Rodionov Oleg

Athonite greek life of st. Anthony of kiev

Abstract

The article introduces into scholarly circulation the Greek text of the handwritten Life of Anthony of the Caves, which has recently come to the attention of researchers and is preserved in the archives of Athos hardly available until recently. For the first time, a critical edition of the Greek text of the Life is being published, the translation of which was carried out recently and published in the 2018 Kapterevskie Chteniya paper collection. We consider six known copies of a newly discovered monument of Greek Athos literature – the approximately thousand-page “Athoniad” by Jacob Neasketiotes, through which the Life has come down to us. The appendix to the article contains the first critical edition of the Greek text of the Life. The article also discusses the obvious sources of the Greek text, from the Tale of Bygone Years and the Kiev Caves Patericon to the Greek hagiographic collections of the 18th and the 19th centuries. Another interesting question is the connection of the work of the Athonite monk, author and copyist Jacob Neasketiotes with Russian matter, which could be explained by his stay while working on the “Athoniad” in the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Athos and communication with the confessor of the Rossikon Fr. Jerome (Solomentsov). This also explains the presence of several codices with the Lives of Theodosius of the Caves, Mitrofan of Voronezh, and other texts related to Russia in the collection of manuscripts of St. Panteleimon Monastery. The original versions of the “Athoniad”, apparently, strongly depended on the historiographical works of another famous Athonite erudite, Theodoretos Lauriotes, who was a relative of Jacob Neasketiotes.

Keywords

Lives of the Saints, St. Anthony of the Caves, Jacob Neasketiotes, “Athoniad”, greek copies, Athos, manuscript tradition

References

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Information about the author

Rodionov Oleg

Academic Degree: Candidate of Sciences* in History;
Academic Rank: Senior Research Fellow;
ORCID: 0000-0002-9442-9937;
Email: orodionov@mail.ru.

*According to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 2011, the degree of Candidate of Sciences (Cand.Sc.) belongs to ISCED level 8 — "doctoral or equivalent", together with PhD, DPhil, D.Lit, D.Sc, LL.D, Doctorate or similar.