APOPHTHEGMATA PATRUM. - Apophthegma means a saying or a witty and sententious reply, uttered by an oracle or by an illustrious personage.
Among the Greeks there are sentences attributed to the Seven Sages, to Themistocles, to Isocrates; three of the approximately 80 opuscules of Plutarch comprised under the name Moralia are entitled A. Diogenes Laertius made use of similar collections in composing his Lives of the Philosophers. Among the Romans we know, through Cicero, that Cato and Caesar wrote volumes of apophthegms.
Primitive Christian literature too has handed down to us examples of this genre; that is, sayings or maxims issuing from the lips of the ancient ascetics, preserved and collected in the various monasteries of the East, first by tradition and then in writing. The texts moreover contained in PG must be connected with many other texts in Greek, in Arabic, in Coptic; some of them have been published, but the majority still remains hidden in the manuscripts of the monasteries of Athos, of Syria and of Egypt.
The most famous collection of these sentences was printed by Cotelier in 1677, precisely under the name Ἀποφθέγματα τῶν ἁγίων γερόντων, in Latin A. P., an edition later reproduced by Migne as a supplement to the Historia Lausiaca of Palladius (v.). We do not know who its author is, who fused, as best he could, earlier collections of sentences and arranged them following the alphabetical order of the personages who uttered them. He himself, in the preface, tells us that no effort was spared, because «the books in which the sayings and deeds of the holy elders are reported without any order are numerous». Nor do we know with precision the time at which it was composed: from external and internal arguments it seems that this date cannot be earlier than the first half of the 6th century, it is certainly to be placed after 509 and perhaps even later. According to some critics the Verba Seniorum, which form books V and VI of the Vitae Patrum of Rosweyde and which contain almost the same material, cited however with the most complete disorder, are to be considered one of its principal sources. According to this hypothesis, since the Verba Seniorum seem to have been collected after 557, the date of composition would have to be moved to the second half of the 6th century. The author nevertheless made use of a large pre-existing material which circulated in small collections and in various languages from the middle of the 6th century. As for the country of origin, it seems to be Egypt.
Besides the edition of Cotelier, there exists a more extensive alphabetical collection in the manuscript of the British Museum, Burney 50. A third collection arranged by subject, divided into 44 chapters, is preserved for us in a Latin version published by Rosweyde as book VII of his Vitae Patrum. These three fundamental collections are composed of more or less the same material, but each contains apophthegms that the others do not have. Photius possessed a copy in which the sentences were arranged by subject and he gives the titles of the chapters in Bibliotheca, cod. 198 (PG 103, 664); the title of the collection is Ἀνδρῶν ἁγίων βίβλος (cf. PL 73, 852).
There exist several versions: Latin, edited by Rosweyde in the Vitae Patrum, books V and VI, which in reality seem to form a distinct work, as has been said; Armenian, in Le vite dei santi Padri (in Armenian), Venice 1855; Coptic, in Zoega, Catal. cod. copti., pp. 287-361, from a manuscript of the Vatican, a mere fragment; Syriac, published in vol. VII of the Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum of P. Bedjan, Paris 1890-97, who, perhaps following Migne, gives them as a third part of the work of Palladius and entitles them Paradise of the Fathers.
All this ascetic material, known also under the name Λειμωνάριον μέγα or Patristic Paradise, was the object of devout reading in the cloisters until the late Middle Ages.
Bibliography4 works
Graziella Miot