ABERCIUS, Saint. - Bishop of Hierapolis (or Geropolis) in Phrygia. Feast on 22 October. His Life recounts that, after a decree of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been issued, ordering sacrifices to be made everywhere, A., warned by a vision, went by night into the temple of Apollo and with a great club smashed everything there to pieces. While the city is in an uproar over this, he begins to preach in the Forum to the faithful: when the enraged multitude of pagans rushes up, he heals some demoniacs before them and so calms them, indeed converts many of them to baptism. His fame spreads through the neighboring provinces; he also cures of blindness the mother of a leading citizen, Eussenianus, a friend of the emperor, and frees many demoniacs. The devil, to avenge himself, enters the emperor's own daughter, protesting that he can be expelled from her only by A. of Hierapolis. Marcus Aurelius writes to Eussenianus to send A. to him, and he, having sailed from Adalia, arrives at Portus Romanus and, presenting himself to the empress (since M. Aurelius was in camp against the barbarians), has the daughter brought to the hippodrome. There he solemnly casts out the demon and, as a penance for having made him undertake that journey, commands him to take upon his shoulders a heavy marble altar that was there and carry it to Hierapolis near the southern gate. From the empress he asks as a favor that baths be built near Hierapolis, and before returning to his homeland he makes a tour through Syria, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, benefiting everyone. He lives a few more years and writes a book; warned of his approaching death, he prepares his tomb and dictates the epitaph to be engraved upon it, on that altar which he had had brought from Rome. When another A. had then been elected to succeed him, he himself consecrates him.
This legend was in the past regarded as having no authority, and the poetic epitaph of the saint which it reports was considered wholly fantastic. Only Halloix (Illustrium scriptorum ecclesiae orientalis vitae, II, Douai 1630, p. 137), and more learnedly Pitra (Spicilegium Solesmense, III, Paris 1856, p. 352) defended its substantial authenticity. Others, such as Garrucci (La Civ. Catt. [1856, 1], p. 686), saw in it extensive interpolations. But at the beginning of 1882 Ramsay found near ancient Hierapolis (a little south of Synnada, capital of Phrygia Secunda or Salutaris) a fine metrical inscription of a certain Alexander, from 216, in which De Rossi and Duchesne immediately recognized notable passages of the epitaph of A. The following year the same Ramsay then found in the same place, set into the walls of ancient baths, two notable fragments of the original epitaph of A., agreeing almost word for word with the text of the legend. Their character, older than that of the stele of Alexander, must be dated back at least to the end of the 2nd century, this too in agreement with the age resulting from the legend, which moreover does not erroneously assign as the see of A. the better-known Hierapolis ad Lycum, in Phrygia Prima or Pacatiana, since it speaks expressly of a city near Synnada. Thus the value of the Life cannot be denied, inasmuch as it is founded on the epitaph, and probably also with regard to several other more notable particulars that it gives us about the saint.
We reproduce the text of the inscription (22 hexameter verses) critically reconstructed, giving in capitals the parts taken from the stele of Alexander and in square brackets what is attested only by the Life:
ἐΚΛΕΚΤΗΣ ΠΟ[λ]ΕΩΣ Ο ΠΟΛΕΙ[της] ΤΟΤΤ' ΕΙΟΠΗ[σε] ζῶν ἸΝ'ΕΧΩ ΦΑΝΕΡ[ῶς] ΣΩΜΑΤΟΣ ΕΝΘΑ ΘΕΣΙΝ ΟΥΝΟΜ' [Ἀβέρκιος ὧν ὁ] ΜΑΘΗΤΗΣ ΠΟΙΜΕΝΟΣ ΑΓΝΟΥ 3
[ὁς βόσκει προβάτων ἀγέλας ὄρεσιν πεδίοις τε, ὀρθαλμοὺς ὃς ἔχει μεγάλους πάντη καθοφῶντας. οὗτος γάρ μ' ἐδίδαξε... γράμματα πιστά·] 6 εἰς Ρώμη[ν] ὃς ἔπεμψεν] ἐμὲν βασίλει' ἀναθρήσαι] καὶ βασίλισ[αν] ἰδεῖν χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]λον χρυσό[το]
THE LIFE
OF THE VENERABLE
SERVANT OF GOD
VINCENT DE PAUL
FOUNDER
AND
FIRST SUPERIOR GENERAL
OF THE CONGREGATION OF THE MISSION.
Divided into three Books.
By Messire LOUIS ABELLY Bishop of Rodez.
At FLORENTIN LAMBERT, rue Saint Jacques, before Saint Yves, at the image of Saint Paul.
M. D.C. LXIV.
With Approbation & Privilege.
149
(Int. Enc. Catt.)
ABELLY - Life of St. Vincent de Paul. Title page of the original edition (Paris 1664).
λαὸν δ'εἶδον ἐκεῖ λαμπρὰν σφραγειδαν ἐξοντα.] 9
καὶ Συρῆς πεῖδον εἶδα] καὶ ἄστεα πάν[τα, Νίσιβιν]
Εὐρᾶτην διαβ[άς· πάν[τη] δ'έσχον συνο[...]
