The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus - Coptic ...

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY: BOOK IV 227
quicker than word, they imparted it to what was above as the ¢re took
over everywhere. 73
And when those oppressed by the siege saw the smoke billowing
up, they devised the following stratagem: bringing small £asks and
¢lling them with sulphur together with hemp and other easily combustible
materials, they catapulted them down onto the so-called agesta;
these emitted smoke, since the ¢re was ignited by the force of the
projection, and caused the smoke which was coming up from the
mound to pass unnoticed. Thus all those who did not know supposed
that the smoke came rather from the £asks, and not from elsewhere.
And so on the third day after this, little tongues of ¢re were seen
being emitted from the earth, and then the Persians ¢ghting on the
mound understood what sort of trouble they were in. But Chosroes,
as if opposing the divine power, attempted to quench the pyre by
directing against it the water conduits which were outside the city.
But it received the water as if it were oil, rather, or sulphur, or one
of the normally in£ammable materials, and grew greater [176] until it
brought down the whole mound and burnt the agesta completely to
73 Procopius does not mention the miracle of the icon of Christ, and Evagrius indeed is
the ¢rst source to refer to this famous acheiropoietos image (‘not made by human hands’),
the Mandylion of Edessa: for discussion, see Averil Cameron, ‘Sceptic’, ‘Mandylion’.
Cameron argued that Procopius’ silence indicates that the story of the icon’s miraculous
intervention was subsequently grafted onto the primary account of the city’s heroic resistance;
Allen (Evagrius 189) regarded the circumstantial detail in Evagrius as an indication
of a written or eye-witness source. There is no evidence to permit this disagreement to be
resolved, but it is worth noting that there is a comparable story in Theodoret (EH v.21)
about problems in ¢ring a trench under a temple at Apamea; these were overcome when
the bishop gave the workman some holy water which had been placed on the altar in
church and told him to sprinkle it on the wood he was trying to light.
Procopius does record that there were problems at Edessa in trying to get the timber in the
mine to ignite the mound, and it is not impossible that every holy object in the city was
exploited to assist the process. If an icon was brought to bless the e¡orts of the defenders
against the mound, which, interestingly, Procopius introduces as a lophos cheiropoietos,
literally ‘a mound made by human hands’, or ‘a man-made structure’ (Wars ii.26.23), the
achievement perhaps subsequently gave the successful image its acheiropoietos reputation.
Evagrius knew Theodoret’s History, and would have appreciated the conceit of the human
structure in Procopius being unmade by the unhuman; he might have exploited Theodoret
to improve the account of events at Edessa, and so perhaps deserves some credit for the
establishment of the reputation of the Mandylion.
For discussion of Chrysostomides’ rejection of Evagrius’ testimony, which she regards as
an invention of the late eighth century, see Appendix II.