them six miles from Paris. There she built a mausoleum and later a basilica, where
miraculous cures occurred.
This text, or a version of it, was known to Gregory of Tours, who stated in his Liber
historiae Francorum that seven bishops were sent from Rome to Gaul at the time of the
emperor Decius (r. 249–51). The vita of St. Geneviève (ca. 520) recounts that it was at
Geneviève’s urging that the Parisians built ca. 475 the first church in honor of the saint
and that it was St. Clement of Rome (pope, 90–100) who had sent Denis to Gaul. (The
earliest episcopal list from Paris, too, mentions that Denis was the first bishop of Paris.)
The cult of the saint thus seems to have been in existence by the late 5th century and the
first Passion shortly afterward.
The early 9th-century Passion Post beatam et gloriosam added the details that Denis
of Paris was the same as the Dionysius the Areopagite converted in Athens by the
Apostle Paul (Acts 17:34); that he was consecrated bishop by Pope Clement as he passed
through Rome; that the martyrs were executed on a hill a mile from Paris (i.e.,
Montmartre); that after his decollation, the saint picked up his head and carried it two
miles; and that the matron who buried the saint was called Catulla after “Catullacus,” the
old name for Saint-Denis.
It was probably in response to the apostolic character of the saint that in 827 the
Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer sent a manuscript of the works of Pseudo-
Dionysius the Areopagite to Louis the Pious, who gave it to the abbey of Saint-Denis. Its
abbot, Hilduin (r. 814–40), translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek into
Latin; his Passio sanctissimi Dionysii explicitly joined Denis of Paris to Dionysius the
Areopagite. Hilduin added, too, that the night before Denis was executed, as he was
St. Denis between angels, from Reims
cathedral. Photograph courtesy of
Joan A.Holladay.
The Encyclopedia 557