Naucratius
Our Venerable Father Naucratius, brother of Basil the Great
Venerable · b. c. 330, at Caesarea in Cappadocia — d. c. 357, by the river Iris in Pontus
Commemorated 8 June — Commemoration of the hermit of the Iris
Naucratius was the second son of Basil the Elder and Emmelia, and so the brother of Basil the Great, Macrina the Younger, Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste. Brilliantly gifted and already launched on a career at the bar, he abandoned it at twenty-one for a hermitage in the forests by the river Iris in Pontus, where he lived five years in extreme austerity with a single servant, Chrysapius, hunting and fishing not for himself but to feed a company of poor and sick old men whom he had taken into his care. He died suddenly, still in his twenties, about the year 357 — the death whose news, in Gregory of Nyssa's telling, became the occasion of his sister Macrina's greatest act of courage. The Greek synaxarion keeps him on June 8, with the note that his identity is not certain.
The household of Emmelia
The family into which Naucratius was born is the most remarkable in the history of Christian Cappadocia: Basil the Elder, a celebrated rhetor of Neocaesarea and Caesarea, and Emmelia, of whose ten children the Church commemorates five as saints. Their grandmother was Macrina the Elder, who had suffered in the persecutions and whose memory shaped the whole house. Naucratius was the second of the sons: after Macrina the Younger, the eldest child, and Basil, and before Gregory of Nyssa and Peter of Sebaste.
Gregory, who wrote the family's history in his Life of Macrina, describes Naucratius as outstanding in natural gifts, in physical beauty, in strength, in quickness of mind and in skill of hand — the most obviously promising of the brothers. He had begun the training that led to the courts and to public life, and every advantage was open to him.
The hermitage by the Iris
At twenty-one he gave it up. What moved him Gregory does not explain beyond saying that he was drawn by "some higher providence" to despise what was in his hands and to follow the solitary life. He went into the forest country of Pontus, to a place by the river Iris near the family estate at Annisa — the same wild valley to which his brother Basil would later withdraw, and where Basil's monastic rule took shape.
He took with him one servant, Chrysapius, who chose to share his life. Their asceticism was severe and their poverty real; they lived by their own hands. But Naucratius' solitude was not a solitude of self-cultivation. In the neighbourhood he found a group of poor and infirm old men, some of them ill, living on nothing, and he made their support the work of his life: he hunted and fished, and what he took he brought to them, so that his skill in the chase — the gift of a young nobleman — became the daily bread of the destitute. Gregory adds that he did this while keeping strict rule himself, and that in this way he "brought his mother's soul to godliness" as much by example as by argument.
Repose, and Macrina's courage
Five years of this life were all that were given him. Naucratius died suddenly and violently — Gregory says while he was engaged in the work by which he provided for the old men, and the tradition understands an accident in the hunt or on the river — and Chrysapius died with him. He was about twenty-seven; the year is reckoned about 357.
Gregory tells what followed for the sake of his sister. Emmelia was nine days' journey away; when the news came she collapsed under it, and it was Macrina who held the house together — refusing to give way herself, reasoning her mother out of a grief that had become a kind of despair, and standing, Gregory says, like an athlete who does not fall at the heaviest blow. The passage is one of the classic Christian treatments of bereavement, and Naucratius' death is its occasion. His portion of the family estate, with the rest, went in the end into the ascetic foundation at Annisa which his mother and sister established and which his brother Basil made famous.
Veneration
Naucratius has no independent hagiography: everything known of him comes from two or three pages of his brother's writing, and from passing references in Basil's letters and in Gregory's other works. He was never a monk under vows, held no office, wrote nothing, and died young. That the Greek synaxaria nonetheless enter him for June 8 is a witness to how completely the Cappadocian household was received into the Church's memory as a whole: the grandmother, the mother, the sister, the two bishops, and the young hermit who fed old men out of the river.
Feast and commemoration
June 8 (church date; New Calendar civil June 8, Old Calendar civil June 21). He is a synaxarion commemoration in the Greek books only — one line, with Nikodemos's cautious "perhaps" attached to it — on a day whose service belongs to the translation of the relics of Theodore Stratelates. He does not appear on the OCA, Slavic or Antiochian lists for June 8, and no proper hymns are appointed him. His family is kept elsewhere in the year: his mother Emmelia on May 30 (with Macrina) and January 1, Basil the Great on January 1, Gregory of Nyssa on January 10. Where the Cappadocian household is commemorated together, Naucratius is named with them.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable ascetic)
In thee, O Father, was the image of God preserved with exactness; for thou didst take up the Cross and follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Therefore doth thy spirit, O venerable Naucratius, rejoice together with the Angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Leaving the courts and the honours of the world in thy youth, thou didst hide thyself in the forests of the Iris, and what thy hands took from the waters thou gavest to the aged poor, O blessed Naucratius; wherefore, taken swiftly to God, thou didst leave to thy house an example of mercy.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No distinct iconographic type of Naucratius has been established: he is not among the Cappadocian saints whom the Byzantine menologia illustrate, and he has no attested individual panel. Where he could be painted he takes the form proper to a young venerable ascetic — a beardless or lightly bearded youth in the dark monastic mantle, holding a scroll or with hands crossed — and in a family composition he would stand at the side of his mother Emmelia among her sons. The one detail his Life offers an iconographer is the net or the game brought to the poor, which no known image uses. Because June 8 falls outside the September–February span of the Menologion of Basil II, that usual first resort for minor saints is not available for him. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection; a search of Wikimedia Commons under his Greek name returned nothing relevant.
Disputed questions
- Whose commemoration is June 8? The identity of the June 8 "St Naucratius" is genuinely uncertain, and the Greek sources say so. St Nikodemos the Hagiorite, in the Synaxaristes, writes that he is perhaps the brother of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa, "who was a wonderful ascetic," and the detail attached to the day — that he fished the lakes and rivers and gave what he caught to the poor — matches Gregory of Nyssa's account of that Naucratius exactly. This is the identification followed here.
- The Studite alternative. Some Greek sources take the June 8 Naucratius to be Naucratius the Studite (†848), the disciple and correspondent of Theodore the Studite, a confessor for the holy icons in the second iconoclasm who became abbot of the Studion about 842 under the patriarch Ignatius. That Naucratius is normally commemorated on April 18, which is the main argument against reading June 8 of him. He has no entry in this collection yet; if he is authored his slug will be naucratius-the-studite, and the two must not be merged — the Cappadocian hermit of the fourth century and the ninth-century Constantinopolitan abbot are certainly different men, whatever the June 8 notice intends.
- Consequences for the data. Because the identification is open, the century and dates in the entry's record follow the Cappadocian Naucratius (4th century, †c. 357). Should the Studite reading prevail, both would change (9th century, †848); the ambiguity is recorded here rather than concealed.
- The manner of his death. Gregory of Nyssa's Greek is compressed, and translators differ over whether Naucratius was killed in a hunting accident, drowned, or died of some sudden seizure while at his work; all agree that it was sudden, that it was in the course of providing for the poor, and that Chrysapius died with him.
- The spelling of the servant's name varies between Chrysapius and Chrysaphius in the manuscripts of the Life of Macrina.