Miletus

ON ST. MILETUS, BISHOP OF TRIER,

IN BELGICA PRIMA.

About the year 470.

Miletus, bishop and confessor, at Trier in Belgica Prima. (S.)

BY J. C.

The variously dislocated name of St. Miletus, bishop of Trier, is read today inscribed in the sacred calendars. The Hieronymian copies of Florentinius vie with one another in recording the deposition of Militus the bishop in the city of Trier

announce. Of St. Miletus, bishop of Trier, The Labbe codex, printed in our work in volume 6 of June in the Appendix to part 2, has it thus: Of Nicetas, of Castor Miles, of Trogus, etc. The Augsburg one in the same place: Of Castor Miles, of Treca, corruptly for Trogi. With the punctuation put in, I think it should be read Castoris, Militis: and that this name of our saint was corrupted by the copyist from Militi. Certainly among the appendices to Bede prefixed to volume 11 of March the Barberini codex employs almost the same inflection, when it makes the memory of St. Miletus in these words: In the city of Trier the deposition of St. Miletis the bishop. Then in the Hieronymian copies Militi is commonly placed before Trogo, nor was Castor a soldier. Very many of the appendices to Usuard also have the saint on this day, and our manuscript Florarium, along with Galesinius, Canisius, Ghini, and others. Ferrarius also mentions him in his Catalogue, but only on the 25th day of September, following the Trier tables. Whatever be the case with those tables, it is certain that on this day St. Miletus is venerated at Trier, on which day concerning him among the proper Offices of the diocese the ninth Lesson is prescribed from the common of a Confessor Pontiff.

[2] whose memory is frequent today in the sacred calendars Moreover I have thought that Miletus should be read rather than Melitus, Melitius, Militus, Meletius, and Myletus, both because the saint's name is found so written among those Offices, and also in the older catalogues. For the rest, the announcement of St. Miletus is everywhere bare; Saussay alone, according to his custom, has woven a fuller elogium of him, more, I think, from what he conjectures to have happened than from what he found to have been done; for the deeds of the holy man are altogether obscure. Brower, Annals of Trier, book 5, folio 356, writes these few things about him: Miletus at that time (when Childeric, king of the Franks, was subjugating various dominions of Gaul) had yielded to nature at Trier, and, his life having been innocently spent, is to be venerated in the calendars of the saints at the nineteenth day of September. If this be so, it may be gathered that the saint's death happened in the not earliest times of Childeric. Childeric, according to some, ceased to reign and to live in the year 479, according to others two years later. Since it is otherwise uncertain in what year the holy prelate came to the see of Trier, and in what year he departed thence to the heavens, I have judged that his death can be fixed about the year of Christ 470.

[3] St. Miletus therefore lived and ruled the church of Trier in most difficult and most mournful times, his deeds are obscure. in which the city of the Treveri and all the surrounding region was more than once laid waste with sword and flame by the Franks, still fierce in their barbarian superstition. It is credible that the holy prelate eagerly seized the occasion offered for exercising Christian fortitude and charity, and that he shone forth not by innocence of life alone, but also by those virtues which the calamities of the times required in so great a prelate. For the rest, St. Miletus is placed by William of Jülich and Peter Merssaeus in the History of the Archbishops of Trier, whom the Sainte-Marthe brothers followed, as the 42nd archbishop of that see in the catalogue. The Deeds of the Treveri, printed by Calmet at the end of volume 1 of the History of Lorraine, column 12, assign Miletus as the successor of Volusianus; the aforesaid Sainte-Marthes, together with the history of Trier which d'Achery inserted in volume 12 of his Spicilegium, interpose between them Hildolphus and Severinus, of whom both here and in other catalogues there are almost bare names.