Hipótesis Específicas

In a brief note, Baumstark asserted that the Passio of Sergius and Bacchus must belong to the fifth century;

he arrived at this conclusion only by grouping the

Passio with other dated martyr accounts, but without indicating what characteristics the Passio of Sergius and Bacchus shares with them.65 Considered togeth-er with both the exttogeth-ernal littogeth-erary evidence and the epi-graphical and archeological evidence now available, the Passio does indeed seem to date from the fifth century, but after the 440s. To reach this more precise date, we must turn to the activities of Alexander of Hi-erapolis, who flourished in the first decades of the fifth century.

As we have seen, the Passio must have been com-posed in Greek by 514 when Severus relied on it for his homily at Chalcis; and the Passio's account men-tions the dedication of a martyrium within Rusafa's walls by fifteen bishops. It is also known that, not long before 431, Bishop Alexander of Hierapolis invested three hundred pounds of gold in a church at Rusafa in commemoration of the martyr Sergius.66 In 431, Alex-ander was part of the cohort of bishops who arrived at the Council of Ephesus under the leadership of John, patriarch of Antioch. Their journey had been delayed, causing them to arrive only after Nestorius's condem-nation, which had been carefully engineered by Cyril of Alexandria. Alexander remained adamant in his

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anti-Cyrillian stance even after 433, when John and Cyril accepted the Formula of Reunion. After the re-conciliation, John and his supporters made repeated attempts to moderate the stance of Alexander and the other bishops who held out against Cyril, including many from the

65. Baumstark, Geschichte, 95 and n. 2. Brock in Lapridge, Archbishop Theodore, 41, groups the Passio of SS. Sergius and Bacchus with other Greek passiones translated to Syriac in the fifth–seventh centuries. The earliest manuscript of the Passio is sixth-century.

66. ACOec. 1.4, p. 185; cf. 1.4, pp. 162–63.

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province of Euphratesia.67 In a letter to Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, Alexander asserted that he could not bear to join in communion with John, even if the latter were to grant Alexander the entire kingdom of heaven (over which, Alexander added, John did not rule), or even Rusafa and the other cities (civitates) in the desert (solitudo).68 John resorted to diminishing the influence of the rebellious bishops—the bishop of Doliche was replaced, and in about 434, without con-sulting Alexander, John traveled to the walled settle-ment that housed S. Sergius's shrine and consecrated a bishop of Rusafa, which until then had fallen under the direct control of the metropolitan of Hierapolis.69 Alexander's activities at Rusafa and John's separation of the town from Alexander's direct patronage are clear signs that Rusafa's stature as a pilgrimage site had grown sufficiently to make it a prized possession.

The Passio also claims that the miracles of Sergius at Rusafa drew many pilgrims.70 There is evidence that the cult of S. Sergius had already begun to spread from Rusafa by the early fifth century: Edessa / Urfa and a village now called , northeast of Edessa, had churches dedicated to Rusafa's martyr from

around the time when Alexander showed an active in-terest in Rusafa in the 430s.71 John took the radical step of wresting a potential seat of influence from a defiant bishop's control. Alexander vainly protested that the Antiochene robbers were after his gold.72 No fifteen bishops are mentioned in Alexander's letter of protest, where he includes among his losses his in-vestment in the church at Rusafa. We can be confid-ent that Alexander would have rallied as many bish-ops as he could, including even his friend Theodoret of Cyrrhus, for the consecration of the miracle-working Syrian martyr's shrine.73 But we should not expect the metropolitan to have distracted the reader from his loss with such details. Alexander took the controversy very personally, and this no doubt only compounded John's wariness of Alexander's direct control over Rusafa. On 15 April 435, deaf to pleas for moderation by fellow bishops, including Theodoret, Alexander was exiled to the Egyptian mines. Rusafa's fame only continued to increase.

67. Frend, Monophysite Movement, 23; Devreesse, Patriarcat, 51–53.

68. ACOec. 1.4, p. 171.

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69. Ibid., pp. 162–63, 185.

