90 RENAISSANCES

was launched, circa A.D. 488, by Xenaias the Monophysite bishop of
Mabbtig (Graece Bambyce-Hierapolis); and in the sixth century there
were iconoclast riots at Edessa and at Antioch. In the same century in
the Greek heart of a Christian oikoumenS the strength of iconoclastic feel-
ing is indicated by the recorded fact that Julian, bishop of Adramyttiurn,
prohibited the exhibition, in churches of his diocese, of any [visual
representations in the round and of any two-dimensional representations
in the media of stone and wood, and permitted sculpture-work on the
doors only.1 In the same century in the Latin West the strength of icono-
clastic feeling is indicated by the recorded facts that a sixth-century
bishop of Narbonne found it politic to drape a picture of Christ on the
Cross, and that Pope Gregory the Great's contemporary, Bishop Serenus
of Marseilles, broke or removed all images found by him in churches in
his diocese.2 Circa A.D. 670, in the citadel of Melchite orthodoxy at Con-
stantinople, the Western Christian pilgrim Arculf was told a story of a
man (vilified by him, or by his recorder Adamnan, as ille ludcus mere-
dulus) tearing down an image of the Theot6kos from the wall of a house
on which it was hanging, when he had learnt who it was that the image
represented, and carrying it—apparently without making any conceal-
ment of what he was doing and also without exciting any protest—to
a neighbouring public latrine, where,

*ob Christi ex Maria nati dehonorationem, imaginem matris eius per
foramen super humanum stercus inferius iacens proiccit <it ipso super-
sedens, per idem foramen alvuna purgans, proprii stercus vcntris super
thoracidem beate Marie paulo ante ibi depositam dimittens, atolicliaaime
agens profudit.'3

In Cyprus, where the iconophpbe persuasion in the Christian Church's
controversy found a champion in the fourth century in an Kpiphamua
of Constantia, and where the iconodule cause was championed at the
turn of the sixth and seventh centuries by a Leontius of Neapolis in
a polemical tract addressed to the Jews,4 the question seems to have been
a burning one; and we may hazard the guess that the perennial interest
in it, and sharp division of opinion over it, in Cypriot Christian circles
may have been a legacy from the former presence of an influential Jew-
ish community on an island which the Roman imperial authorities had
subsequently placed out of bounds for Jews, in retaliation for the Jewish
insurrection there in A.D. n 5-17,5 There was not, however, any com-

1 See Alexander, op. cit., p. 179. A tract addressed to Xiishop Julian by hit* «'d<J»ititititml
superior Hypatius, Metropolitan of Eph«$us, putting the case for vl»u»l rtspre*ont«ti«n§
in churches, will be found in Orientalia Christiana Anahcta, vol. cxvii (Rome 1938,
Pontificate Institutum Orientalium Studiorum), pp, 127-9, A tramlation. with notes and
commentary, is given by Alexander, in loc, cit.

* Gregory's correspondence with Serenus about these proceeding* U printed by J. P.
Migne in his Patrologia Latina, vol. Ixxvii, cols, 10*7-8 and ua8-io,

3 Arculfi Relatio de LaosSanctis ab Adamnano Scripts, Book III', chap, s <m Tobler,
T., and Molinier, A.: Itinera ttierosolymitana tt Description* Ttrra* Sanet&e ttelii* Sacrit
Antenora et Latmd Lingud Exarata (Geneva 1879, Fick, a vol*.)> vol. i, pp. icy-aoi).
All the cases of Iconophobia, except for Julian'a case, that have been cited m thin paw-
graph have been collected by S. Der Nersessian in op. cit,, pp. 60-70, and tha references
to the original sources will be found there.

, .4«SeeJ?-8.8»5i- 2. above. The surviving fragments of this tract are printed by T. P. Mianein
lasPatrologta Graeca, vol. xciii, cols. 1597-1609. Extracts—apptrentty from « different ver-
sion—are quoted by Saint John of Damascus (see Baynea, op. cit., 0:07, n. 10). Areium<4
of Leontius s arguments is given by Baynes, ibid., pp. 97-103, » Se« V. V, 68.