DIONIGI il PICCOLO. — A Scythian monk, moribus omnino Romanis, who, in order to make up for the deficiencies of the various translations of the Greek canons circulating in the West since the middle of the fifth century, composed in Rome, between 498 and 514, a collection known as the Collectio Conciliorum Dionysiana prima; he included in it the Greek canons of the Syntagma up to the Council of Chalcedon, added the canons of Sardica, those of the Council of Carthage of 425, and finally the canons of the Apostles. Upon discovering a better copy of the canons of Carthage, D. decided to prepare a second version of his collection, Collectio Conciliorum Dionysiana altera, and introduced further modifications into the text of the earlier one; finally, at the request of Pope Hormisdas, he produced a third, Collectio Conciliorum Dionysiana tertia.
For a long time it was believed that D. il P. had been the first to collect the decretals of the Roman Pontiffs; but Maassen had already indicated traces of earlier collections, and various hypotheses concerning them were proposed by Duchesne, Massigli, and more recently by C. Silva-Tarouca and Wurm.
D. brought together in another collection, which may be called the Collectio Dionysiana decretali, 38 decretals of the popes from Siricius (384) to Anastasius II (498); the decretals provide responses to various consultations submitted to the pontiffs concerning Bap-
tism, Orders, Penance, heretics, secular jurisdiction, and liturgical usages.
The Dionysian collections, subsequently brought together into a single collection, took different forms, such as the Dionysiana Bobiensis, until the celebrated transmission of the Dionysiana made by Pope Hadrian to Charlemagne in 774, the Dionysio-hadriana, which contains the same material as the Dionysiana, together with additional material of its own, the Collectio Dionysio-hadriana cum mutationibus, and the Collectio Dionysio-hadriana aucta. Extracts were also made from them: Breviarium ad quaerendum sententias infra, Epitome Hadriani.
D. il P. is also owed the introduction of the Christian era (v. ERA), which he used in compiling the table of the Easter cycles that he prepared as a continuation of that of Cyril of Alexandria.