Leucius of Brindisi
Our Father among the Saints Leucius the Confessor, Bishop of Brindisi
Bishop · Confessor · Wonderworker · Venerable
Commemorated 20 June — Repose at Brindisi
Leucius the Confessor was an Alexandrian monk, born Eutropius, who was sent — the Life says by a direct command of Christ — from Egypt to the heel of Italy, and became the first bishop of Brindisi (Brundisium), the port at the end of the Appian Way. The Greek and Slavonic books, which call his see by the half-Hellenised name Vruntisiopolis, tell of a drought of two years broken by his prayer, and of the baptism of the governor and of the whole city after it. He is one of the very few saints of southern Italy to have entered the Byzantine synaxaria by the eastern road rather than the Latin one, and he is commemorated on June 20.
Eutropius of Alexandria
He was born at Alexandria to Christian parents named in the Life as Eudycius and Euphrosyne, and was given the name Eutropius. His mother died when he was eleven; his father then withdrew to the monastery of St Hermias and took the boy with him. There, under the abbot Nicetas, Eutropius was raised on the Scriptures and grew — the account is insistent on this — quiet, gentle and obedient, an unremarkable virtue that the Life treats as the foundation of everything that followed.
When he was eighteen the abbot Nicetas died, and the brotherhood wished to set Eutropius over them. He refused, on the ground that he had not yet been tonsured and was unworthy of the charge; and the monastery, unwilling to take another, stood seven years without a superior while he continued in the ranks. The detail is the sort that legendary Lives do not usually invent.
The name Leucius
The turning point is given as a double revelation at the feast of the Dormition, when Eutropius was making the round of the churches of Alexandria. His father received a vision that his own death was near, that his son would be a bishop, and that he would enlighten the Italian city of Brundisium; and in the same vision a new name was disclosed — Leucius, which the Life glosses as meaning that the Spirit of the Lord had come upon him. At the festal celebration Bishop Hellius of Heliopolis heard a voice from heaven blessing Leucius for the episcopate, and himself blessed the young monk and his father. The brotherhood renewed its petition, the bishop yielded, and Leucius was ordained presbyter and made abbot of St Hermias.
Wonderworker in Egypt
As abbot he received, the Life says, the grace of healing and of casting out demons. Its principal miracle is the destruction of a demon that had taken the form of an enormous serpent and was killing the people of a nearby village; Leucius delivered them, and some three thousand pagans were baptised in consequence. On the martyrdom of Bishop Philip of Alexandria he was chosen to succeed him, and continued to draw the heathen to the faith — until the eparch Saturninus determined to have him killed. When Christians of the city proposed to take vengeance on the eparch, Leucius forbade it absolutely; and it was then that he announced that Christ had commanded him to leave Egypt and to go and preach at Brundisium.
Brindisi
He appointed a successor in Alexandria and sailed for Italy with a small company — the deacons Eusebius and Dionysius, the priests Leo and Sabinus, and five students. On the voyage they fell in with the tribune Armaleon and his sixty-seven soldiers, all of whom he converted.
At Brindisi Leucius preached Christ openly. The governor, Antiochus, hearing that the tribune had gone over, summoned him, and then met Leucius himself and put to him a challenge that is the centre of the whole story: the land had seen no rain for two years; let the God whom he preached send it, and the city would believe. Leucius gathered his clergy and the handful already baptised, and they prayed; and the rain came down in such abundance that the parched country was soaked. Antiochus and, the Life says, the whole city — twenty-seven thousand souls — received baptism. Two churches were built: one of the Mother of God, and one of St John the Baptist at the place of the baptisms.
Repose and relics
Falling ill, Leucius was shown in a vision that this sickness would be his last. He charged his spiritual son Antiochus to bury him at the spot on the shore where the ship from Alexandria had come in. Antiochus did so and raised a church over the grave, dedicated to Leucius himself, to which the relics were translated; miracles were reported there for centuries. The relics were later carried inland to Trani and thence, in the Norman period, to Benevento, where the cathedral has long claimed them — a translation that belongs to the Latin history of the cult and is not commemorated in the Orthodox books.
Feast and commemoration
June 20 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 3) in the Greek, Slavonic and OCA books. Brindisi and Benevento in the Latin West keep him on January 11, and the two calendars have never been harmonised. His is one of a small group of southern Italian commemorations — Byzantine Apulia and Calabria were Greek-speaking and under Constantinople until the eleventh century — that survived in the eastern synaxaria after the region passed to the Latin obedience.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
The truth of things revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness and a teacher of abstinence; therefore thou hast attained the heights by humility, and riches by poverty. O father and hierarch Leucius, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2 (common of a hierarch)
Thou wast sent from the Nile to the sea of Italy as a cloud full of rain, O Leucius, and at thy prayer the parched land drank and the city was washed in the font. Wherefore we honour thee as a shepherd and a wonderworker, and as an intercessor for our souls.
Iconography
Leucius is written as a hierarch of the early type: an elderly bishop, white-bearded, in phelonion and omophorion, blessing and holding the Gospel-book; a scroll is sometimes substituted. Where the Life is illustrated, the subject is invariably the rain: the bishop standing with his hands raised before the governor and the citizens while the clouds break over the harbour of Brindisi — the image that makes him, in local Apulian usage, a saint invoked against drought. The serpent-demon of the Egyptian episode may appear beneath his feet in later compositions.
No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The century. The Greek and Slavonic synaxaria place him in the fifth century, and the Russian books say so plainly; the Latin tradition of Brindisi makes San Leucio its first bishop and puts him as early as the second, which cannot be reconciled with the Alexandrian frame of the Greek Life. The Life as transmitted is a hagiographic composition rather than a document, and the safest statement is that a bishop Leucius is anciently venerated as the founder of the see of Brindisi, and that the Byzantine tradition received his cult with an Alexandrian back-story attached.
- The name of the see. The Greek books call him bishop of Βρεντέσιον; the Slavonic books carry a corruption of the Greek, Врунтисиополь ("Vruntisiopolis"), which is how the Russian calendars and the OCA still print it. The place is Brindisi and nothing else.
- Bishop Philip of Alexandria and the eparch Saturninus are not otherwise attested in the Alexandrian episcopal lists or in the civil fasti; the names belong to the Life.
- Not to be confused with Leucius, martyred with Thyrsus and Callinicus (December 14) — a layman of Bithynia under Decius, no relation to this hierarch; nor with the shadowy heretic Leucius Charinus, to whom the apocryphal Acts of John were ascribed in antiquity, a figure with whom the Confessor has been confused in some Western catalogues because of the bare name.