Peter of Argos

Our Father among the Saints Peter the Wonderworker, Bishop of Argos and Nauplion

Bishop · Venerable · Wonderworker · b. c. 855, at Constantinople — d. c. 922, at Argos

Peter (c. 855 – c. 922) was bishop of Argos and Nauplion in the Peloponnese, and is remembered in the Greek Church chiefly as the merciful hierarch: a monk of Constantinople from a family in which all five children took the habit, who twice refused a bishopric and accepted the third call only under compulsion, and who then spent some thirty years feeding a province through famine, ransoming captives from the Saracen raiders of Crete, and healing the sick. The Peloponnese of his episcopate was a frontier under attack, and his charity has the shape of that emergency: the Life by Theodore of Nicaea makes the miracle for which he is best known the flour and grain that would not run out while the queues of the hungry lasted. He wrote homilies, of which some seven survive; he foretold the day of his death and reposed at about seventy; and in 1421 his relics were carried to Nauplion, whence they exuded myrrh. He is titled ὁ Θαυματουργός, the Wonderworker, and is the patron of Argos and of Nauplion.

Family, and a household of monks

Peter was born at Constantinople, about the middle of the ninth century, to wealthy and devout parents. The Life dwells on the household: five children — Paul, Dionysius, Peter himself, Plato, and a sister — brought up, in the biographer's phrase, in an atmosphere of temperance and almsgiving, and educated in the letters of the Church and of the Greeks alike. The generation was that of Photius the Great, whose learning the Life takes as the model for Peter's own studies: the Scriptures and the Fathers first, but also the classical rhetoric which is plainly audible in his surviving sermons.

The family's decision was collective and complete: father, mother and all five children entered the monastic life. Two of the brothers rose in the hierarchy — Paul became metropolitan of Corinth, and Dionysius and Plato remained monks with Peter.

The monk who would not be a bishop

As a monk Peter was, on the biographer's account, an ascetic of the strict Constantinopolitan kind: humility, abstinence, patience, self-control, unbroken prayer, and above all φιλανθρωπία, the love of humankind that afterwards defined his episcopate. Nicholas Mystikos, patriarch of Constantinople (901–907 and 912–925), knew him and wished to make him a bishop; Peter declined, judging himself unworthy, and the refusal was not a formality — the Life records that he held out.

When his brother Paul was consecrated to Corinth, Peter went with him into the Peloponnese and there took up, in his own words, the ἄσκησις τῆς ἡσυχίας, the discipline of silence — the life of a monk attached to a bishop's household but withdrawn from its business. It was from that retirement that the see of Argos, falling vacant on the death of its bishop, drew him out. The clergy and people of Argos and of Nauplion sent delegations, and pressed, and would not be refused; and after long and vehement entreaties Peter at last consented and was consecrated bishop of the joint see.

Bishop in a raided province

The episcopate that followed — roughly the first quarter of the tenth century — fell in the worst years of the Peloponnese's exposure to the Arab emirate of Crete, whose fleets raided the coasts of the Argolid for slaves, and in a period of repeated crop failure in the interior. Peter's pastorate is remembered almost entirely in terms of those two afflictions.

He fed the hungry at the expense of the see, and organised the feeding: the Life speaks of the bishop's stores thrown open and of a daily distribution that outlasted every calculation of what the granaries held. He ransomed captives taken by the Saracens, buying men and women out of slavery with the church's money and, when that failed, with its plate. He housed and fed prisoners of war — including, in the detail the Greek tradition preserves with some relish, Arab captives taken by the imperial forces, whom he fed at his own table and would not let be sold. He supported the wavering, taught by word and by example, healed the sick, and was credited in his lifetime with foreknowledge — the gift of seeing what was to come, which the Life attaches both to public disasters and to the state of individual souls.

Miracles

The signature miracle, told by his biographer as an eyewitness matter and repeated in every synaxarion since, is the inexhaustible grain: in a year of failed harvest, the flour and the wheat set aside for the hungry did not diminish though the distribution went on, so that the poor of the whole district were fed from a store that should have lasted days. To it the tradition adds the multiplication of flour in the bishop's own household, the healing of the demonically afflicted, and cures of the sick who were brought to him.

Writings

Peter of Argos is one of the few provincial bishops of the tenth-century Peloponnese whose own voice survives. Some seven homilies and encomia are transmitted under his name — panegyrics of saints and sermons for feasts, in a polished Constantinopolitan rhetoric — and they are valued by historians as much for their incidental testimony to conditions in the Peloponnese (the raids, the movements of population, the state of the churches) as for their theology.

Repose and relics

He foretold the day of his repose. The Life describes three days of farewell from his deathbed, in which he blessed the clergy and people who came to him, and a death that came in prayer, with the sign of the Cross — at about seventy years of age, about 922.

