The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus - Coptic ...

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY: BOOK IV 241
for him. 115 But let us transfer the course of the account to the next
subject.
36 After Anthimus had been expelled from the see of the queen of cities,
as I have said, Epiphanius succeeded to the bishopric 116 and in turn
after Epiphanius, Menas, under whom there also occurred a miracle
worthy of great account. Ancient custom in the imperial city has it that
when a substantial quantity of the holy parts of the immaculate body of
Christ our God remain over, uncorrupted boys are sent for from among
those who attend an elementary teacher, and that they eat these. On one
occasion the son of a glass-worker, a Jew by belief, was assembled with
the boys. When his parents enquired the reason for his lateness, he
declared what had happened, and what it was that he had eaten up,
together with the other boys. And his father, in fury and wrath, placed
the boy in the furnace of coals where he shaped the glass, and set light to
it. While looking for the boy but unable to ¢nd him, the mother went all
over the city, wailing and shrieking piercingly. And on the third day,
when standing by the door of her husband’s workshop, she called to the
boy by name, though convulsed with lamentations. And he, recognizing
the voice of his mother, answered her back from the furnace. And she,
on breaking through the doors [186] and going inside, saw the boy
standing in the midst of the coals, but the ¢re was not touching him.
When he was asked how he had remained unharmed, he said that a
woman wearing a purple robe had visited him frequently and pro¡ered
water, and with this he had quenched the adjacent coals; and that she
fed him whenever he was hungry. When this was reported to Justinian,
he enrolled the boy and his mother in the church, after they had been
enlightened with the bath of rebirth; as for the father, who did not
115 Miracles that a¡ected the plague are rare; Barsanuphius urged his fellow monks to
join in prayer with three perfect men, John in Rome, Elias in Corinth, and an anonymous
person in the province of Jerusalem (i.e. Barsanuphius himself), who were labouring to
secure a speedy end to the torment: Correspondance 569. If Ephrem was still patriarch, it
must have been the ¢rst visitation of the plague which was stopped, whereas under Domninus
it would have been one of the recurrences. For the periphrasis ‘sons of . . .’, cf. nn. 15 and
67 and above, and. i.20 with n. 175.
116 Cf. iv.11 above for this incorrect succession.