The Dragon-Slayer Tradition

The most famous legend of the warrior-saints — the mounted hero spearing a dragon — is universally associated with St. George, but it was attached to Theodore as well, and by some scholars’ reckoning earlier than to George. In Byzantine art and legend Theodore (Tyro and/or Stratelates) is shown slaying a dragon or serpent, and Christopher Walter and others have argued that the equestrian dragon-slaying motif was first borne by Theodore before George eclipsed him as its archetype. This file treats the dragon as a hagiographic and iconographic topos — rooted in Psalm 90:13 (LXX) and the dragon of the Apocalypse — examines the equestrian dragon-slayer image, and weighs the disputed priority of Theodore over George, throughout as legendary and iconographic development pinned to its sources rather than as history (§3.5).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; warrior-saint)

A Legend, Not a Life

It must be said plainly at the outset that the dragon-slaying belongs to legend and iconography, not to the historical or even the early hagiographic record of Theodore. Neither the earliest secure witness to his cult — Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century encomium On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro [PG 46:736–748]) — nor the core Passio of the martyr (BHG 1760–1773) contains a dragon; Gregory’s Theodore is a soldier who burns a pagan temple and dies by fire, not a mounted dragon-slayer (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore [PG 46:736–748]; see Burning the Temple of the Mother of the Gods). The dragon is a later accretion — a hagiographic and above all an iconographic motif that grew up around the warrior-saints in the middle and later Byzantine centuries and was then read back into expanded legends (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909). In keeping with the method of this compendium, the dragon-fight is reported here as what the sources make it: a developed topos pinned to its earliest attestations, never asserted as an event (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Dragon as a Hagiographic and Iconographic Topos

The dragon-slaying motif did not enter the warrior-saint legends from a memory of any combat. It is a scriptural and symbolic topos, a visual and literary figure of the saint’s victory over the devil and over paganism, assembled from biblical materials. Its principal scriptural root is Psalm 90:13 (LXX) — Psalm 91:13 in the Hebrew and English numbering — “thou shalt tread upon the asp and basilisk, and trample on the lion and dragon” (epi aspida kai basiliskon epibēsē, kai katapatēseis leonta kai drakonta); the verse furnished the Church with an authoritative image of the righteous one treading the serpent and the dragon underfoot, and it lies behind the iconography of saints triumphing over reptilian evil (Psalm 90:13 LXX [= Ps. 91:13]; Walter 2003). To this is joined the dragon of the Apocalypse — “the great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan” cast down in the war in heaven (Revelation 12:9; 20:2) — which fixed the dragon as the standing visual cipher for the devil in Christian art. Behind both stands the wider biblical mythology of the conquered chaos-serpent (Leviathan, the dragon of the deep), so that the saint who spears a dragon enacts, in a single image, the defeat of Satan, of paganism, and of chaos by the power of Christ (Walter 2003).

Read in this light, the dragon attached to a warrior-saint is a declaration of meaning, not a report of fact. The serpent is sin, idolatry, and the devil; the saint’s lance is the cross and the confession of Christ; the trampling horse is the triumph of the martyr. This is why the motif could migrate so freely among the soldier-saints — George, Theodore, and others — and could attach itself to figures whose early legends contain no such episode: it was available to any warrior-saint because it expressed what every warrior-saint was held to have accomplished spiritually, the conquest of the evil one (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909). The later prose legends that supply a narrative dragon — a beast terrorizing a city or a region, slain by the saint to deliver the people and convert them — are themselves secondary elaborations of the image, the picture generating the story rather than the reverse (Walter 2003).

The Equestrian Dragon-Slayer Image

The characteristic visual form of the motif is the equestrian dragon-slayer: the saint on horseback, lance lowered, driving the spear into the open mouth or the coils of a dragon writhing beneath the horse’s hooves. Walter traces the emergence of this mounted dragon-slaying type in middle-Byzantine art and connects it to the older imperial and late-antique image of the triumphant horseman trampling a prostrate enemy — the imago of victory adapted to Christian use, with the dragon substituted for the human foe (Walter 2003). The type belongs to the same militarization of the warrior-saint cults treated in the companion file: as the soldier-martyrs became armed protectors of army and empire, the mounted, spear-bearing, dragon-trampling image gave their victory its most vivid and martial expression (Walter 2003; see Theodore Among the Military Martyrs).

Crucially, the equestrian dragon-slayer image was not the exclusive property of George. Theodore is depicted as a mounted dragon-slayer in Byzantine art, sometimes paired with George — the two horsemen shown together, each spearing a dragon, or the two confronting a single serpent — and the surviving evidence shows the motif distributed across more than one warrior-saint before it became, in the popular imagination, George’s signature (Walter 2003). In some compositions Theodore spears the dragon while George spears a human figure, or the two are differentiated only by inscription, the same problem of legibility that attends the whole warrior-saint company (Walter 2003). The mounted dragon-slayer, in short, is a warrior-saint type that Theodore shared, and that the sources do not assign to George alone.

