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Dionysius
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Introductory Note to Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria.
[909] Dionysius is giving a sort of summary of all the calamities which befell the Alexandrian church from the commencement of his episcopal rule: namely, first, persecution, referring to that which began in the last year of the reign of Philip; then war, meaning the civil war of which he speaks in his Epistle to Fabius; then pestilence, alluding to the sickness which began in the time of Decius, and traversed the land under Gallus and Volusianus.—Vales.
[910] ἀναμασσόμενοι τὰς ἀλγηδόνας. Some make this equivalent to mitigantes. It means properly to “wipe off,” and so to become “responsible” for. Here it is used apparently to express much the same idea as the two preceding clauses.
[911] μόνης φιλοφροσύνης ἔχεσθαι.
[912] The phrase περίψημα πάντων refers to 1 Cor. iv. 13. Valesius supposes that among the Alexandrians it may have been a humble and complimentary form of salutation, ἐγώ ειμι περίψημά σου; or that the expression περίψημα πάντων had come to be habitually applied to the Christians by the heathen.
[913] ὑπτίαις χερσι. [See Introductory Note, p. 77.]
[914] καθαιροῦντες.
[915] ὁμοφοροῦντες.
[916] Compare Defoe, Plague in London.]
Epistle XIII.—To Hierax, a Bishop in Egypt.
[917] Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., vii. 21. The preface to this extract in Eusebius is as follows: “After this he (Dionysius) wrote also another Paschal epistle to Hierax, a bishop in Egypt, in which he makes the following statement about the sedition then prevailing at Alexandria.”
[918] Or, for.
[919] μεσαιτάτη τῆς πόλεως. Codex Regius gives τῶν πόλεων. The sedition referred to as thus dividing Alexandria is probably that which broke out when Æmilianus seized the sovereignty in Alexandria. See Pollio’s Thirty Tyrants.
[920] ἄπειρος. But Codices Fuk. and Savil. give ἄπορος, “impracticable.”
[921] ἀκροτόμου. It may perhaps mean “smitten” here.
[922] ᾽Εδέμ.
[923] Written Γηών in Codex Alexandrinus, but Γεών in Codex Vaticanus.
[924] ιχῶρας.
[925] ὡμογέροντας.
Epistle XIV.—From His Fourth Festival Epistle.
[926] ἐκ τῆς δ᾽ ἑορταστικῆς ἐπιστολῆς. From the Sacred Parallels of John of Damascus, Works, ii. p. 753 C, edit. Paris, 1712. In his Ecclesiastical History, book vii. ch. 20, Eusebius says: “In addition to these epistles, the same Dionysius also composed others about this time, designated his Festival Epistles, and in these he says much in commendation of the Paschal feast. One of these he addressed to Flavius, and another to Domitius and Didymus, in which he gives the canon for eight years, and shows that the Paschal feast ought not to be kept until the passing of the vernal equinox. And besides these, he wrote another epistle to his co-presbyters at Alexandria.”
[927] P. 84, note 6.
[928] P. 82, note 6.
[929] See, in the Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum of Gallandi, the Appendix to vol. xiv., added from the manuscripts, after the editor’s death by an anonymous scholar.
I.—A Commentary on the Beginning of Ecclesiastes.
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