The Menologium Graecorum of Basil II and the “Life” of St Colluthus

In the 1781 publication of two Coptic fragments of the “Life” of St Colluthus, the preface begins by describing how the pages reached the hands of the owner, Francisco Borgia.  It then continues by printing the entry for St Colluthus from volume 3, pages 105-6, of the “Menologium Graecorum”.  Borgia prints only the Greek text and that full of ligatures.  I was, indeed, unable to read it.

“Menologium Graecorum” was the title of the first printed edition of the Synaxarion of the Greek church.  (A synaxarion is a liturgical book containing a list of the saints and their feast days with a short description). The editor was A. Albani:

ALBANI, Annibale (1682-1751). Menologium Graecorum. Urbino: Antonio Fantauzzi (17270,  3 vols.

At more length, the title is:

Menologium Graecorum jussu Basilii imperatoris Graece olim editum, munificentia et liberalitate … Benedicti XIII. In tres partes divisum nunc primum Graece, et Latine prodit, studio et opera Annibalis … card. Albani

The volumes are online:

Vol. 1 – https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_layxa_CFQpEC/page/n4/mode/1up

Vol. 2 – https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_nOmkHy194oUC/page/n3/mode/1up

Vol. 3 –  https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_4Bol8GjwYB0C/page/n5/mode/2up

While the text was edited by Cardinal Annibale Albani, it was compiled by Giuseppe Simonio Assemani, and came with a Latin parallel translation. This Borgia helpfully omitted.

Albani’s work is reprinted in the Patrologia Graeca vol. 117.  The Colluthus section is on col. 465-6.

Now the first two volumes were printed from a single deluxe physical manuscript – 430 miniatures! – of one of the recensions of the Synaxarion.  This manuscript is known as the Menologium of Basil II, dates to the late 10th century, and today is held in the Vatican, where the shelfmark is MS. Vat. gr. 1613.  It is also online here.  But it only includes the contents for the months of September to February.  Probably a second volume once existed, with the summer months.

So where did Albani find the text of his summer section, which he printed as volume 3?  In Albini’s preface, unnumbered page, we learn:

Secundo, semestrem alteram Partem, cujus initium à mense Martio ducitur, quamque Bollandiani Socii in monasterio Cryptae Ferratae repertam dicunt, à Joanne Francisco Albano iis Graecè Latinèque transmissam fuisse ante annum Christi 1668. quo mensem Martium ex Basiliano Menologio edidere, quemadmodum Joannes Ciampinus in Diario anni 1676. testatur.

Secondly, the other six-month portion, beginning with the month of March, which the Bollandists report having found at the monastery of Grottaferrata, had already been sent to them by Giovanni Francesco Albani in both Greek and Latin before 1668. In that year they published the March section of the Basilian Menologion, as Giovanni Ciampini records in his diary under the year 1676.”

As I learn from the Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography vol. 2, p.205, the manuscript used for the summer section, which is still at Grottaferrata, has the shelfmark MS Cryptensis Β.γ.III.  So that was used for our section of the book.

Colluthus’ saints’ day is 19 May.  So what does the work say about St. Colluthus?  Well, I was not going to fight with the Greek ligatures, so I used AI to transcribe and translate the Latin.

Ex certamen sancti Martyris Colluthi.

Martyr Christi Colluthus fuit, Imperatore Maximiano, ex Thebaide Aegypti urbe. Ob Christi autem confessionem ab idololatris comprehensus, praesidi regionis traditus est: a quo neque blanditiis illectus, neque minis perterritus, Christum libere profitebatur. Idcirco primum quidem ingenti saxo ad ejus collum alligato, inverso capite suspensus fuit. Cumque a lictoribus flagellaretur, dicebat: “Non sunt condignae passiones hujus temporis ad futuram gloriam, quae revelabitur in nobis.” Postea e ligno, in quo suspensus fuerat, depositus, fanum idolorum ingredi, et sacrificare compellitur. Quod cum facere recusaret, ut flammis addiceretur, sententiam accepit. In fornacem itaque valde accensam injectus, hujusce temporariae vitae finem habuit.

English:

From the Contest (martyrdom) of Saint Martyr Colluthus.

Colluthus was a martyr of Christ, when Maximian was emperor, from a city of the Thebaid in Egypt. Because of his confession of Christ, he was seized by the idolaters, and handed over to the governor of the province. Neither enticed by his flattery nor frightened by his threats, he continued to profess Christ openly.  Therefore firstly he was suspended upside down with a great stone tied to his neck. And while he was being flogged by the executioners, he said, “The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.” (Rom. 8:18)

Then he was taken down from the wooden frame on which he had been suspended, and he was forced to go into the temple of the idols and offer sacrifice. But when he refused to do so he was sentenced to be burned alive.  And so he was thrown into an intensely heated furnace, and there was the end of his earthly life.

But then it occurred to me that the Patrologia Graeca text must – unusually – be easier to read than the original edition, because the ligatures would be expanded.  And so they were.  ChatGPT scanned the PG text as follows:

Καὶ ἄθλησις τοῦ ἁγίου μάρτυρος Κολλούθου.

