Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 799
flow of divine favours, of acts of successful arbitration, plain speaking and
intercession on behalf of the community as a whole (as in times of drought)
that came from God through the holy man. To be content with one small,
but revealing example. By the 580s, visitors to Symeon the Younger on the
Mons Admirabilis, the Wonder-filled Mountain, outside Antioch (present-day
Samandagˇı, Symeon’s mountain), could not but have been impressed by a
complex of buildings at the foot of the column of the saint, the splendour
of whose surviving capitals alone reflected a koine of near eastern princely
art that stretched from Constantinople to Kermanshah. Such building,
however, so the biographers of Symeon insisted, was the product of Isaurian
workers who had worked solely out of gratitude to the saint for the healings
that he had bestowed on them. 34 In the same way, the wealth associated with
the growing establishment of the holy man (especially as this was continued,
after his death, by a monastic community) and the support offered to him in
his lifetime by leading persons were frequently explained, in hagiographic
sources, by reference to some incident in which an important person, standing
for the wealth and power of ‘the world’ in its most obtrusive and darkened
form, was humbled by the holy man through some miracle. Frequently
this miracle was performed on behalf of the poor who had sought the saint’s
protection against the powerful person in question. Wealth that came to the
holy man’s establishment was made ‘clean’ in this way, by a dramatic story in
which the giver of the wealth was first ‘taught a lesson’ by the saint. 35 Given
this situation, it has been rightly observed that, by the sixth century, the
miracle had become ‘the specific, quasi-institutional mode of action’
through which the holy man impinged on the world. 36
Altogether, holy men tended to be remembered as having been
effectively active in society in a manner that fulfilled, with satisfying congruence,
the expectations of any other great patron. They frequently did
so in areas which the historian now knows to have been characterized by a
vigorous rural population which had taken ever more marginal land into
cultivation. This is the case with the astonishing late Roman villages of
northern Syria and with the large churches perched on what is now the
boar-infested plateau of Karabel above Myra (Demre, Turkey) in Lycia. 37
But we must always remember that the very success of the holy man left
his disciples with much to explain. The fact that they did so, and with gusto,
in terms of a carefully censored language of ‘clean’ patronage does not
mean that patronage in itself explains the holy man. It is, rather, to the
wider features of the religious world in which the holy man moved that we
34 V. Sym. Jun. 96, Van den Ven (1962) 74–5; see Van den Ven (1962) ii.92–3, who shares my scepticism.
On the buildings, see Djobadze, (1986) 57–114.
35 Similar narratives concerning the wealth of modern Islamic holy men have been acutely observed
by Gilsenan (1982) 102–3. 36 Flusin (1983) 208.
37 Tate (1992); Harrison (1963); Fowden (1990b).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008