENNEDY MARC LAUXTERMANN
PAUL MAGDALINO HENRY MAGUIRE
CYRIL MANGO MARLIA MANGO
CLAUDIA RAPP JEAN-PIERRE SODINI
JONATHAN SHEPARD
 OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N B Y Z A N T I U M
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Symeon Stylites the Younger
and Late Antique Antioch
From Hagiography to History

L U C Y PA R K E R
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
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certain other countries
© Lucy Parker 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952671
ISBN 978–0–19–286517–5
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For my parents
 Acknowledgements

This book began its life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis. I am very

grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my
doctorate. I finished the book while working as a British Academy
Postdoctoral Fellow, still in Oxford, and would like to thank the
British Academy for their support of my research. The book is
therefore a product of the rich and stimulating environment of the
History Faculty in Oxford. I am grateful to all the students and tutors
in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies with whom I have discussed
Byzantine religion over the years, and to David Taylor for inspiring
tuition in Syriac. I cannot imagine a better place to have worked on
this project. Of many debts, two stand out. I was first introduced to
Byzantine history as an undergraduate student by the late Mark
Whittow. Mark was a wonderfully engaging and kind tutor, and
remained a source of support, wisdom, and good humour long after
my student days. Like so many others, I miss him greatly. I am also
very indebted to my supervisor, Phil Booth. Phil has been unfailingly
generous and supportive to me, and his advice has greatly improved
my work. Among many kindnesses, he took the time to teach me
the basics of Coptic.
I am very grateful to everyone who has helped me in the process
of converting my thesis into a monograph. My doctoral examiners,
Averil Cameron and Vincent Déroche, gave me very helpful
suggestions and constructive criticism; I greatly appreciate their
support. After finishing my doctorate, I began working on the
‘Stories of Survival’ project in Oxford led by John-Paul Ghobrial.
John-Paul has been a wonderful mentor and friend, and I have
learned a great deal from him. I would also like to thank Elizabeth
Jeffreys, who was very encouraging when I first considered
publishing this book with Oxford Studies in Byzantium. I am very
grateful to Charlotte Loveridge and Cathryn Steele, my editors, and
to all the team at Oxford University Press for all their help
throughout the process of publication.
I owe a great deal to the support of my friends and family. I
cannot name them all here, but would especially like to thank Otone,
my house mate throughout most of the time I worked on this
project, for her unfailing friendship, support, and enthusiasm about
stylites. It has been a joy to talk about history, religion, and the
ancient world with Anastasia, Rosie, and Laura. My husband, Paul,
has been a constant source of encouragement. We first met each
other a few months before I finished my doctorate. Several years
later, we were in Scotland on our honeymoon when I found out that
my book had been accepted by OUP! I am so grateful for the love
and happiness that he has brought into my life.
My greatest debt is to my parents, Jo and Robert, for the support
of all kinds which they have given me over the years. I could not
have written this book without them, and I dedicate it to them with
love and gratitude.
 Contents

List of Figures
Note on Transliterations and Conventions
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Antioch and Northern Syria in the Sixth Century
Disasters in Antioch: A City in Decline?
Society and Culture
Conclusion
2. The Sermons of Symeon Stylites the Younger
The Early Christian Homily
Authorship
Genre
Style
Demons and Monks
Heaven and Hell
Rich and Poor
Conclusion
3. The Life of Symeon Stylites the Younger
The Hagiographer’s Worldview
Christology
Opposition and Crisis
Conclusion
4. The Life of Martha
Cult Promotion and Apologetic
 A Reorientation of Priorities
Liturgy and Ritual Practice
Conclusion
5. Hagiography and the Crises of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries
Saints’ Lives and Disasters
Context for Crisis: Heightened Expectations of Holy Men
Miracle Collections
Conclusion
Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
 List of Figures

0.1. Map showing the location of the ‘Wonderful Mountain’ (Mont Admirable),
where Symeon the Younger’s monastery was built, from Lafontaine-Dosogne
1967, pl. 1; reproduced with the permission of Peeters Publishers.
0.2. The remaining base of Symeon’s column on the ‘Wonderful Mountain’.
Photograph taken by the author in 2011.
0.3. Plan of Symeon’s monastery on the ‘Wonderful Mountain’, with his column in
the centre, from Van den Ven 1962–70, pl. 1a; reproduced by permission of
the Société des Bollandistes, Brussels.
0.4. The remains of the baptistery on the ‘Wonderful Mountain’. Photograph taken
by the author in 2011.
0.5. A column capital on the ‘Wonderful Mountain’. Photograph taken by the
author in 2011.
Note on Transliterations and Conventions

