TO OUR MOST HOLY LORD, BENEDICT XIII, SUPREME PONTIFF, ANNIBAL, CARDINAL PRIEST OF THE TITLE OF SAINT CLEMENT, BISHOP OF ALBANO, CHAMBERLAIN OF THE HOLY ROMAN CHURCH, AND ARCHPRIEST OF THE VATICAN BASILICA, WISHES EVERLASTING HAPPINESS.
A The Basilian Menologium, the other half-yearly part of which Clement XI, the predecessor of Your Holiness, had in the very flower of his youth caused to be transcribed from a most ancient Greek manuscript of the Monastery of Grottaferrata and, having saved it from destruction, had rendered into Latin, is now, under Your auspices, MOST HOLY FATHER, published for the general benefit of learned men. And rightly and worthily so. For the Acts of the Saints themselves, having long ago been collected for the use of a great emperor, are eager to write Your name upon themselves and seem to congratulate You, because You have emerged as the supreme teacher of the Church from this school of innocence and holiness; and because, having been devoted to sacred matters from an early age and occupied in their practice for almost the entire span of Your life, You hold these in the highest place amidst the most burdensome duties of the apostolic dignity, and wish most earnestly for others to hold them, so that the devotion to knowing and illustrating sacred antiquity may increase day by day. Nor do I believe it happened by chance that a work finished long ago and destined for the press many years ago could at last come to light through the Urbino types, which You have embraced with the greatest generosity, at the very time when eight famous alumni of our Roman Church, distinguished by virtues and miracles, have been enrolled in the canon of saints by the most wise judgment of Your Holiness. For it became the Greek Church that the daughter should follow the mother; and that she, who has no new saints to produce, should at least show the ancient ones collected from the whole Orient into one volume, and at the same time testify that the Eastern lands were most fertile in saints of every age, rank, and condition when they were obedient to the Roman Pontiff and were cultivated by competent laborers. With which patronage, therefore, most holy Father, embrace this most expected edition, in which, while we make public the first fruits of the studies of Your predecessor, Clement XI, we represent Your own studies, for You have applied Your mind to the exercises of religion and letters from childhood. Furthermore, we ask God, the Best and Greatest, with earnest and assiduous prayers, that, joining the Church of the Greeks with their Roman mother, He may restore her under the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XIII to that state which existed under Benedict VII, when Basil Porphyrogenitus, the Emperor, had this Menologium transcribed for his own use.
THE TYPOGRAPHER TO THE CANDID READER*
The Menologium, transcribed by order of the Emperor Basil Porphyrogenitus and adorned with painted images of the saints, was brought to Constantinople to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan—having escaped the changes of time, the neglect of barbarism, and the common fate of books. Afterwards, it was kept by the Sfrondati family, and given as a gift to Paul, Cardinal Sfrondato of Saint Cecilia; then, Pope Paul V assigned it to the Vatican Apostolic Library. The same work, celebrated with the highest praises by learned men and desired by their prayers, at last comes forth into the public light. B Learned men did indeed lament for a long time that such an excellent manuscript lay hidden, than which nothing would be more useful for exciting Christian piety, for confirming the truth of the orthodox religion, and for illustrating ecclesiastical antiquity and the history of sacred things; in short, nothing more pleasing in our age to literate men who are eagerly applying themselves to such studies with the distinguished fruit of the Church and sacred criticism. Truly, Leon Allatius and Petrus Arcudius, who well deserved of the ecclesiastical erudition of the Greeks, tried in some way to satisfy their curious and pious studies. For the former, in his Dissertation on the Ecclesiastical Books of the Greeks, § 12, pursued in writing the age, excellence, and fortune of the codex. Arcudius, indeed, translated the same into Latin, and we read his interpretation printed in volume VI of Ferdinando Ughelli’s *Italia Sacra*. But Allatius wrote...
* The edition of the Menologium appeared at Urbino in 1727, in 3 folio volumes, adorned with a wonderful splendor of types.
Having set forth the rarity of the codex with his own explanations, he increased the desire of the curious; and the translation of Arcudius, not being sufficiently accurate, revealed to readers the necessity of the Greek text; especially in the light of this age and of the critical art, which is kindled all the more by interpretations for the purpose of examining texts. Therefore, Cardinal Joseph Maria Thomasius, a man celebrated for the holiness of his character and his sacred erudition, since he knew the value of that treasure very well, directed his efforts toward publishing it. He would have accomplished this, had not the sheer magnitude of the expenses deterred a man of such singular merit, who was at that time serving in the order of regular clergy, and who was poor in will and in his institute. For the dignity of the codex is recommended above all other praises by four hundred and thirty images painted in minium by illustrious artists of the Basilian age, which display to the eyes the holy martyrs, confessors, priests, monks, virgins, women, torturers, tyrants, and judges, along with their vestments, arms, seats, and ornaments; as well as the structure, form, and apparatus of houses, temples, and tribunals: to engrave and reproduce these in copper would have required no small sum of money.