He was buried at Argos, and his tomb became a place of healing. In 1421 the relics were translated to Nauplion, the fortified port of the see, where they exuded myrrh and were the occasion of continued cures — the removal being, in all probability, a measure for their safety as the Morea's security deteriorated in the last decades before the Ottoman conquest. He remains the patron of both cities, and the cathedral of Argos bears his name.

Feast and commemoration

May 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 16). The day is his in the Greek books, where his office ranks high — he is one of the principal Peloponnesian saints and the day is a local feast of the first order at Argos and Nauplion, with civic observance — and it is kept also in Slavonic usage and in the OCA calendar, which lists "Saint Peter the Wonderworker, Bishop of Argos." He shares the day with the martyrs Timothy and Maura, whose office holds the day in the Menaion, and with the venerable Theodosius of the Kiev Caves.

The translation of the relics to Nauplion in 1421 is remembered in the local tradition and in the akolouthia printed for him — the service of "our father among the saints Peter, archbishop of Argos and Nauplion, the wonderworker," of which a nineteenth-century Greek edition (Nikolaos Taronitis, 1836) survives — but no separate calendar day is assigned to it in the received books, and none is asserted here.

Because May 3 falls near the boundary of the Paschal cycle, the day's position in the year is not fixed; in most years the office is sung within the Pentecostarion.

Hymns

Apolytikion — Tone 3

An unbreakable rock of the Church, and the best of shepherds for the city of Argos, hast thou been shown to be, O all-praised hierarch…

Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)

O God of our fathers, who ever dealest with us according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the intercessions of Thy hierarch Peter guide our life in peace.

Original translation from the Greek

Kontakion — Tone 4

Gloriously didst thou bear the name of the Chief of the wise Apostles, O father Peter…

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Peter is painted as a hierarch of middle age or elderly, in phelonion and crossed omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the jewelled Gospel in the left, his beard full and rounded and his hair receding — the ordinary Byzantine bishop-type, inscribed Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΠΕΤΡΟΣ ΑΡΓΟΥΣ to distinguish him from the several other holy Peters who share the hierarch's dress. Where his particular character is signalled, it is by the attributes of mercy: he may be shown with a loaf or a measure of grain, or in a narrative scene distributing bread to a crowd of the poor, or receiving ransomed captives — the compositions of the eleëmon, the merciful bishop, which Greek painters also give to John the Almsgiver. In modern Peloponnesian churches, and especially in the cathedral of Argos and the churches of Nauplion, he appears prominently and often with a model of the city in his hand.

No pre-1900 icon or fresco of him has been located for this collection. The only historical image on Wikimedia Commons that bears his name is the title page of the 1836 printed service — a typographic sheet, not a depiction — which was examined and rejected as not being an image of the saint. He is therefore entered in the list of icons still being sought; the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for a minor Byzantine saint, covers only September to February and cannot supply a May day.

Disputed questions

The dates. No year of birth or death is transmitted; the received "c. 922" is inferred from the Life's statement that he died at about seventy, from his connection with Nicholas Mystikos (patriarch 901–907, 912–925), and from the political circumstances the Life describes. Sources accordingly place his episcopate anywhere from the 890s to the 930s, and the OCA's formula — "lived during the ninth and early tenth centuries" — is deliberately vague. This entry gives c. 855 – c. 922 as the conventional reckoning and marks it as such.
Bishop or archbishop? The Greek books style him Ἀρχιεπίσκοπος Ἄργους καὶ Ναυπλίου, archbishop; the Slavonic and English calendars have simply bishop. Both are correct at different periods: the see, originally a suffragan bishopric of Corinth, was later raised in rank, and the higher title was applied to Peter retrospectively by the tradition that venerated him.
Which patriarch called him? The Life names Nicholas, and the identification with Nicholas I Mystikos is standard; the OCA's summary calls him "Bishop Nicholas, later Patriarch from 895," which is a year too early for Nicholas Mystikos's first patriarchate (901). The discrepancy is a slip in the modern retelling rather than a genuine variant.
The offer of Corinth. Some accounts have the patriarch wishing to make Peter metropolitan of Corinth — the see his brother in fact received — and others simply "a bishop." The Life's sequence (Peter refuses; Paul is consecrated to Corinth; Peter follows him thither) is best read as the first, with Peter's refusal opening the way for his brother.
Not to be confused with the other Peters of the calendar — Peter of Alexandria (November 25), Peter of Atroa (September 13), Peter of Damascus (February 9), Peter of Capitolias (October 4), Peter of Monembasia (February 7), or Peter, Metropolitan of Moscow (December 21) — nor with the new-martyr Angelis of Argos (December 3), the physician of the same city, martyred at Chios in 1813, who is the other saint of Argos on the calendar.