Παῦλον ἔχων ἐπ[...]· πίστις π[άντη] δὲ προῆγε 12
καὶ παρέθηκε [τροφήν] πάντη ἰχθύν ἀπὸ πηγῆς]
πανμεγέθη, καθ[αρόν, οὐ] ἐδράξατο παρθέ[νος] ἀγνή]
καὶ τοῦτον ἐπέ[δωκε] σίβ[λος] ἐσύ[ειν] διὰ παντός. 15
οἶνον χρηστὸν ἔχουσα κέρασμα διδούσα μετ' ἄρτου.
ταῦτα παρεστῶς εἶπον Ἀβέρκιος ὧδε γραφήναι
ἐβδομηκοστὸν ἔτος καὶ δεύτερον ἦγον ἀληθῶς. 18
ταῦθ' ὁ νοῶν εὔξαστο ὑπὲρ Ἀβερκίου πᾶς ὁ συνυδός].
ΟΥ ΜΕΝΤΟΙ ΤΥΜΒΩ ΤΙΣ ΕΜΩ ΕΤΕΡΟΝ ΤΙΝΑ
ΘΗΣΕΙ
ΕΙ Δ'ΟΥΝ ΡΩΜΑΙΩΝ ΤΑΜΕΙΩ ΘΗΣΕΙ[ι]
ΔΙΣΧΕΙΑΙΑ [χ]ΡΥΣΑ 21
ΚΑΙ ΧΡΗΣΤΗ ΠΑΤΡΙΑ' ΙΕΡΟΠΟΛΕΙ ΧΕΙΛΙΑ
ΧΡΥΣΑ.
Here is the translation: "A citizen of a chosen city, I have made this monument for myself while alive, so as to have here a noble burial for my body, [3] I by name A., a disciple of the chaste shepherd who pastures flocks of sheep over mountains and plains, who has great eyes, which from on high look in every direction. [6] He indeed instructed me in writings worthy of faith, ... who sent me to Rome to contemplate the palace and see the queen in golden robe and golden sandals; [9] and I saw there a people, who bear a shining seal. I also visited the plain and all the cities of Syria and, having crossed the Euphrates, Nisibis, and everywhere I found companions... [12] having Paul with me... and everywhere faith guided me and set before me as food the fish of the spring, very great, pure, which the chaste virgin takes [15] and offers to her friends to eat every day, having an excellent wine, which she mixed for us with water together with bread. These things I, A., had written here in my presence; [18] seventy-two years I had in truth. Whoever understands what I say and feels as I do, let him pray for A. But let no one place another in my tomb; [21] otherwise, he shall pay to the treasury of the Romans two thousand gold coins and to my good homeland Geropolis a thousand."
The Catholic value of this monument was too great and evident for learned rationalists, once certain of its authenticity, not to begin at once to call its Christian character into doubt. Thus in 1894 Ficker sought to demonstrate that A. was a priest of Cybele, in 1895 Harnack saw in him a pagan Gnostic, and in the following year Dieterich a priest of Attis. But these and other similar attempts fell flat owing to the fact that in that epitaph all the most singular phrases are explained with ease and naturalness in the language of the most ancient Christian symbolism, as Dölger especially demonstrated, and outside of that they find only strained and contradictory hermeneutics. One readily tends to identify our A. with Avircius Marcellus, to whom an anti-Montanist treatise was addressed (Eusebius, Hist. eccl., V, 16, 3), but wrongly, since even supposing the not easy identification of 'Ανίρκιος with 'Αβέρκιος, the latter would not have passed over in silence in the epitaph the most important part of the name Marcellus, at a time when the nomen was often omitted, but never the cognomen. And since the author of the Life was certainly at Hierapolis (so that he could not have confused the place with the distant Hierapolis ad Lycum) and copied the inscription there, if he had found the full name there, at least in the prose part that probably followed the poetic one, he would not have passed it over in silence. Perhaps from this prose part A. was clearly called bishop, as the Life represents him; from the poetic epitaph this does not appear.
In this the "chosen city" must be Hierapolis and not the mystical heavenly city; it is called Geropolis by A., by another inscription and by some coins, just as various other homonymous cities are called now Geropolis, now Hierapolis. The "shepherd who pastures flocks over mountains and plains" is Jesus who has faithful everywhere; "the palace and the queen of Rome" are the Church in her splendid see, but the author of the legend (like certain moderns) understood by this the empress in her palace in the absence of the emperor; the "shining seal" is the Christian character; the "traveling companion Paul" alludes verisimilarly to the Letters of the Apostle, as faith is its guide; the "great fish etc." is evidently Jesus as Eucharistic food (ΙΧΘΥC, v.); the "chaste virgin" is the Church, which administers the Eucharist to us every day (and note the abundant use of water that was then made there).
This, as De Rossi called it, is the queen of Christian inscriptions, the most ancient securely datable one, the first Eucharistic monument that has come down to us on stone and one of the first of the discipline of the arcane, a worthy forerunner of the flourishing Christian Phrygian epigraphy of the 3rd and 4th centuries. It deserves to be compared especially with the epitaph of Pectorius (v.) of Autun. - See Pl. V.
