Gregentios
While the first eight are vague in their chronology and geography, the ninth draws on superior historical sources and contains more precise details.
[7] The early part, which includes an Avar raid on his hometown, may also reflect authentic conditions in the northern Balkans during the later 6th century.
The Nomoi may contain some authentic information, since it shares characteristics with legal inscriptions from pre-Islamic South Arabia.
[2] The Dialexis, which is a debate between Gregentios and a Jew named Herban, was the most popular part of the work and circulated independently into modern times.
[4] According to his Bios, Gregentios was born on 6 December in the late 5th century in the town of Lyplianes (Ljubljana) in the land of the Avars.
Miraculously saved from drowning, he retires to the desert, where he receives instruction and prophecies about his future from a holy man.
At the urging of a certain Sergios, his foster mother tells her dream to an elder named Niketas, who interprets it as saying that Gregentios will one day convert a fourfold people.
[11] Gregentios next traveled extensively in northern and central Italy and Sicily before sailing to Alexandria in Egypt.
[2][7] The Bios presents him as travelling from Lyplianes to Moryne (Murano), Antenora (Padua) and Agrigento, then by boat to Pavia, then to Milan and Carthage, then by foot to Rome, then to Augustopolis (either Augusta or Koper) and finally Alexandria.
The holy man and Gregentios leave Moryne after the local bishop learns of the latter's spiritual gifts.
[10] With the holy man, Gregentios moves on to Agrigento, leaving the bishop of Antenora also to send searchers after him.
He visits two churches in the city, and a woman preaching to a crowd from a balcony predicts that he will go to Egypt and Ḥimyar.
He takes on as a disciple a boy of fourteen named Leon, who later becomes governor of Melike (either Ravenna or the land of the Melingoi) and is assassinated.
[10] In Carthage, Gregentios meets a woman named Philothea who is regarded as a mute who only barks and sighs.
During his time in Carthage, he befriends a young man named George and they visit a church dedicated to Saint Anastasia.
Artados prophesies in detail about Gregentios' future in Egypt and Ḥimyar, where he will convert four peoples: pagans, Jews, Ḥimyarites and Maurousians.
[13] In 523, the Ḥimyarite king Dhū Nuwās massacres the Christians of Najrān and its leader, Arethas.
The Emperor Justin I asks the Ethiopian (Aksumite) king Elesboam (Caleb) to lead an expedition against Dhū Nuwās.
[2] In Ethiopia, Gregentios stays for a time in the capital, Amlem (Aksum), before crossing the sea to Medekion (Maddaban) and then heading to Taphar (Ẓafār) and finally Najrān, where he meets the king.
He consecrates the churches that the kings has built and installs priests in them at Najrān, Ẓafār, Akana (Bi'r Ali), Atarph (Ẓufār), Legmia (Laḥj), Azaki (Aden) and Iouze (Mawzaʿ).
[14] Gregentios remains in Ḥimyar for thirty years, assisting Elesboam's appointed viceroy, Abraha, in building churches.
Within the last class are laws concerning sorcery, poisoning, perjury, theft, extrajudicial punishments, infringing ecclesiastical asylum, workhouses for criminals and prohibitions on begging.
Although the Nomoi is a civil law code, it presents itself as having been promulgated by a supernatural force to the geitoniarchai (administrators of Najrān's 36 districts).
One of the most unusual and cruel punishments in the Nomoi—suspending a convict upside down and smoking him to death with burning hay—is actually attested in an 8th-century Byzantine source (Nikephoros's Breviarium).
Some prescriptions regarding marriage in the Nomoi became a part of Byzantine law during the reign Leo VI (886–912).
[23] The Nomoi may be compared with other pseudepigraphal texts of supposed supernatural origin from Byzantium, such as the Didascalia Apostolorum and Letter of Christ Fallen from Heaven.
[24] The earliest manuscript witness to the Nomoi, a copy made in 1180 on Cyprus, shows some Western influence in its terminology.
[24] The Dialexis purports to be a record written around 550 or 560 of a debate between Gregentios and a Jew named Herban that took place before the royal court of Ḥimyar around 520 or 530.
In 1660, some "letters of Gregentios"—possibly the same treatise—were catalogued as part of the library of Denis Pétau that had been purchased after his death by Queen Christina of Sweden.
