I have another piece for you of the ancient literature about St Nicholas of Myra. This is an encomium which is found in the manuscripts among the sermons of Proclus, the 5th century Patriarch of Constantinople. Although it has acquired his name, it is really anonymous. Bryson Sewell completed a draft of the translation, and Andrew Eastbourne revised it and completed it. Here it is:
- Proclus_of_Constantinople_ps-Encomium on St. Nicholas-2016_rev1 (PDF)
- Proclus_of_Constantinople_ps-Encomium on St. Nicholas-2016_rev1 (Word .docx)
As usual I make these public domain – use them for any purpose, personal, educational or commercial.
It’s translated from the Greek text published by G. Anrich. Apparently there are quite a number of late encomia which merely retread the earlier material, and this is mostly one of them. Still useful to have, tho!
UPDATE: Dr. E. has drawn my attention to an editorial error with note 14. I’ve uploaded new versions of the files.
Thank you, all three! What a wonderful (in various senses!), fascinating thing to be able to read!
It is humbling and exhilarating to encounter my abysms of ignorance about Greek hagiography and theology and rhetoric with such a clear taste of all the sorts of things given here, even though I am further in the dark about them.
You are very welcome! I wish some rich person would fund the translation of masses of this stuff. It really could be done quite cheaply, and we would all be the richer.
I’ve just dug out my copy of A. Blom’s Nikolaas van Myra en zijn tijd (1998) to consult his handy appendix-list sketching an overview of the development of the Nicholas literature.
He notes that Cioffari is of the opinion that this is perhaps really by Proclus, or, if not, from the period 447-550. He further notes that the Praxis de Stratelatis (story of Nicholas and the generals) to which this encomium refers is dated by Anrich in the version known to us to 460-580, while Cioffari dates it to some time between the death of Nicholas and the first half of the fifth century.
Sadly, I have no access to Cioffari’s S. Nicola nella Critica Storica (Bari, 1987), upon which he draws, to follow the arguments – though I suspect I would have to brush up my Italian pretty vigorously, if I did.
I think I translated that appendix somewhere on the blog. I wonder if I still have the book. I didn’t ever get any of Cioffari’s books or articles; but then I felt that the important thing was to make the texts accessible, rather than delving into the secondary literature.
It looked to me as if Cioffari seems to give very early dates to *everything*; which of course means that I don’t feel very confident in his assessments.