ecclesial context within Sophronius’s scheme. Enigmatic dreams, it should be noted, are exceptional, and only once do we glimpse a possible clerical arbitration of divine access through dream interpretation.181 Indeed, while certain of the shrine’s clerics are included as subjects of the saints’ miracles, such clerics are for the most part conspicuous for their absence from surrounding narratives. Furthermore, where ecclesiastical rituals do appear, it is in dreams, and the rites themselves are appropriated by the saints. In the face of recalcitrant pagans or heretics, therefore, it is not clerics but the martyrs who appear as priests with the cup of communion, spreading incense in the manner of the steward or reading from the Gospels in the form of a deacon.182 Furthermore, when such supplicants awake and partake of the eucharist, they do so directly, seemingly without clerical mediation.183
In a text that celebrates the direct intercession of the saints within the lives of individuals, the absence of clerics and mediating rituals is perhaps unsurprising. Nevertheless, once we situate Sophronius’s text next to other healing-saint collections produced within the same period, his presentation of the saints’ cult’s practice appears not as a simple description of patients’ experience at the shrine but as a particular model promoted over potential others, and in competition with other potential impresarios. Several of such collections survive: thus at Seleucia we have the Miracles of Thecla (444–76);184 at Constantinople, the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian (ca. 527–623)185 and Miracles of Artemius (658–68);186 and at Thessalonica, the Miracles of Demetrius (ca. 610).187 Like Sophronius, these authors too insist on basic virtue as a precondition of their saint or saints’ patronage (although their schemes, we should note, are less developed). Besides the need for faith in the saint, emphasized within all collections, the Miracles of Thecla 4 makes explicit reference to the need for supplicants to adopt a “worthy life.” For, the text tells us, “the holy megalomartyr will never approach someone who is slovenly and impious.”188 The Miracles of Cosmas and Damian too, like the Miracles of Cyrus and John, emphasizes the importance of obedience to, and faith in, the saints: “See now, most faithful ones,” interjects one author at the end of Miracles of Cosmas and Damian 16, “how many difficulties disobedience [hē parakoē] brings about, and what better, what greater benefits the virtue of obedience [hē tēs hupakoēs aretē] produces.”189 The Miracles of Artemius, too, makes explicit reference to sin as an impediment to cure.190
Alongside these demands for basic virtue, however, these collections also comment on the clerical and liturgical structures of their shrines. In the Miracles of Thecla clerics are celebrated as special recipients of the saint’s favor, and the cult itself is integrated within a far broader ecclesiastical world. Thus the text describes a remarkable succession of high-level clerics: Dexianus, bishop of Seleucia (3, 7, 8, 32), Menodorus, bishop of Aegae (9), Basil, bishop of Seleucia (12), Marianus, bishop of Tarsus (29), Maximus, bishop of Seleucia (30), John, bishop of Seleucia (44), and Porphyrius, bishop of Seleucia (peroration). “The archpriests and priests,” the author informs us in Miracles of Thecla 6, “are more honorable than all men.”191 Both Dexianus and Menodorus, furthermore, prior to election to their respective sees, are said to have been administrators (paredroi) within the saint’s shrine.192 The cult is presented, therefore, both as the playground of an ecclesiastical elite and as a training ground for local clerical honors.
Furthermore, where the Miracles of Cyrus and John makes little or no reference to liturgical contexts—that is, contexts that might require clerical intercession—the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian contains a general exhortation to participate in the eucharist, added, almost as an afterthought, to Miracles of Cosmas and Damian 5:193
Therefore you learn, friends of Christ, what you knew—that is, the operations of the saints Cosmas and Damian, which most of us have enjoyed, lest we neglect to come together as far as we are able in their church, which benefits all. For those who are strong of body who fulfill this procure security for themselves, and those among them judged worthy of a cure by the saints who compete with them fulfill a debt and perform an act of gratitude, in particular whenever their hands look to the needs of those in want and they participate more frequently in divine communion—I mean the awesome mysteries. For those who live with these virtues not only serve God, who is well pleased with such sacrifices, but also found their own souls on rock, souls whose foundations the winds of life are not able to shake, for they have been founded on the secure rock of faith.
The same text sets two miracles at the saints’ regular vigil,194 and furthermore, it contains one narrative that dramatically underscores the potential of liturgical acts to heal. Therein, a deaf and dumb woman comes to the shrine and implores the saints to intervene. “Before being healed,” the anonymous authors tell us, “she sang in her mind the Trisagion, and through and by this she was healed with the grace of Saints Cosmas and Damian. For when the lamplight service [to luchnikon] had finished in their home and the Trisagion was being pronounced as was the custom, suddenly she who was deaf heard the psalmody and who was mute cried out with the psalm singers, and sang with them the Trisagion.”195 The Miracles of Thecla, too, contains a long and detailed description of the liturgical celebrations at the saint’s feast,196 referring to the “spiritual benefit” (ōpheleia tēs psuchēs) that those celebrations bestow.197
The later Miracles of Artemius presents an even more ritualized vision of a shrine’s practice (although the eucharist itself is, we should note, absent).198 In Sophronius’s scheme, the sole acts that he prescribes to his audience (through inclusion in the narratives of most miracles) are the offering of prayers to the saints in preparation for a cure and the offering of thanks upon that cure’s completion.199 But such acts in themselves confer no spiritual benefit (and are thus not prerequisite to success before the saints). In the Miracles of Artemius, however, many miracles refer to the performance of the “customary rites” (ta ethē) as a preparation for incubation itself, rites that seem to involve the simple dedication of a votive lamp (kandēlē) with wine and oil, or of a candle (kēros).200 Furthermore, the author offers a spirited defense of the efficacy of that practice when, in Miracles of Artemius 34, a sick girl who often lights lamps on behalf of her mother is saved from death by the saint. In a dream she sees angels coming to collect her, but Artemius objects and claims her for himself, thus saving her. The author then comments: “These things were revealed to the girl not because the martyr was opposed to the divine command (for this could not be) but in order that she might know that the Lord of Life had long since granted her to him, and lest she think that that the constant lighting [of lamps] be reckoned vain by the saints.”201
The ritualized context that the Miracles of Artemius constructs is maintained further through frequent references to the shrine’s weekend vigil. Miracles of Artemius 33, for example, takes its setting as the time of the Sabbath, “with the Lord’s Day dawning and the spiritual vigil being celebrated, when the kathisma had been sung, after the three evening antiphons.”202 The patient has a dream in which the saint commands him to apply a wax salve as a cure. When the patient wakes, “It was then the hour when the midnight rites [ta mesonuktika] are fulfilled, and the time when the holy wax salve is distributed with the adoration of the honorable and life-giving Cross.”203 The patient performs his adoration, receives the holy salve, and is cured.204
Artemius’s night vigil is indeed the defining act of worship for those devoted to his shrine. Thus the subject of Miracles of Artemius 15 is described as “a certain man in voluntary service, an attendant to one of the elite, who frequented the night vigil of the Forerunner on the Sabbath.”205 In Miracles of Artemius 18 the protagonist is “a certain man who attended the night vigil of the Forerunner from a young age, and who still now sings the verses of the sainted, humble Romanus.” In the same miracle, Theodosius “the church singer” (psaltēs) and Abraamius “the treasurer of the society of those who attend the night vigil” (arkarios tou philikou tōn tēs pannuchidos) also make appearances, as does one Theophylact, who also “frequented
