DIONYSIUS Exiguus (DIONYSIUS the Little). — A Scythian monk, *moribus omnino Romanis*, who, to remedy the deficiencies of the various Greek canonical translations circulating in the West since the mid-5th century, compiled in Rome between 498 and 514 a collection known as the *Collectio Conciliorum Dionysiana prima*. This included the Greek canons of the *Syntagma* up to the Council of Chalcedon, to which he added the canons of Sardica, those of the Council of Carthage of 425, and finally the canons of the Apostles. Upon discovering a better exemplar of the canons of Carthage, D. decided to produce a second edition of his collection, the *Collectio Conciliorum Dionysiana altera*, introducing further modifications to the text; finally, at the urging of Pope Hormisdas, he produced a third edition, the *Collectio Conciliorum Dionysiana tertia*.
For a long time it was believed that D. the Little had been the first to collect the decrees of the Roman Pontiffs into a single collection; however, Maassen already pointed out traces of earlier collections, and various hypotheses regarding them have been advanced by Duchesne, Massigli, and more recently by C. Silva-Tarouca and Wurm.
D. assembled another collection, which may be called the *Collectio Dionysiana decretalium*, containing 38 decretals of the popes from Siricius (384) to Anastasius II (498); the decretals provide responses to various consultations addressed to the pontiffs on baptism, Orders, penance, heretics, secular jurisdiction, and liturgical usages.
The Dionysian collections, when combined into a single corpus, took on different forms, such as the *Dionysiana Bobiensis*, down to the famous transmission of the *Dionysiana* by Pope Adrian to Charlemagne in 774, the *Dionysiana-Hadriana*, which contains the same material as the *Dionysiana* plus additional material of its own, the *Collectio Dionysiana-Hadriana cum mutationibus*, and the *Collectio Dionysiana-Hadriana acta*. Extracts were also made: the *Breviarium ad quaerendum sententias infra* and the *Epitome Hadriani*.
D. the Little is also credited with introducing the Christian era (v. era), which he employed in compiling the Paschal cycle table he produced in continuation of that of Cyril of Alexandria.