70. Pass. gr. 30; Pass. syr., p. 322. Ulbert in Actes, 445, suggests a link between the translation and the growth of the cult's popularity.

71. See chapter 4.

72. ACOec. 1.4, pp. 184–85.

73. Cf., e.g., the invitation of neighboring bishops, ab-bots, and priests by Bishop Perpetuus of Tours to the feast of S. Martin in the 450s, at which Perpetuus con-secrated the miracle-working saint's magnificent new church (Greg. Tur., De virtutibus S. Martini 1.6).

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Discovery of a pivotal inscription originally located in the structure called basilica B by the archeologists, to-gether with excavations beneath this building, have helped identify Alexander's church. The inscription states that the stone-built structure was begun in 518.74 It also relates that the new building replaced an older shrine built of mud brick; and indeed a brick building, finds from which date it no later than 425, has been discovered beneath the stone basilica.75 The new evidence allows Konrad, the excavator of the levels beneath basilica B, to confirm that the early fifth-century building is the church known to have been built at Rusafa by Alexander, and the same one consecrated by fifteen bishops, as the Passio relates.76 Allowing a short period of time to justify the observation by the Passio's author that the original site outside the walls worked more miracles than the new shrine, the composition of the Passio can be placed safely in the mid fifth century.

The insistence of the Passio's author that the original shrine was still in his day, that is, in the mid fifth cen-tury, the site of miracle-working deserves our atten-tion. One way in which the memory of the traditional

place of martyrdom could have been kept alive would have been if the feast of the saint included a proces-sion linking the site of martyrdom with the new shrine within the walls that held the relics. One can imagine how, commencing from the shrine within the walls, a procession might have passed from the new shrine to the original tomb outside the walls. The relics would have been carried in the procession, escorted by the region's ecclesiastical and secular leadership, per-haps even a military guard. At the site of the martyr-dom, the Passio would have been read, litanies per-formed and hymns sung in honor of the saint.77 There is no doubt that by the mid fifth century, Rusafa contained within its walls the shrine of S. Sergius. But no evidence, not even the Passio, suggests that S.

Bacchus too was buried there. In fact, the Passio spends little time on Bacchus. No mention is made, for instance, of his veneration after his body was saved by the Euphratine monks. Bacchus does non-etheless play a part, if only a cameo role, in the story related by the Passio, and the consequence of this was that as S. Sergius evolved into one of eastern Christianity's greatest defenders, he would sometimes appear alone, and at other

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74. Ulbert and Gatier, DaM 5 (1991): 169–82. For dis-cussion of the inscription and its place in the cult's de-velopment at Rusafa, see below, pp. 80–91.

75. Konrad, DaM 6 (1992): 343–44.

76. Ibid., 349 and n. 181; Kollwitz, Neue Deutsche Ausgrabungen, 46; Ulbert in Actes, 447. Kollwitz was tempted as early as 1959 to identify the church of the fifteen bishops with Alexander of Hierapolis's church (Neue Deutsche Ausgrabungen, 46).

77. For processions, vigils, miracula readings, and banquets accompanying saints' feasts, see Maraval, Lieux saints, 213–21. For the probable location of the tomb outside the walls, see below, pp. 149–73, esp.

pp. 157–59.

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times with S. Bacchus by his side. From Severus's homily, it appears that, at least in 514, the feast at Chalcis was held in honor of Sergius alone—Severus had to lobby for Bacchus's inclusion. Severus later wrote three hymns in honor of Sergius, but only one featured Bacchus.78 Severus may have insisted that what God had joined in martyrdom should not be sep-arated in pious remembrance. But those who came to know the powerful martyr Sergius on his own at Rusafa and at local feasts, may have thought it unne-cessary to include Bacchus. Others welcomed him.

The result was not terribly uniform. In Syria and Meso-potamia, the predominance of Sergius was a given, the appearance of his less-spectacular fellow martyr only occasional.