Asterius of Amasea

Significant portions of his lively sermons survive, which are especially interesting from the point of view of art history, and social life in his day.

[4] Sixteen homilies and panegyrics on the martyrs still exist, showing familiarity with the classics, and containing an unusual concentration of details of everyday life in his time.

One of them, Oration 4: Adversus Kalendarum Festum attacks the pagan customs and abuses of the New Years feast, denying everything that Libanius had said supporting it – see Lord of Misrule for extensive quotations.

[2] As described, the icon was on canvas, and displayed in a church near her tomb; it has puzzled historians, as the manner of death, from fire, differs from all other accounts in the tradition.

In Oration 1, On the Rich Man and Lazarus,[7] he objects to richly decorated clothes: through vain devices and vicious desires, you seek out fine linen, and gather the threads of the Persian worms and weave the spider's airy web;[8] and going to the dyer, pay large prices in order that he may fish the shell-fish out of the sea and stain the garment with the blood of the creature,[9] ----this is the act of a man surfeited, who misuses his substance, having no place to pour out the superfluity of his wealth.

Clothes decorated with religious images, worn by laymen it seems, are also condemned:having found some idle and extravagant style of weaving, which by the twining of the warp and the woof, produces the effect of a picture,[10] and imprints upon their robes the forms of all creatures, they artfully produce, both for themselves and for their wives and children, clothing beflowered and wrought with ten thousand objects....You may see the wedding of Galilee, and the water-pots; the paralytic carrying his bed on his shoulders; the blind man being healed with the clay; the woman with the bloody issue, taking hold of the border of the garment; the sinful woman falling at the feet of Jesus; Lazarus returning to life from the grave.

The apparent contradiction of these positions confused Arnold Hauser, in his famous The Social History of Art, into wrongly claiming Asterius as an Iconoclast,[11] but his objection to images on clothes is on the grounds of expense and frivolity.