ON S. ARGIMIRUS THE MONK,
MARTYR AT CORDOVA IN SPAIN.
A.D. 856.
Acts and notice from the Memorial of S. Eulogius.
Argimirus the Monk, Martyr at Cordova in Spain (S.)
D. P.
The last but one of the Martyrs, whose notice
S. Eulogius the Presbyter of Cordova left us,
in his Memorial of the Saints,
distinguished into three books,
is the aforenamed Saint; The Author, three years after to be crowned with Martyrdom, of
whom he, not much after, that is in the year
859, the Christian faith also himself with his own blood
about to seal, thus writes in book 3, chapter 16, after relating
in the preceding Chapter the Martyrdom of Elias the Presbyter,
and Paul and Isidore, two months before Argimirus
crowned in the Arabian persecution there at Cordova,
of whom we treated on the 17th of April.
[2] Thence besides a certain Argimirus, a Confessor,
a noble man and now full of age, from the town of Egabro
drew his lineage; and at one time
at Cordova Patricia a Censor had been set by the King.
He praises the fortitude of Argimirus. When, removed from the administration
of justice, the leisure of a convent he inhabited quiet,
by the deceit or hatred of certain Heathens circumvented,
he is accused before the Judge of derision of their
Prophet, and is reproached for his profession of the divinity
of the Son of God; and that than this one more omnipotent no
other he confesses, and that one the author of vanity and leader
he asserts to be of the lost. Whom the Judge before
himself after some days bidding to stand, while with his
exhortations and a certain enticement of words
to the profane rite to enslave he strives, and prevails not;
the soldier of Christ pertinacious in his holy purpose,
on the rack living he placed, and with the sword pierced
he slew on the 4th of the Kalends of July, in the Era 894.
Whose body when after many days by the
command of the Judge from the gibbet was taken down, by a certain
Religious's diligence to the basilica of S. Acisclus it is carried,
and by the worthy ministry of Priests near
the tomb of the aforesaid Martyr, and of S. Perfectus, was buried.
[3] The Martyrdom of S. Perfectus, with which the aforepraised Memorial
S. Eulogius begins, we gave from him on the
18th of April, on which he suffered in the year 851; of S. Acisclus,
an ancient Martyr under Diocletian, to treat on the 17th
of November. Ambrose Morales, who with scholia the Memorial
itself illustrated, The observations of Ambrose Morales pertaining hither. suspects that Argimirus had already otherwise
confessed the faith of Christ, for that he is entitled Confessor:
but Egabro, where Argimirus acted as a Monk,
he says is Cabra, a town 36 miles
distant from Cordova, namely from the Greek name Αἴξ,
αἰγὸς, which signifies Goat, rendered into Latin. But to others
perhaps such a derivation will seem little apt.
But what was the Magistracy of Censor among the Arabs,
he confesses himself to be ignorant; he suspects however this name
was borrowed by Eulogius from the Romans, by some reference
to the Roman Censorship, which I would easily admit,
since some of the Judiciary power, and indeed supreme, the
Censors had: but I would not confound the Censorship
with the Census; which they who made, were called not Censors but
Censitors, as rightly observes Tamayus,
bringing nothing else that makes for this.
[4] Galesinius in noting in the sacred Fasti the name of Argimirus,
The name inscribed in the Fasti. went before the innovators of the Roman Martyrology
under Gregory XIII: but these followed in their Monastic Martyrologies,
Wion, Menardus, Dorganius, Bucelinus, by a right
altogether best. The history from Eulogius into Spanish
rendered John de Marietta the Dominican in book 3,
chapter 3 of the Ecclesiastical History of the Saints of Spain:
but our Martin de Roa the same paraphrastically explained: ending with it his work on the feasts
of the Saints of Cordova, The history of the body found in the year 1615 is wanted. printed at Seville in the year
1615, and adds at the end these to our matter
notable words: There were found and to this day are kept
his holy Relics in the church of the Apostle
Peter, as we wrote in the history of their finding.
Worthy was this place, to which Tamayus adverting,
would teach us something of such a history; but neither
in the Library of our Society, even lately revised
and augmented by Nathanael Sothwell; nor
in the Spanish Library of Nicholas Antonius, more accurately
even the writings of Martin recounting, anything
is indicated that makes for this, whence vehemently I fear,
lest all the labor in vain in seeking that History
now the hagiophile friends asked by us will spend.