Any author of a book treating an area which used a range of

languages faces difficult decisions in terms of transliteration
conventions. I have tried to follow some clear principles, but, like the
scribes of Syriac manuscripts, I beg the reader to forgive any
mistakes. For names which have common English equivalents, I
have used these (thus John not Ioannes/Yuḥanon, George not
Georgios/Giwargis, Cyril not Kyrillos). When a name does not have a
widely used English equivalent, I typically use a simplified Greek
transliteration (Amantios, Dorotheos, Evagrios Scholastikos). I do,
however, use a Latinized transliteration for authors who wrote in
Latin (Marcellinus comes), for emperors (Tiberius and Heraclius),
and for martyrs whose names are paired with common English
names (thus Cosmas and Damian, not Kosmas and Damianos). For
place names, I typically use the commonly known English version.
For places with both Syriac/Arabic and Greek names, I use the name
most widely used in scholarly literature. For obscure place names
mentioned in hagiographies, I use a simplified transliteration from
Greek.
In the main text of the monograph, I provide all quotations in
English translation. If I have made the translation myself, or adapted
it from a published translation, I provide the original-language
quotation in the footnote, so that readers may check my
translations. If I have quoted from a published translation, I do not
provide the original language text, although I do provide a reference
to the relevant edition as well as the translation. For the Bible,
unless otherwise indicated quotations from the Old Testament are
from the New English Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford, 2007),
accessed online through http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/,
which includes updates from 2009 and 2014; quotations from the
New Testament are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New
Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, 4th edn (Oxford,
2010).
 Abbreviations

ACO E. Schwartz et al. (eds), Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum

(Berlin, 1914– ).
CPG Clavis Patrum Graecorum (Turnhout, 1974– ).
IGLS Les inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie (Paris, 1929– ).
NETS A. Pietersma and B. G. Wright (eds), A New English
Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford, 2007).
NRSV M. D. Coogan (ed.), The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New
Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, 4th edn
(Oxford, 2010).
Pauly-Wissowa A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, et al. (eds), Pauly’s Real-Encylopädie
der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1894–1979).
PLRE A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris (eds),
Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3 vols in 4
(Cambridge, 1971–92).
SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Leiden, 1923– ).
 Introduction

Shortly before the Persian sack of Antioch in 540, a local holy man
received a troubling vision. This holy man, Symeon Stylites the
Younger, was, according to his hagiographic Life, warned by God
that He was angered by the sins of the Antiochenes and was
planning to deliver them to the Persians. Symeon cried out to God,
imploring Him to change His mind and spare the city. The
hagiographer reports, however, that the saint received no response
from God, because His anger was at its peak. Symeon then prayed
again, fervently, and God provided an uncompromising reply:

I will surrender the city and I will not hide from you what I am going to do.
I will fill it with enemies and I will surrender the majority of those living in it
to slaughter, and many of them will be led off as prisoners.1

