03 — The Passion Traditions

The legendary martyrdom-cycle of St. George, read as what it is: a hagiographic romance, not a chronicle. Behind the dragon and beneath the cult lies the Passio Georgii, an extravagant passion épique in which the martyr is tortured over days or years, killed and raised again — in the developed recensions, three times — and at whose example an empress, a magician, and a crowd of bystanders confess Christ. These files treat the tortures and the “threefold death,” and the witnesses converted, as recognizable hagiographic topoi pinned to their attestation under METHODOLOGY §3.5 — honoring the Trophy-Bearer while saying plainly, as the Church’s own Decretum Gelasianum did, that the Acts are legend.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; the Trophy-Bearer)

The developed Acts of St. George are among the most fantastical of all the martyr-legends, and that quality is not incidental to them — it is their genre. Where the historical acta of the early martyrs report an arrest, a trial, and a death with restraint (the Martyrdom of Polycarp is the model; see The Confession Before Diocletian), the George Passio unfolds as an epic of survivable torment: the wheel set with blades, the cauldron of boiling water or molten lead, the quicklime pit, the red-hot iron shoes, the poison of the magician — and, repeatedly, death itself, undone again and again so that the martyr may be killed and raised three times before his final beheading. This is the feature that marked the Acts as romance to ancient and modern readers alike, and that drew the early Church’s own censure in the Decretum Gelasianum (c. 494), which placed the Passio Georgii among books “not to be received” (see The Acta and Their Condemnation).

This section reads the passion-cycle as hagiographic legend throughout. Following the critical scholarship — Krumbacher’s survey of the Greek recensions, Delehaye’s analysis of the passions épiques, and the cultural histories of Walter and Riches — and following the repository’s own discipline (METHODOLOGY §3.5), the tortures, the threefold death, and the converted witnesses are reported as what the Passio tradition attests, pinned to that tradition, and read for the meaning the genre gives them rather than asserted as historical events. The governing image is the title the whole collection turns on: George is the Tropaiophoros, the Trophy-Bearer, and the serial death-and-resurrection is the hagiographer’s way of writing, in narrative, the Paschal confession that death has been trampled down. The securable historical core of George is established elsewhere, from the cult and not from the Passio (see The Historical Core and What Can Be Known); here the legend is examined as legend, respectfully and exactly.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Tortures and the Threefold Death The elaborate martyrdom-cycle of the Passio: the wheel and blades, dismemberment and revival, boiling and the cauldron of molten lead, the quicklime pit, the red-hot iron shoes, crushing and sawing, the poison of the magician Athanasius — and the signature “threefold death,” in which George dies and is raised three times over a span the legend gives as seven years. Read as hagiographic topoi dramatizing the Trophy-Bearer’s triumph, the feature that marks the Acts as romance and that the Decretum Gelasianum flagged. Krumbacher, Delehaye, Walter, Riches; METHODOLOGY §3.5.
The Witnesses Converted The figures won over within the legend: above all the Empress Alexandra, in the legend the persecutor’s wife, who confesses Christ at George’s example and is martyred with him (commemorated with George on 23 / 21 April); the magician Athanasius, whose poison fails and who converts; soldiers, bystanders, and the resurrection-signs. The persecutor’s-household-converted topos, with Alexandra treated as legendary and the actual women of Diocletian’s house (Prisca, Valeria, from Lactantius) kept distinct. Krumbacher, Delehaye, Walter, Riches, Lactantius.

See Also

References

  • Krumbacher, Karl. Der heilige Georg in der griechischen Überlieferung. Ed. Albert Ehrhard. Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 25.3. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1911. (The critical survey of the Greek recensions; the archaic stratum with the legendary king “Dadianus,” the seven-year persecution, the threefold death, and the recurring converts.)
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Brussels: Bureaux de la Société des Bollandistes, 1909. (George at the head of the military-saint legends; the Passio as a passion épique and the analysis of its conventions.)
  • Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The warrior-saint cult and its victory-theology.)
  • Riches, Samantha. St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000. (The growth and cultural afterlife of the legend.)
  • Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum. Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. (The contemporary source naming Diocletian’s wife Prisca and daughter Valeria — the actual women of the imperial household behind the legend’s Alexandra.)
  • Decretum Gelasianum (De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis). Ed. Ernst von Dobschütz, Texte und Untersuchungen 38.4. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912. (Names the Passio Georgii among books non recipienda.)