But this praise was reserved for Clement XI, Supreme Pontiff, that he might make public a thing which had hitherto been the precious treasure of great princes. By his providence, he restored to its pristine splendor a codex worth more than any gold, yet already crumbling from age and fading with images that were nearly disappearing; and he would have had all the plates taken at his own expense, had not death intervened. The final hand was applied to the work he had begun by his successors, Innocent and Benedict XIII, the former of whom ceased to be among the living while he was embracing this excellent monument of antiquity with his munificence; the latter not only completed the plates but also generously provided the most elegant Greek type for the preparation of the edition.
It remained, however, that the loss of the other part, which had long since miserably perished, be restored in some way to the integrity of this most highly desired work; and that, by adding the six subsequent months from some manuscript codex of no inferior age, students of sacred things might possess an absolute corpus of the Menologium, with the Lives at least, if not the plates, digested through the full circle of the year. We have obtained this aid from the domestic library of manuscripts of Clement XI himself, which is enriched with the most choice monuments of all languages, or rather from his very own papers, and from the earliest exercises of his childhood. For he had scarcely passed his seventeenth year when, from the ancient codices of the monastery of Grottaferrata, he had discovered by himself that other part of the Basilian Menologium which learned men lamented as lost, had copied it in Greek with his own hand, and had rendered it in a most accurate Latin translation. Although his plain and singular modesty had suppressed it in long darkness, public utility does not allow it to lie hidden any longer. Therefore, to the mutilated work we have added the other half-year part, preserved and rendered into Latin by his diligence; so that posterity may refer its gratitude to his immortal name for a work partly snatched from destruction, partly brought out from darkness, and partly endowed with the Latin language.
The Bollandist associates enriched the erudite labors of such a young man with some months of their own collection, adding the Greek acts of the saints to the end of March, April, May, and July from the Alban commentaries. And although the same Clement XI prepared the Latin translations of those same months, as well as of June and August; yet in his own papers which survive, only April and May are complete; of March, the first twenty days; and of June and July, some days appear translated into Latin and written in his own hand; whither the rest went, or by what fate they lie hidden or have perished, is unknown. The Basilian monks of Grottaferrata, supplementing from the same autograph and from more recent Menologies in Greek, adorned the Latin version of the month of August, which had fallen out of the Alban copy and was mutilated by a few pages. The remaining days of March, June, and July were translated from the Greek language into Latin by P. Petrus Benedictus of the Society of Jesus, a Syrian Maronite, a man most cultivated in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic letters. By the command of the same Clement XI, he also translated into the Latin tongue the history of the Persian martyrs written by a most ancient Syrian author, and the deeds of other saints described in most excellent Syriac codices, which the same Pontiff, brought forth from the shadows of the Orient along with many other selected manuscripts of oriental languages, dedicated in the Vatican library for common utility, and we expect these to be published in type shortly.
The first half-year part of the Menologium, which Ughellus published under the name of Petrus Arcudius, we here edit as corrected and bestowed with a new, and almost entirely different, translation by the illustrious Joseph Simonius Assemanus, a beneficiary priest of the Vatican Basilica, who has examined the same oriental codices in the Clementine-Vatican library. For it stood very far from the Greek text, as is made obvious by the collation performed: for many things were falsely added or omitted by the interpreter; some things were expressed in a sense entirely different from what the text allows; the names of the saints were even corrupted in some places; and everywhere, finally, one can see a paraphrase rather than a faithful version: so much so that the learned could hardly believe it to be the genuine offspring of the man Arcudius, who was most learned in Greek and Latin, unless Ughellus affirmed it.
In the other half-year part, which, as stated above, we owe to Clement XI, some days are lacking because several pages were torn out due to the age of the codex: namely, June 9, 10, 11, and August 4, 13, 14, 28, 29, 30, 31. We add these, taken from the printed Menaea and translated into Latin. We present the images of the saints engraved in copper as true to life as they appear in the Vatican autograph: for they are precious moments of antiquity, even if they recede somewhat from the art of painting. The names of the painters,
which exist in the margin of the individual images in the same autograph are these: Pantaleo Simeon, Michael Blachernita, Georgius, Menas, Simeon Blachernita, Michael the Younger, Nestor. We have not deemed it worth the effort to repeat them four hundred and thirty times in the margin of this edition.
