Asterius was an orator who served as bishop of Amaseia in the last quarter of the fourth century, having come to the pulpit from the law courts. All the works he left are sermons and panegyrics on martyrs delivered in Greek; the sixteen texts accepted today as genuine are among the liveliest testimonies we have to the church life, the market place, the festivals and the everyday morals of late antique Pontus. Most of them were spoken in Amaseia itself, in the city's churches and martyr shrines, to the crowd standing before him. His life and the content of his sermons are told in detail in Asterios of Amaseia: His Life, Sermons and Legacy.

Life

The place and date of Asterius's birth are uncertain; he is generally thought to have been born around 350 and to have died around 410. In his youth he studied rhetoric and classical literature, came to know Demosthenes closely, and practised as a lawyer before becoming a bishop. He was elected bishop of Amaseia between 380 and 390. He was a younger contemporary of Amphilochius, bishop of Iconium, and of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. The only firm date in his life is the New Year sermon he preached on 1 January 400; in another sermon he speaks of himself as an old man. The place and date of his death are unknown.

Works

Sermons and Panegyrics (Homiliai)

All of Asterius's works are of a single kind: sermons (homiliai) in Greek prose, delivered from the pulpit, and panegyrics (enkomia) on the martyrs. The number of texts accepted as genuine today is sixteen. Fourteen of them were printed with Latin translations in volume 40 of Migne's Patrologia Graeca (columns 155-480); since the same volume also prints under his name texts belonging to the Arian Asterius the Sophist, Migne's edition must be used with care. The remaining two sermons were found in manuscripts on Mount Athos by M. Bauer and first published by A. Bretz in 1914. The modern critical text is the work of Cornelis Datema: the first fourteen sermons were published at Leiden in 1970 with introduction and notes, and his edition of Sermons XV and XVI appeared in the journal Sacris Erudiri in 1978-1979. Among the first editors of the age of print was Philip Rubens, brother of the painter Rubens; the texts prepared by Philip, who died in 1611, were printed after his death.

None of these texts carries a written scriptural passage at its head; the preacher takes as his subject a parable, a feast day or an event of the day in the city, addresses his audience directly, puts questions to them and uses every resource of classical rhetoric. The principal known texts are the following:

Moral Sermons (I-V)

The first five sermons are moral discourses applying the parables and teachings of the Gospels to the life of his own day, and they were translated into English in the same order in 1904 by Galusha Anderson and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed in Ancient Sermons for Modern Times. Sermon I is based on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and contains the famous passage mocking the costly garments of the rich, woven with hunting scenes or Gospel episodes. Sermon II treats the parable of the unjust steward and conveys, through images of a field and of a tree by the roadside, the idea that man is no more than a steward of what he possesses in this world. Sermon III is against covetousness and addresses a crowd gathered for a martyr's feast. Sermon IV is on the Kalends, the New Year festival. Sermon V takes up the question in the nineteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel to treat divorce and defend the bond of marriage.

Sermon on the Festival of the Kalends (IV)

One of Asterius's most studied texts is this sermon, delivered on 1 January 400. Since the preacher mentions the fall of Eutropius from his consulship as an event of the previous year, the sermon can be dated with certainty. The text describes one by one the New Year exchange of gifts turned into a compulsory tax, the beggars and stage tumblers going from door to door, soldiers dressing up as women, consuls scattering great sums of money, and customs that teach children to expect a gift in return for a gift. The sermon is in effect a reply to what Libanius had said in defence of the festival.

Panegyrics on Martyrs and Saints

Among the panegyrics whose subjects and places of delivery are clearly known are Sermon VIII (on the apostles Peter and Paul, on their feast day), Sermon IX (on the martyr Phocas of Sinope, at his shrine in Amaseia) and Sermon XII (on Stephen the First Martyr, at his feast on 26 December, following Christmas). The panegyric of Phocas tells the story of the martyr who worked as a gardener outside the gate of Sinope, by the highway crossing the isthmus, who received in his house the soldiers sent to find him and dug his grave with his own hands; it records that he was held to be the protector of sailors from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, and that sailors set aside every day a share of their food as "the portion of Phocas" and distributed its price to the poor in harbour. The sermon on Stephen opens with the thought that the earth, defiled by the blood of Abel, was blessed by the blood of the first martyr.

The Ekphrasis of Euphemia (XI)

Text XI is a description of a painting on canvas, displayed in a portico beside the tomb of Euphemia, martyr of Chalcedon (Kadıköy), showing her martyrdom scene by scene. Asterius begins by telling how, tired from reading Demosthenes' speech against Aeschines, he walked to the market to rest his mind and from there to the church; he describes the painting in detail down to facial expressions, colours and the order of the scenes, and compares it with the famous Hellenistic painters Euphranor and Timomachus. It is one of the most detailed surviving examples from this period of ekphrasis, the verbal description of a work of art. The text has been translated into English by Cyril Mango (1972) and Elizabeth Castelli (2000), and republished with notes, together with the panegyrics of Stephen and Phocas, in the 2003 collection of martyr homilies by Leemans, Mayer, Allen and Dehandschutter. Eleven of the sermons have also been translated into German.

