Though he stayed some
time at that picturesque place, does not so much as mention. They say
that this chapel of Saint Mark was built by Euprassius, protos-padarius
of Calabria, and that in the days of Nilus it was dedicated to Saint
Anastasius. Here, at Rossano, we are once more en plein Byzance.
Rossano was not only a political bulwark, the most formidable citadel of
this Byzantine province. It was a great intellectual centre, upon which
literature, theology and art converged. Among the many perverse
historical notions of which we are now ridding ourselves is this-that
Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings.
It needed, on the contrary, a resourceful activity to wipe out, as did
those colonists from the east, every trace of Roman culture and language
(Latin rule only revived at Rossano in the fifteenth century). There was
no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military
achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of
Saracens, Lombards and other intruders. And the life of those old monks
of Saint Basil, as we now know it, represented a veritable renaissance
of art and letters.
Of the ten Basilean convents that grew up in the surroundings of Rossano
the most celebrated was that of S. M. del Patir. Together with the
others, it succeeded to a period of eremitism of solitary anchorites
whose dwellings honeycombed the warm slopes that confront the
Ionian....
The lives of some of these Greco-Calabrian hermits are valuable
documents. In the Vitae Sanctorum Siculorum of O. Caietanus (1057)
the student will find a Latin translation of the biography of one of
them, Saint Elia Junior. He died in 903. It was written by a
contemporary monk, who tells us that the holy man performed many
miracles, among them that of walking over a river dryshod. And the
Bollandists (Acta Sanctorum, 11th September) have reprinted the
biography of Saint Elia Spelaeotes-the cave-dweller, as composed in
Greek by a disciple. It is yet more interesting. He lived in a "honesta
spelunca" which he discovered in 864 by means of a flight of bats
issuing therefrom; he suffered persecutions from a woman, exactly after
the fashion of Joseph and Potiphar's wife; he grew to be 94 years old;
the Saracens vainly tried to burn his dead body, and the water in which
this corpse was subsequently washed was useful for curing another holy
man's toothache. Yet even these creatures were subject to gleams of
common sense. "Virtues," said this one, "are better than miracles."
How are we to account for these rock-hermits and their inelegant habits?
How explain this poisoning of the sources of manly self-respect?
Thus, I think: that under the influence of their creed they reverted
perforce to the more bestial traits of aboriginal humanity.
