The names of many Old Testament personages are included: Moses, Aaron, Elias, Jeremias, etc., also almost all the apostles and their immediate disciples, but for the most part they occur on different dates from those which they usually occupy in the Roman Calendar. For instance, St John the Evangelist is on the 8th May and the 26th September, St Barnabas on the 11th June, SS. Peter and Paul on the 29th June, St Titus on the 25th August, St Thomas on the 6th October, St Philip on the 14th November, St Andrew on the 30th November. SS. Joachim and Anna appear on the 9th September, the day after our Lady’s Nativity, the Archangel Michael on the 8th November, St Thecla (here entitled proto-martyr) on the 24th September, and the Holy Innocents on the 31st December. For the first time, Constantine and his mother Helena, appear as saints in the calendar; they are commemorated together on the 21st May, a day which falls before that on which Constantine actually died. Justinian and his consort Theodora are commemorated also, but do not appear with the title “saint”; they are placed on the 14th November, the day on which Justinian died, Theodora having preceded him on the 28th June 548. Justinian was called a prince of pious memory by the popes Pelagius II. and Gregory the Great.[798]
From these indications it appears that this martyrology was intended principally if not exclusively for the city and diocese of Constantinople. The safest conclusion to arrive at is to regard it as the martyrology of the patriarchate of Constantinople, since it steers a middle course, as it were, between particularism and universality: it is the most ancient of the Greek menologies known to us. Among the Greeks St John Damascene is regarded as the originator of calendars of this kind,[799] corresponding to Ado in the Latin Church. The menology has been edited with an excellent commentary by Stephen A. Morcelli (Rome, 1788), having previously been published in Latin at Urbino (1727) from the Codex of Cardinal Albani.
8. The Menology of the Emperor Basil II., and the Syrian Lectionary of the Eleventh Century
This menology takes its name from Basil II. Porphyrogenitus (976-1025), and was given to the public for the first time in its entirety by Cardinal Albani at Urbino in 1727, from two codices each containing six months. It is distinguished from the menology which we have just described by having a saint on every day of the year, and most of the days have more than one; the saints are drawn from the whole extent of the Eastern Church, and the Western Church, especially Sicily and Rome, is more prominent than in the former document.
As regards Rome, there are a large number of popes given who are entirely absent from the other menology: Silvester, Leo, Agatho, Gregory I., Celestine, etc. With the exception of Gregory I. they are generally placed on different dates from those on which they are commemorated in the West, e.g. Silvester on the 2nd January, Leo on the 18th February, and Alexander on the 16th March, etc. It appears as if the sources which the compiler had at his disposal for the West were insufficient, since, for example, he gives St Perpetua, St Felicitas and companions once on the 2nd February, and again on the 14th March, with the addition, “in Rome”; from this it would appear that he thought the saints mentioned on the first date had belonged to some other locality. St Agnes is given on the 5th July.
Not so many patriarchs of Constantinople are given as one would have expected, and many, indeed, are omitted who are included in the menology of which we have spoken in the previous section, as, for example, Nectarius, Paul II., Gennadius, Thomas II., but on the other hand we find some who lived after the composition of the earlier document, especially Germanus, Tarasius, and Antonius II., surnamed Cauleas († 12th February 896).[800]
In other points the Basilianum resembles the former work, except that it is fuller in every respect. The most striking feature is the large number of saints belonging to religious orders contained in it, who for the most part are specially designated; even the patriarch of the Western monks, St Benedict, is not forgotten, and is given on his proper day. Names from the Old Testament occur frequently, and from the New Testament, we have almost all the disciples of the apostles whose names are given, and these are designated as “belonging to the Seventy.” The number of the days of apostles is considerable, though seldom coinciding with the days observed in the Western Church, except in the case of St Mark, St Barnabas, SS. Peter and Paul, and St Andrew. Both the St James are absent, and so are deprived of veneration within the region in which this document was followed,[801] but there is a feast of all the apostles on the 30th June. St Anna appears on the 25th July; St John the Baptist on the 24th June and 29th August. It is to be noticed that the first four general councils have each a special day allotted to them, while in the Constantinopolitanum all are commemorated on the same day—16th July. It is strange to find not only earthquakes, included, but also defeats in the wars with the Persians, Arabs, and Bulgarians, but unfortunately there is nothing to indicate the localities where these events happened (see the 7th and 20th February, the 23rd March, the 24th May, etc.). This exceeds the limits observed in liturgical documents.
As the day of the foundation of Constantinople (the 11th May) is again included in this document, we must conclude that it belongs to this city. Since, too, Goths and Persians find a place in it, it is ahead of its predecessors in its attempts to achieve universality.[802]
While the admission of foreign names is to be welcomed as a step in advance, it may yet, on the other hand, be a source of confusion and give rise to mistakes later on. We find, namely, in this menology, that the names of foreign saints are not always given on the correct date, but are arbitrarily placed on other days than those to which they belonged. Later redactors, when they found the same name on different dates, may have thought that different persons were meant, and this may have been the cause of the repetition of the names of saints. This shows that in admitting names of new saints, and the correct day of whose death had not been transmitted, they acted according to their fancy. This was the case with regard to the majority of the Seventy Disciples, many of whom appear here for the first time. The same must have taken place also with feasts of our Lord, as when the Flight in Egypt is given on the 26th December, and so placed before the Circumcision and the Presentation. The admission of foreign names was left to chance or opinion. Thus, e.g. the Western saints Ambrose, Martin of Tours, and Hosius are admitted, but Hilary, Augustine, Jerome, etc., are passed over.
The impression made by the entire document is that the principles which were on the whole followed in its composition were not maintained with sufficient care, but yielded more than was right to opinion and caprice. In many cases, too, the necessary knowledge of history, and a sufficient supply of literary material seems to have been lacking.