Anastasius II of Antioch

Anastasius II, sometimes called Anastasius the Younger to distinguish him from his immediate predecessor, was the Chalcedonian (Melkite / Greek Orthodox) Patriarch of Antioch from 599 until his death in 609. Almost nothing reliable is known of his birth, family, or early career; neither a year nor a place of birth can be established from the surviving sources. He succeeded Patriarch Anastasius I, a Palestinian monk and theologian who had held the see in two periods (from the late 550s, with an interval of exile under Justinian and Justin II) and who died in 598. Anastasius II thus took office while the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire still governed Syria, but at a time when Antioch and its hinterland were already divided between the imperial Chalcedonian hierarchy and large Miaphysite communities, and when the eastern frontier was under growing pressure from Sassanian Persia.

His patriarchate coincided with the last years of Emperor Maurice and with the usurpation of Phocas in 602. The eastern provinces then entered a period of acute political and military instability. Near-contemporary and later Byzantine chroniclers, notably Theophanes the Confessor and the Chronicon Paschale, report that Anastasius II was killed in Antioch in 609 (a few accounts give 610). According to these narratives he died in the course of urban violence: later tradition often blamed a Jewish rising in the city and described the patriarch as dragged through the streets and his corpse burned. Modern historians treat that attribution with caution, because it may reflect subsequent polemical writing; the same unrest can also be read as circus-faction rioting, military disorder under Phocas, or a mix of local conflicts. What is not seriously disputed is that the patriarch died a violent death in Antioch at the end of the first decade of the seventh century. Later ecclesiastical memory sometimes counted him a martyr, though his cult is poorly documented and is easily confused with that of Anastasius I of Antioch (commemorated on 20 April) and with the Sinai monk Anastasius of Sinai.

Very little of Anastasius II’s own literary or administrative work survives, and he remains a much more obscure figure than Anastasius I. He belonged to the imperial Chalcedonian church in communion with Constantinople and with Rome. Pope Gregory the Great (died 604) had been in correspondence with the church of Antioch in this generation, though the securely attested letters are those exchanged with Anastasius I rather than with his successor. No evidence indicates that Anastasius II married or belonged to a named monastic order of the later Western type; like other Eastern bishops of his age he would have been drawn from celibate clergy or the monastic estate. After his death the see of Antioch was further disrupted by the Sasanian occupation of the city (Antioch fell to the Persians in the early 610s) and, within a few decades, by the Arab conquests. The verifiable core of his biography is therefore brief: Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch from 599 to 609, and victim of lethal unrest in that city.