Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen: The Partisans of Melania and Eudocia

Abstract

As Peter Brown has so eloquently described in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, bones became an avenue to power in late antiquity. Wealthy Christians who could lay claim to the bodies of the holy dead gained status through their willingness to share the gratia thus acquired with those lacking relics of their own; Paulinus of Nola, proprietor of Saint Felix's remains, affords an illuminating example. Patronage was restyled, Brown argues, as the royal, priestly, or monastic controllers of bones became the intermediaries through whom the saints' generosities were bestowed on sinful humans. Yet cooperation was not always the dominant spirit in the dispensing of gratia: relics could provide new opportunities for competition, as is dramatically illustrated by a rivalry confused and perhaps forever obfuscated by contradictory texts. The rivals are the heiress-turned- ascetic Melania the Younger and the empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II. The bones are Stephen's.