Symeon could not change God’s mind; destruction was unleashed on

Antioch. The hagiographer continues to claim that Symeon was able
to mitigate the damage wrought, and to protect some monks and
prisoners who invoked his name, but his initial petition for God to
spare Antioch went unheeded. This episode raises uncomfortable
questions about the position of the holy man as an intercessor
between God and his supplicants. Could a human, however holy, be
expected to change the mind of God? How could he reconcile
fulfilling his supplicants’ desire for protection with his obedience to
God’s will? And, most strikingly, how would his supporters react to
his failure to achieve protection for the community which he claimed
to defend?
This is a book about the authority of the holy man and its limits in
times of crisis. It investigates the tensions that emerged when
increasingly ambitious claims about the powers of holy men came
into conflict with undeniable evidence of their failures, and explores
how holy men and their supporters responded to this. It takes as its
central figure Symeon Stylites the Younger, who, from his vantage
point on a column on a mountain close to Antioch, witnessed a
period of exceptional turbulence in the local area. Symeon the
Younger was born in Antioch in c.521.2 According to Symeon’s
hagiographer, the saint’s father, John, was the son of two perfume-
sellers from Edessa. Symeon’s mother, Martha, had desperately
desired to remain a virgin but had to bow to her parents’ wishes to
marry John.3 After her marriage, she supplicated John the Baptist to
be granted a child to serve Christ; Symeon was born after this.4
Symeon’s sanctity was foreshadowed throughout his infancy: he
would only drink, for example, from his mother’s right breast,
spurning the left (in an echo of Christ’s division between the
righteous sheep on his right and the sinful goats on his left).5 When
Symeon was five, an earthquake struck Antioch; one of the victims
was the saint’s father, John.6 His life was thus marked from an early
age by the disasters that afflicted sixth-century Antioch. Not long
afterwards, a man in white appeared to Symeon and led him to a
monastery in the mountains, led by another stylite, John. Symeon,
now aged six, joined the monastery, and soon ascended a small
column next to John’s.7 This was the start of an exceptional career.
The child saint received numerous visions from God, and
surpassed the rest of the monastery in asceticism, provoking
jealousy among the monks.8 He soon began to perform miracles.
Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch, came to visit him and spread his
fame within the city.9 After some time, he moved onto a 40-foot-tall
column, on which he stood for eight years.10 He foresaw John’s
death, and seems, although the hagiographer never states this
explicitly, to have taken over the monastery after this took place.11
After John’s death, Symeon redoubled his ascetic efforts, and
performed yet more miracles. Indeed, most of his hagiographic Life
consists of a vast array of miracle stories, with little clear narrative or
chronological structure. But this is interspersed with several key
events, some relating to Symeon’s own career and monastery, some
part of empire-wide events. Symeon, as we have seen, is said to
have prophesied the Persian sack of Antioch by Khosrow I in 540.12
In an ultimately unsuccessful effort to avoid his crowds of admirers,
he relocated his monastery to the ‘Wonderful Mountain’ (so named
by Christ in a vision), where he arranged for a new column and new
monastic complex to be built (see Fig 0.1).13 The base of this
column still stands today (see Figs 0.2 and 0.3).
Fig. 0.1 Map showing the location of the ‘Wonderful Mountain’
(Mont Admirable), where Symeon the Younger’s monastery was
built, from Lafontaine-Dosogne 1967, pl. 1; reproduced with the
permission of Peeters Publishers.
Fig. 0.2 The remaining base of Symeon’s column on the ‘Wonderful
Mountain’. Photograph taken by the author in 2011.
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 NURSING

XXII

O hush, my little baby brother!

Sleep, my love, upon my knee,
What though, dear child, we’ve lost our mother?
That can never trouble thee.

You are but ten weeks old to-morrow;

What can you know of our loss?
The house is full enough of sorrow;
Little baby, don’t be cross.

Peace, cry not so, my dearest love!

Hush, my baby bird, lie still,—
He’s quiet now, he does not move,
Fast asleep is little Will.

My only solace, only joy,

Since the sad day I lost my mother,
Is nursing her own Willy boy,
My little orphan brother.
 THE ROOK
AND
THE SPARROWS

XXIII
A little boy with crumbs of bread
Many a hungry sparrow fed.
It was a child of little sense
Who this kind bounty did dispense;
For suddenly ’twas from them torn,
And all the birds were left forlorn
In a hard time of frost and snow,
Not knowing where for food to go.
He would no longer give them bread,
Because he had observed, he said,
A great black bird, a rook by name,
That sometimes to the window came
And took away a small bird’s share.
So foolish Henry did not care
What became of the great rook
That from the little sparrows took,
Now and then, as ’twere by stealth,
A part of their abundant wealth;
Nor ever more would feed his sparrows.
Thus ignorance a kind heart narrows.
I wish I had been there, I would
Have told the child, rooks live by food
In the same way the sparrows do.
I also would have told him too
Birds act by instinct, and ne’er can
Attain the rectitude of man.
Nay, that even when distress
Does on poor human nature press,
We need not be too strict in seeing
The failings of a fellow-being.
 FEIGNED
COURAGE

