Description

The Belgian Jesuit Hippolyte Delehaye (1859-1941) was a distinguished member of the Society of Bollandists, named for the seventeenth-century Jesuit Jean Bolland, who was assigned the task of collating and editing the various versions of the lives of saints and martyrs. This work in French was published in 1909, and considers the various legends, originating in the Greek Orthodox Church, about the lives of soldier-saints, from the most famous, such as St George and St Theodore, to those, such as St Procopius of Scythopolis, where there is not unanimous agreement that they were soldiers at all. A long appendix gives the Greek texts (with variants) of several versions of the lives and martyrdoms of Sts Theodore, Eutropius, Procopius, Mercurius and Demetrius. Delehaye in his introduction points out that Christianity spread rapidly through the Roman army, and that this accounts in part for its dissemination across the Roman world.