Lycia and the Late Roman World

St. Nicholas belongs to Lycia, the rugged maritime province on the southern coast of Asia Minor, and to the pivotal half-century that ran from the Great Persecution under Diocletian to the Constantinian peace. This file sets that world: the cities of Patara and Myra, the harbor economy that made Lycia a crossroads of Mediterranean shipping, and the historical turning — from the last and fiercest Roman persecution of the Church to its legalization and the calling of the first Ecumenical Council — through which a bishop of Myra would have lived.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Great Hierarch)

The Province of Lycia

Lycia is a mountainous peninsula on the southern coast of Anatolia, jutting into the Mediterranean between the gulfs of Telmessos (modern Fethiye) to the west and Pamphylia to the east, where the Taurus range falls steeply to a deeply indented coast of harbors, river-mouths, and offshore islands. In antiquity it was the home of the Lycians, a people with their own language and a distinctive federal organization, the Lycian League, which Strabo praised as a model of well-ordered confederation (Strabo, Geography 14.3.3). Rome annexed Lycia formally under the emperor Claudius in AD 43, joining it administratively to neighboring Pamphylia to form the province of Lycia et Pamphylia; by the time of Nicholas, the Diocletianic reorganization of the late third century had reshaped the provincial map again, and Lycia stood as a province in the diocese of Asiana within the prefecture of the East (English 2012; Jones 1978). It was a region of Greek civic life laid over an older indigenous culture, dotted with the rock-cut tombs and pillar monuments for which the Lycian cities are still famous.

For the world of Nicholas two cities matter above all: Patara and Myra. Patara, at the mouth of the Xanthos river, was one of the principal harbors of the Lycian coast and the site of a renowned oracle of Apollo; it was a natural landfall for ships crossing the eastern Mediterranean, and it appears in the New Testament as a port where the Apostle Paul changed ships on his way to Jerusalem (Acts 21:1–2). The tradition makes Patara the birthplace of Nicholas (Michael the Archimandrite, Vita Nicholai, in Anrich 1913–1917; English 2012). Myra (modern Demre), some forty kilometers to the east, lay a short way inland from its harbor at Andriake on the Andrakos river; it too was a stop on the Mediterranean sea-lanes, and Acts records that Paul, a prisoner being taken to Rome, was transferred at Myra from a coasting vessel to an Alexandrian grain ship bound for Italy (Acts 27:5–6). Myra would become the metropolis — the chief see — of Lycia, and it is as its bishop that Nicholas is remembered.

The administrative texture of this world is worth filling in, for it is the frame within which a bishop of Myra would have acted. Under the early Empire Lycia had been governed as part of the joint province of Lycia et Pamphylia, with the Lycian cities retaining the forms of their old federal life — a council, magistracies, and the prestige of cities such as Xanthos, Patara, and Myra that ranked among the league’s leading members (Strabo, Geography 14.3.3). The Diocletianic reforms of the years around 300 dissolved the older arrangement, separating Lycia as a distinct province and folding it into the diocese of Asiana, one of the great administrative groupings of the reorganized East (Jones 1978; English 2012). A metropolitan bishop’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction tended to track this civil geography: as Myra was the chief city of the province, so its bishop held the first place among the bishops of Lycia, and it is in precisely this capacity — the metropolitan presiding over the province’s see — that the later tradition envisions Nicholas (English 2012). The world of the saint is thus a world of Roman provincial order laid over an ancient Lycian substrate, the two visible together in the cities’ Greek civic institutions and their distinctive funerary architecture.

The archaeology of Myra confirms the picture the texts give. The site at Demre preserves a Roman theater and a striking cliff-face of rock-cut Lycian tombs, the marks of a prosperous provincial city; and at the heart of the later town stands the church of St. Nicholas, the basilica raised over the saint’s reputed burial place and rebuilt and enlarged across the Byzantine centuries, which became the focus of his cult and the goal of pilgrims until the relics were carried off to Bari in 1087 (Jones 1978; English 2012). The harbor at Andriake, with its great granary inscribed under Hadrian, attests in stone the very grain-traffic the Acts narrative describes — the commerce that made Myra a node on the sea-route and that underwrites the maritime character of everything Nicholas would later be (English 2012). The church and the harbor together fix the saint geographically: a bishop of a real city, on a real coast, whose remembered deeds answer closely to the place.

A World of Ships

The single most important fact about Nicholas’s geography is that it is maritime, and this shapes the whole later character of his cult. The Lycian coast sat athwart the great sea-route that carried grain, goods, and travelers between the eastern Mediterranean — Egypt, Syria, the Aegean — and Constantinople, Greece, and the West. Myra’s harbor at Andriake was a recognized waystation on this route; the Alexandrian grain fleet that fed the imperial capital passed along these shores, and the same Acts narrative that places Paul at Myra shows precisely this traffic in operation (Acts 27:5–6; English 2012). Ships put in at Lycian harbors to wait out weather, take on water, and change vessels.