Ὁ τοῦ Χριστοῦ μάρτυς Κολλοῦθος ὑπῆρχεν ἐπὶ τῆς βασιλείας Μαξιμιανοῦ, ἐκ Θηβαΐδος πόλεως τῆς Αἰγύπτου· διὰ δὲ τὴν εἰς Χριστὸν ὁμολογίαν κρατηθεὶς ὑπὸ τῶν προσκυνούντων τὰ εἴδωλα, παρεδόθη τῷ τῆς χώρας ἡγεμόνι· καὶ μήτε κολακείαις δελεασθεὶς, μήτε ἀπειλαῖς πτοηθεὶς, ὡμολόγει τὸν Χριστὸν παῤῥησίᾳ. Διὰ τοῦτο πρῶτον μὲν λίθῳ μεγάλῳ τὸν τράχηλον προσεδεθεὶς, ἐκρεμάσθη κατὰ κεφαλῆς. Καὶ τυπτόμενος ὑπὸ τῶν δημίων, ἔλεγεν· Οὐκ ἄξια τὰ παθήματα τοῦ νῦν καιροῦ πρὸς τὴν μέλλουσαν δόξαν ἀποκαλυφθῆναι εἰς ἡμᾶς. Ἔπειτα τοῦ ξύλου, ἐν ᾧ ἐκρέματο, καταβιβασθεὶς, ἠναγκάζετο ἀπελθεῖν εἰς τὸν ναὸν τῶν εἰδώλων, καὶ θῦσαι. Καὶ μὴ πεισθεὶς, τὴν διὰ τοῦ πυρὸς ἀπόφασιν ἐδέξατο· καὶ ἐμβληθεὶς εἰς κάμινον ἰσχυρῶς ἐκκαεισαν, τέλος ἔσχε τοῦ προσκαίρου βίου.

One word (παῤῥησίᾳ) was definitely read incorrectly, from an awful blur, but luckily it was not abbreviated in the original.  AI then translated this as follows, which I have slightly amended.  Someone with real knowledge of Greek will doubtless find errors, but this is enough for our purpose.

The Contest of the Holy Martyr Colluthus

The martyr of Christ, Colluthus, lived during the reign of Maximian. He was from a city of the Thebaid in Egypt. Because of his confession of Christ, he was seized by those who worshipped idols and handed over to the governor of the province. Neither enticed by flatteries nor intimidated by threats, he confessed Christ with boldness.

Therefore, they first fastened a great stone to his neck and suspended him head downwards. While he was being beaten by the executioners, he was saying, “The sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is about to be revealed to us.”

Afterward, they took him down from the wooden beam on which he had been hanging, and they compelled him to go to the temple of the idols and to offer sacrifice. But he refused to comply and he received the sentence of death by fire. He was thrown into a fiercely burning furnace, and he had the end of his temporary life.

Nothing about this tells us much, unfortunately.  Whatever the original work said, this is abbreviated to the point of non-existence.  Oh well.

I thought that I would finish this post by posting the Albani text, from p.105-106.

Lovely.

Update (20 July 2026): I have revised the text of this post in several places where it relates to the Synaxarion, because I have learned a bit more.  There are more than 50 manuscripts containing various versions of the Synaxarion of Constantinople.  Most of these belong to seven main recensions.¹

The following useful summary is from D. Thomas and A. Mallett, “Synaxarion Of The Great Church” In: Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 3 (1050-1200) (2011) pp. 574–585  DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004195158.i-804.343:

The Synaxarion owes its origin to the deacon Euaristus who, during the personal reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (944-59), wrote the first book of this kind, which he dedicated to the emperor, and this is when the Synaxarion took the form in which we now find it: mostly a collection of notices. In his preface, preserved anonymously in a Greek manuscript (in the Arabic translation, the Melkite Synaxarion [q.v.], the name of the author is given as h.w.r.s.t.s; see Sauget, 1969), Euaristus briefly outlines the principles that guided him in making abstracts of long hagiographical texts, especially the passions of the martyrs. This first stage of the text (recension H*, separated by Noret) is preserved in whole or in part in three manuscripts.

The collection then evolved over the centuries. The fundamental work of the editor of the Synaxarion, H. Delehaye, taken further in the century that followed by others (Noret, Luzzi), makes it possible to distinguish seven recensions: H* (the primitive form), S* (later, to which belongs the Synaxarion of Sirmond, S, the base witness of Delehaye’s edition), B* (the archetype of which is the famous Menologion of Basil II, Vat. gr. 1613, a manuscript illustrated with 430 miniatures presented to the Emperor Basil II in the late 10th century), C* (probably an exclusively Italo-Greek recension, secondary to B*) D*, F* and finally M*, the most recent recension, which became prevalent in the 12th century. The Melkite Synaxarion (Sauget, 1969) is an 11th-century Arabic translation of a text close to that in MS G (see list of manuscripts below), which is an abbreviation of form F*. This classification omits a few individual manuscripts, since the history of the text of the Synaxarion, which was adapted and evolved with time and place, is still only imperfectly known.

1. Andrea Luzzi, “Synaxaria and the Synaxarion of Constantinople,” in: S. Efthymiadis (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 2 (2014), p.197-208.  Online here.[↩]