Lost Sermons

Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, mentions in codex 271 of his Bibliotheca other sermons of Asterius that no longer survive. The number of these lost texts is given differently in the sources: some studies speak of four, others of ten. One of the sermons Photius read contains a statement showing that Asterius reached a very great age, and this is one of the clues used in dating the preacher's life.

Amasya in His Works

Asterius's texts do not describe the city by name, but many of them were delivered in Amaseia to the crowds gathered for the city's martyr feasts, and the manuscripts always present him as the bishop of this city. Even the manuscript title of the Euphemia ekphrasis does so: "Ἀστερίου ἐπισκόπου Ἀμασείας ἔκφρασις εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν Εὐφημίαν τὴν πανεύφημον" (Ekphrasis of Asterius, bishop of Amaseia, on the all-praised Saint Euphemia).

The panegyric of Phocas clearly shows that there was a holy place belonging to this martyr in Amaseia. After describing the poor who flock from every side to the great shrine at Sinope, the preacher turns to his own city:

Εἰ δέ που καὶ ἀλλαχοῦ διὰ μικρῶν λειψάνων οἷον ἀποικίαν τινὰ μητροπόλεως ὁ μάρτυς ἑαυτῷ κατεστήσατο, θαυμαστὸς καὶ οὗτος ὁ τόπος καὶ πᾶσι χριστιανοῖς περισπούδαστος, ὥσπερ δὴ καὶ οὗτος ὁ παρ’ ἡμῖν χῶρος ἱερὸς καταγώγιον ἑορταζόντων.

In English: "But if, by means of small relics, the martyr has established for himself elsewhere a place like a colony of his mother city, that place too is admired and eagerly sought by all Christians, just as this holy place among us is a lodging for those who keep the feast." At the beginning of the sermon Asterius says that he speaks having "come today to the venerable shrine of the thrice-blessed Phocas". These two sentences are the only written record showing that at the end of the fourth century there was a shrine in Amaseia holding part of the relics of Phocas, where crowds gathered on his feast day.

Sermon III, against covetousness, also offers a glimpse of the social life of the Amaseia region. The preacher begins by addressing the crowd gathered from the villages and towns for a martyr's feast:

Ἄνδρες χριστιανοὶ καὶ κλήσεως ἐπουρανίου μέτοχοι ἄνδρες· ὑμεῖς ὁ χωρικὸς δῆμος καὶ πάντες ὅσοι τῶν πόλεων ἐκφοιτήσαντες πρὸς τὴν παροῦσαν συμφώνως ἑορτὴν συνεδράμετε.

In English: "Christian men, men who share in the heavenly calling; you, the people of the countryside, and all who have come out of the towns and run together in concord to the present feast." Asterius asks this crowd why the martyrs are honoured with splendid buildings and annual gatherings, then complains that the feast has turned into a market and that visitors are busier with buying and selling than with worship. This scene, in which feast and fair merge, describes a provincial centre where country people and townsfolk met around the holy place. This sermon too is held to have been delivered in Amaseia.

Influence and Assessment in the Sources

Asterius's fame in later centuries rests above all on the Euphemia ekphrasis. The Second Council of Nicaea, which met in 787 to close the iconoclast controversy, had this text read twice as evidence in support of the veneration of icons. Thus a description spoken from the pulpit by a bishop of Amaseia was used three centuries later as proof in the gravest theological dispute of the empire.

In modern scholarship Asterius is read from two different angles. Art historians find in the Euphemia description and in the passage on painted garments in Sermon I a rare written testimony to the arts of painting and weaving in the fourth century. Social and religious historians follow in the Kalends sermon, the sermon on divorce and the texts on martyr feasts an everyday life that rarely appears in official documents. Anderson, in the introduction to his 1904 translation, presents him, in his own phrase, as a live preacher who took his subjects directly from the problems around him, and stresses that the sermons vividly show the conditions and customs of the common people of the time.

In Amasya's local memory the name of Asterius survived in an unexpected place, in a tradition attached to the Aynalı Mağara (Mirrored Cave). Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, describing the royal tombs in the first volume of his Amasya Tarihi, records the following in a footnote:

Bu mağara el-yevm "Aynalı Mağara" demekle meşhûrdur. Bunun kapısından mâ-adâ üzerinde yazı olan büyük mağara yokdur. Bu mağarada "Astiris" nâmıyla meşhûr metropolidin medfûn olduğu Rûmlar arasında şâyi' ise de esâsı yokdur.

In English: "This cave is known today as the Aynalı Mağara. Apart from this one there is no large cave with an inscription over its door. It is a common rumour among the Greeks that the metropolitan known by the name of 'Astiris' is buried in this cave, but it has no foundation." The "Astiris" mentioned by Hüsâmeddin is very probably the local pronunciation of the name of Asterius, the city's best-known bishop; this is an inference. Georges Perrot, whom Hüsâmeddin quotes in his second volume, takes the cave on the basis of the inscription over its door to be the tomb of one of the great priests of Comana, and Hüsâmeddin himself rejects the rumour firmly. Even so, the tradition shows that the Greek community of Amasya still remembered the name of its ancient bishop at the beginning of the twentieth century and attached it to one of the city's most conspicuous monuments.

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