We preface the Menologium with the testimonies of illustrious men regarding both its parts: from which it is evident, first, that the Emperor Basil to whom the Menologium is attributed is not the Macedonian, who held the empire in the year of Christ 886, as Cardinal Baronius thought; but the Porphyrogenitus, who was a full century later than the Macedonian, which Allatius and Ughellus demonstrate. Second, that the other half—the semestral part, the beginning of which is dated from the month of March, and which the Bollandist associates say was found in the monastery of Grottaferrata—was transmitted in Greek and Latin to them by Giovanni Francesco Albani before the year of Christ 1668, in which they published the month of March from the Basilian Menologium, as Giovanni Ciampini testifies in his Diary of the year 1676. We append the Greek letter of Petrus Possinus of the Society of Jesus to the same Giovanni Francesco Albani, written on the 26th of December 1661, from which it is made clear that the illustrious youth, at the beginning of his thirteenth year of age (for he was born in the month of July 1649), had progressed so far in the study of the Greek language that he could write letters in that tongue not only purely and accurately, but also elegantly and ornately.
That the work should be divided into two parts seemed to be required by the Greek text, which is distributed into two semestres. But because the first part—having four hundred and thirty images of saints—makes it twice as large as the latter, it was necessary to divide the Menologium into three [volumes], of which the first part comprises September, October, and November; the second, December, January, and February; and the third, the remaining six months of the year. Enjoy these, friendly Reader; and attribute this edition to the most eminent and most reverend Lord Annibale, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church of the title of St. Clement, Albani, Chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, and Archpriest of the Vatican Basilica, nephew of Pope Clement XI, a man who has deserved exceedingly well of the republic of letters, through whose counsel, zeal, and expense this work is yielded for your convenience.
CONCERNING THE MENOLOGIUM OF THE EMPEROR BASIL
TESTIMONIES OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN
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*Card. Baronius, under the year 886, on the Emperor Basil the Macedonian.* It concerns the same Basil (lest any antiquity be omitted) that he saw to the writing and augmentation of the Greek Menologium; which he also adorned with images, in which the contests of each are expressed. On its front, we find an epigram of this kind written in iambic verse in the manuscript codex of Vincenzo Pinelli, sent to us at Ferrara, when we were there with the pontiff:
Basil, emperor of this clime, Excellent in peace, and in martial affairs. And by skin-bound pact, following in order, Beautiful, fierce images like stars.
The autograph volume of Basil himself exists, decorated with images of great value for single days and individual saints, of whom mention is made in the verses. We have seen and read it, allowed to us by Paul Sfondrati, Cardinal of Saint Cecilia, nephew of Pope Gregory XIV, of happy memory.
*Leo Allatius in his dissertation on the Ecclesiastical Books of the Greeks, § 12.* Menologia are nothing else (and it will be the twelfth book) than what the Latin would call Martyrologies or Calendars, and there is nothing contained in them except the lives of the saints, summarized for every day throughout the whole year, or a commemoration of those whose lives are not held; and no series of ordering or reciting the office is contained therein. It is, however, true that very often a part—and not a small one—of these Menologia is digested in the Menaia after the sixth ode, so that, without the help of another book, anyone who recites the office in church or at home may have the little histories and commemorations of the saints to be celebrated. This Menologium among the Greeks is not one, but it also takes on a varied face according to the convenience of time; for one thing is what Canisius presented to us in Latin only, from the version of Cardinal Sirlet, in his *Antiquae Lectiones*: another is that which is kept separately, manuscript here and there in libraries, and most notably the Barberini, which is also the most ancient: and they do not all correspond with one another; another is that which is inserted into the Greek Menaia; another is that which is read after the divine Hours, the Gospel, the Apostle, and other books. The Menologium, dug out from the Greek Menaia and translated into the Greek vernacular, was edited by Maximus Margunius, Bishop of Cythera, and printed by Antonius Pinellus at Venice in the year 1529, in-12.
Baronius, in the year of our Lord 886, reports that the Emperor Basil the Macedonian had the Greek Menologium written out and augmented, and also adorned with images, in which the contests of the individual saints are expressed: the autograph of which we ourselves have seen, and read, allowed to us by Paul Sfondrati, Cardinal of St. Cecilia, nephew of Pope Gregory XIV. This Menologium, most precious in gold and gems