XXIV

Horatio, of ideal courage vain,

Was flourishing in air his father’s cane,
And, as the fumes of valour swell’d his pate,
Now thought himself this hero, and now that:
“And now,” he cried, “I will Achilles be;
My sword I brandish; see, the Trojans flee!
Now I’ll be Hector, when his angry blade
A lane through heaps of slaughter’d Grecians made!
And now my deeds, still, braver I’ll evince,
I am no less than Edward the Black Prince.
Give way, ye coward French!” As thus he spoke,
And aim’d in fancy a sufficient stroke
To fix the fate of Crecy or Poictiers
(The Muse relates the Hero’s fate with tears),
He struck his milk-white hand against a nail,
Sees his own blood, and feels his courage fail.
Ah! where is now that boasted valour flown,
That in the tented field so late was shown?
Achilles weeps, great Hector hangs his head,
And the Black Prince goes whimpering to bed.
 HESTER

XXV

When maidens such as Hester die,

Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try
With vain endeavour.
A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed,
And her together.

A springy motion in her gait,

A rising step, did indicate
Of pride and joy no common rate,
That flush’d her spirit.
I know not by what name beside
It may be call’d; if ’twas not pride,
It was a joy to that allied
She did inherit.
Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool,
But she was train’d in Nature’s school,
Nature had blest her.
A waking eye, a prying mind,
A heart that stirs is hard to bind,
A hawk’s keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.

My sprightly neighbour, gone before

To that unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,
Some summer morning,
When from thy cheerful eyes a ray
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away,
A sweet forewarning?
 HELEN

XXVI

High-born Helen, round your dwelling

These twenty years I’ve paced in vain;
Haughty beauty, thy lover’s duty
Hath been to glory in his pain.

High-born Helen, proudly telling

Stories of thy cold disdain;
I starve, I die, now you comply,
And I no longer can complain.

These twenty years I’ve lived on tears,

Dwelling for ever on a frown;
On sighs I’ve fed, your scorn my bread;
I perish now you kind are grown.

Can I, who loved my beloved,

But for the scorn “was in her eye,”
Can I be moved for my beloved
When she “returns me sigh for sigh?”
In stately pride, by my bedside,
High-born Helen’s portrait’s hung;
Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays
Are nightly to the portrait sung.
To that I weep, nor ever sleep,
Complaining all night long to her:
Helen, grown old, no longer cold,
Said, “You to all men I prefer.”
 THE
BEGGAR MAN

XXVII

Abject, stooping, old, and wan,

See yon wretched beggar man;
Once a father’s hopeful heir,
Once a mother’s tender care.
When too young to understand,
He but scorch’d his little hand
By the candle’s flaming light
Attracted, dancing, spiral, bright;
Clasping fond her darling round,
A thousand kisses heal’d the wound:
Now, abject, stooping, old, and wan,
No mother tends the beggar man.
The Beggar Man
Then nought too good for him to wear,
With cherub face and flaxen hair,
In fancy’s choicest gauds array’d,
Cap of lace with rose to aid;
Milk-white hat and feather blue;
Shoes of red; and coral too;
With silver bells to please his ear,
And charm the frequent ready tear.
Now, abject, stooping, old, and wan,
Neglected is the beggar man.

See the boy advance in age,

And learning spreads her useful page;
In vain—for giddy pleasure calls,
And shows the marbles, tops, and balls.
What’s learning to the charms of play?
Th’ indulgent tutor must give way.
A heedless wilful dunce, and wild,
The parents’ fondness spoil’d the child;
The youth in vagrant courses ran.
Now, abject, stooping, old, and wan,
Their fondling is the beggar man.
 BREAKFAST

XXVIII

A dinner party, coffee, tea,

Sandwich, or supper, all may be
In their way pleasant. But to me
Not one of these deserves the praise
That welcomer of new-born days,
A breakfast, merits; ever giving
Cheerful notice we are living
Another day refresh’d by sleep,
When its festival we keep.
Now, although I would not slight
Those kindly words we use, “Good-night,”
Yet parting words are words of sorrow,
And may not vie with sweet “Good-morrow,”
With which again our friends we greet
When in the breakfast-room we meet,
At the social table round,
Listening to the lively sound
Of those notes which never tire
Of urn or kettle on the fire.