The continuity with the older imperial horseman is worth pressing, because it explains how the motif could be shared so freely. In late-antique and Byzantine triumphal imagery the victorious ruler is shown mounted, trampling or spearing a fallen barbarian; the Christian warrior-saint inherits the posture and substitutes the dragon for the human enemy, converting a political image of conquest into a spiritual one (Walter 2003). Because the image is a type rather than the illustration of a particular story, it attaches to whichever saint a given church or workshop wished to honour, and the saint’s identity is carried by the accompanying inscription rather than by anything intrinsic to the dragon-fight itself. This is precisely why the same composition can name George in one monument and Theodore in another, and why the two can be set side by side as matching horsemen: the dragon-slayer is a slot in the visual language of the warrior-saints, and more than one of them could fill it (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909).

Theodore or George First?

This raises the contested question of priority: which warrior-saint first bore the equestrian dragon-slaying motif? The famous answer in the popular tradition is George, and George did become the archetypal and best-known dragon-slayer, his Miracle of the Dragon — the rescue of the princess from the beast — crystallizing into the legend that conquered Christendom east and west (Walter 2003). But the scholarly picture is more complicated, and several investigators, Walter among them, have argued that the dragon-fight attached to Theodore earlier than to George, with George later overtaking and eclipsing him as the motif’s archetype. Walter’s discussion gathers the visual and textual evidence for a Theodore dragon-slayer of some antiquity and treats the assignment of the developed dragon-legend to George as a secondary, if ultimately dominant, development (Walter 2003). On this reading the trajectory parallels the cults themselves: Theodore, the oldest of the soldier-martyr cults, carries the motif first, and George, the eventual celebrity of the company, inherits and monopolizes it (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909; see Theodore Among the Military Martyrs).

The matter is genuinely disputed, and the evidence — scattered images of uncertain date, prose legends of varying antiquity, and the migratory character of the motif itself — does not permit a confident verdict. It is also complicated by the doubling of Theodore: a dragon-fight is attached now to Theodore Tyro, now to Theodore Stratelates, so that “the Theodore dragon-slayer” is not a single stable figure but is itself split between the Recruit and the General (Walter 2003; Delehaye 1909; see The Two Theodores). What can be said with assurance is that the dragon-slaying was shared among the warrior-saints, that Theodore was among its earliest bearers, and that George’s later supremacy as the dragon-slayer was a development within the tradition rather than its starting point.

[Disputed: Christopher Walter (2003) and other students of the warrior-saint iconography hold that the equestrian dragon-slaying motif was attached to Theodore earlier than to George, George later eclipsing him as the archetypal dragon-slayer; the popular and much of the older tradition treats George as the original and proper dragon-slayer, the dragon being a secondary borrowing in Theodore's case. The evidence — undated images and prose legends of contested antiquity, and the migratory character of the motif among the military saints — does not permit a firm resolution.]

Competition and Convergence of the Two Traditions

The relation between the Theodore and George dragon-traditions is best described as one of convergence and competition within a single iconographic family rather than as the borrowing of one fixed legend by another. Because the dragon was a shared topos of the warrior-saints, it could and did attach to both, and the two were frequently shown together as paired horsemen — a pairing that simultaneously links them and invites the eye to compare them (Walter 2003). Over the long development the popular legend concentrated on George: it was George’s dragon, George’s princess, George’s city of Silene that the imagination retained, while the Theodore dragon-fight, never absent, remained the lesser and less storied of the two (Walter 2003). The “competition,” in other words, was won by George in the arena of fame, even if Theodore may have held the motif first.

For the Orthodox reader the point is not to award priority but to read the dragon rightly. Whether borne first by Theodore or by George, the dragon is the same thing in both: a scriptural and iconographic figure of the devil and of paganism trodden underfoot by the martyr in the power of Christ, drawn from Psalm 90:13 (LXX) and the dragon of the Apocalypse (Psalm 90:13 LXX; Revelation 12:9; Walter 2003). It is the visual theology of the warrior-saint, not a chapter of his biography. The earliest and securest Theodore — the recruit of Euchaita, the soldier who burned the temple and died by fire, praised by Gregory of Nyssa — has no dragon; the dragon is what later centuries gave him, and what he came to share with, and partly to cede to, George (Gregory of Nyssa, On St. Theodore [PG 46:736–748]; Walter 2003; see Reading the Theodore Tradition and Legacy and Assessment).

References

Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The dragon-slaying motif among the warrior-saints; the equestrian dragon-slayer image and its late-antique antecedents; the argument that the dragon-fight attached to Theodore earlier than to George; the pairing of Theodore and George as mounted dragon-slayers.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Paris: Picard, 1909. (The foundational source-critical study of the Greek military saints; the migration of motifs among the dossiers and the doubling of Theodore.)
Gregory of Nyssa. On St. Theodore (De Sancto Theodoro). In Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 46, cols. 736–748. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1858. (The earliest secure witness to the cult of Theodore Tyro; the soldier-martyr who burns the temple and dies by fire — with no dragon.)
The Holy Bible. Psalm 90:13 (LXX) [= Psalm 91:13]: “thou shalt tread upon the asp and basilisk, and trample on the lion and dragon”; Revelation 12:9 and 20:2: the great dragon, the old serpent, the Devil. (The scriptural roots of the dragon as a figure of the conquered devil.)
Halkin, François. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG). 3rd ed. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The Passiones of Theodore Tyro, BHG 1760–1773, which lack the dragon-episode.)