THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYthe ‘desert’ and the ‘city’ stood for individual spirituality and external ties
respectively rather than for actual locations. And while the holy man needed
other people, every community, large or small, also needed its own holy man;
he might not be called upon very often, but his presence and his holiness
were essential. All sections of society came to take this for granted; even the
sophisticated Procopius relates how when Hephthalite archers in the Persian
army of Cavadh tried to shoot at the holy man James, their arrows would not
leave their bows. Jacob had taken himself to a retreat two days’ journey from
Amida where he lived on seeds; the proud local people had built a rustic shel-
ter around him, with gaps allowing him to see out and to converse. Cavadh
asked him to restore the fi repower of his archers. James complied, and the
king offered him anything he asked for, at which the holy man asked for the
safety of any who chose to take asylum with him from the present war.^77
Like much of the evidence used in Peter Brown’s article, this example relates
to Syria, where asceticism took a particularly striking form, in part because the
ascetic ideal had been well established at an early date, and was not confi ned
solely to Christianity – Gnostics, Marcionites and Manichaeans all preached
renunciation.^78
There was as yet no formal process for the recognition of a holy person as
a saint, but holy men and women were soon recognized as such, and it was
a function of hagiography, the writing of saints’ lives, to justify their claim
to holiness. The recognition of such special fi gures went together with an
importance attached to their relics and an increasing belief in their capacity to
perform miracles.^79 The possession of relics of saints or martyrs gave prestige
and power to Christian sites and their bishops, and ordinary Christians began
to be buried in and near their shrines. In the late sixth century the Life of
Eutychius the patriarch of Constantinople devotes the section about his exile
in the Pontus to a listing of the miracles he performed there. The shrine of
Thekla at Seleucia with its huge church and all necessary buildings to accom-
modate large numbers of pilgrims was enlarged on a grand scale in the fi fth
century by the Emperor Zeno. Thekla, a character from a very popular work
of early apocryphal literature, was an untypical saint, and the fi fth-century
Life and Miracles of Thekla is a much more literary production than most of the
collections of such miracle stories. Several of these survive from the sixth
and seventh centuries, associated with major shrines including those of the
martyrs Sts Cosmas and Damian in Constantinople, Sts Cyrus and John at
Menuthis in Egypt (composed by Sophronius the later patriarch of Jerusalem,
for whom see Chapter 9) and St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and listing the
miraculous cures and answers provided to pilgrims.^80 Saints and their shrines
specialized in particular diseases (for instance St Artemios, whose shrine was
also in Constantinople, specialized in curing hernias and genital diseases), and
Sts Cosmas and Damian and St Cyrus were all reputed to have practised medi-
cine themselves. The activities of such shrines required management and were
not without their tensions. In the Miracles of Sts Cyrus and John there is an evi-
dent attempt to promote the healing powers of the saints over the alternative