This setting matters because Nicholas’s most enduring patronage — of sailors and of those in peril on the sea — grows directly out of it. The sea-miracles attributed to him, the calming of storms and the rescue of foundering ships, are not arbitrary: they belong to a saint whose see looked out on one of the busiest and most dangerous shipping lanes of the ancient world (see Rescuer of the Condemned and Sailors). A bishop of Myra in the fourth century would have lived among sailors, merchants, and the families of men who did not always come home from the sea; the maritime cult that later spread from Lycia across the whole Mediterranean has a real geographical root.

The Diocletianic Persecution

Nicholas’s traditional dates — birth around 270 and death around 343 — place him squarely across the most violent rupture in the history of the early Church and its most decisive reversal. In 303 the emperor Diocletian, prompted in part by his Caesar Galerius, launched what came to be called the Great Persecution, the last and by far the most systematic attempt of the Roman state to destroy Christianity. A series of edicts ordered churches demolished, the Scriptures surrendered and burned, Christians stripped of rank and legal standing, the clergy arrested, and ultimately all subjects compelled to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2–6; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 11–15). The persecution fell with particular severity in the East, where Diocletian and Galerius ruled, and it dragged on in those regions for the better part of a decade, until Galerius, dying, issued an edict of toleration in 311 (Eusebius, HE 8.17).

It is into this period that the tradition places Nicholas’s confession: that he was imprisoned and tortured for the faith under Diocletian and survived to see the Church’s deliverance — a confessor, that is, who suffered for Christ but was not put to death, rather than a martyr (Michael the Archimandrite, Vita Nicholai, in Anrich; English 2012). The historical persecution is securely attested by the contemporary witnesses Eusebius and Lactantius; Nicholas’s personal share in it is a tradition of the later Life, and its attestation is examined where it belongs (see The Confessor under Diocletian). What can be said with confidence is that the world in which a bishop of Myra came to maturity was a world in which confessing the faith could and did cost imprisonment, mutilation, and death.

The Constantinian Turn and Nicaea

The persecution Nicholas’s generation endured ended in a reversal so complete that it transformed the Church’s whole position in the world. In 312 Constantine, having defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, embraced the Christian God; in 313 the agreement conventionally called the Edict of Milan, issued jointly with Licinius, granted Christians and all others freedom of worship and ordered the restoration of confiscated church property (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 48; Eusebius, HE 10.5). Within a single decade the Church passed from proscription to imperial favor.

That favor brought a new kind of problem. With external persecution lifted, internal controversy came to the fore, and the most dangerous of these was the teaching of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, who held that the Son of God was a creature, made by the Father and not co-eternal or of the same essence (homoousios) with Him. To settle the dispute Constantine summoned the bishops of the Christian world to Nicaea in Bithynia in 325 — the First Ecumenical Council — which condemned Arius and confessed the Son to be “of one essence with the Father” (see The Ecumenical Councils). The tradition numbers Nicholas of Myra among the fathers of that council and attaches to him the famous story of his striking Arius — a tradition whose lateness and historical problems are examined critically in its own section (see The Nicaea Tradition). However that question is resolved, the world of Nicholas’s episcopate was the world of the Arian crisis and the Nicene settlement, the formative theological battle of the fourth-century Church.

A Bishop in This World

To set Nicholas in his world, then, is to set him at a hinge of history: a bishop of a Lycian harbor city, in the generation that passed from the last persecution to the first Christian emperor and the first Ecumenical Council. Everything about the later cult — the merciful almsgiver, the rescuer of the condemned, the patron of sailors, the confessor and anti-Arian hierarch — can be read as an elaboration of a figure naturally at home in this setting. The historian’s caution, developed in the companion file, is that the setting is secure while the figure who fills it is known only through sources written centuries afterward (see The Historical Core). The world is firm ground; the man standing in it must be approached with the care the rest of this collection brings.

References

Strabo. Geography, Book 14. Trans. H. L. Jones, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. (The Lycian League.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History, Books 8 and 10. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (The Great Persecution and the Constantinian settlement.)
Lactantius. On the Deaths of the Persecutors. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The edicts of persecution; the Edict of Milan.)
Anrich, Gustav. Hagios Nikolaos: Der heilige Nikolaos in der griechischen Kirche. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913–1917. (Michael the Archimandrite’s Vita Nicholai; Patara and Myra in the tradition.)
Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (Lycia, Myra, and the geography of the cult.)
English, Adam C. The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. (Patara, Myra, the maritime setting, and the historical world.)