Arethas of Caesarea

Arethas of Caesarea was a Byzantine theologian, classical scholar, and hierarch who served as Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia in the early tenth century. He was born in Patras in the Peloponnese, within the Byzantine Empire, during the ninth century. He studied under Photios, the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, and belonged to the circle of learned clergy associated with the intellectual revival of the Macedonian period. Before his elevation to the episcopate he served as a deacon of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Already in that office he was an energetic collector of books. A famous manuscript of Plato, completed for him in 895 and now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, together with other dated copies of Euclid and of classical and patristic authors, attests both his means and his scholarly interests.

In the opening years of the tenth century, during the reign of Emperor Leo VI, Arethas was appointed Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, a metropolitan see of the first rank in the Byzantine ecclesiastical hierarchy and the historic throne of Basil the Great. As metropolitan he became involved in the controversy over the emperor’s fourth marriage, known as the tetragamy. Arethas at first supported Patriarch Nicholas I Mystikos in rejecting the marriage as contrary to canon law and wrote letters and treatises on the subject. Subsequent changes of patriarch and imperial policy, including the deposition and later restoration of Nicholas and the eventual Tomos of Union of 920, drew him into the prolonged negotiations that settled the affair. His surviving correspondence, orations, and canonical opinions are among the principal sources for these events and for the ecclesiastical politics of Constantinople and the provinces in his generation.

Arethas’s enduring importance lies in his activity as a scholiast and as a patron of manuscript production. He annotated works of Plato, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, and other ancient authors; the scholia that survive in the margins of manuscripts associated with him preserve both his own remarks and excerpts from older commentaries that would otherwise be lost. In theology his chief work is a commentary on the Book of Revelation, which depends on the earlier commentary of Andrew of Caesarea while incorporating additional patristic citations and Arethas’s own observations. He also left homilies, letters, and occasional speeches. Through the books he commissioned and marked, he played a substantial role in the transmission of classical Greek literature across the middle Byzantine centuries.

The precise date and place of Arethas’s death are not recorded. Documentary and manuscript evidence shows that he was still active in the early 930s. He is not commemorated as a saint in the Byzantine liturgical tradition; the martyr Saint Arethas of Najran, whose feast falls in October, is a distinct sixth-century figure. Arethas of Caesarea is remembered instead as one of the outstanding scholar-bishops of the Byzantine Church and as a central figure in the preservation of the classical heritage during the Macedonian Renaissance.