Olympius

The personal name Olympius (Greek Olympios) is a common late antique theophoric name and is attached in the sources to more than one man. The present subject is identified only by that name, without a see, a reliable catalogue number, or a standard hagiographical dossier. Major Western martyrologies and the principal Eastern synaxaria do not preserve a widely received, independently attested Life of a saint uniquely known as Olympius from which a birth year, death year, birthplace, or burial place could be stated. Homonyms must therefore not be collapsed into a single biography, and vital dates must be left blank rather than borrowed from an office-taking year or from a different person of the same name.

The best-documented bearer of the name in a Christian political setting is the magister officiorum Olympius at the court of the emperor Honorius, active in the years around 408 and 409. Near-contemporary historians, including Olympiodorus of Thebes as excerpted by Photius, together with Zosimus and Sozomen, describe him as a Christian official of strongly anti-barbarian views who played a central part in the overthrow of the general Stilicho and in subsequent court struggles. He later fell from power and was killed. He is a secular magistrate, not the subject of a medieval cult. No feast, patronage, religious order, or act of canonization or beatification is attached to him in the Roman Martyrology or in later Catholic or Orthodox liturgical books, and his precise years of birth and death are not securely recorded.

In Greek Christian literature the related but distinct name Olympas (Olympas), one of the Seventy Apostles greeted in the Epistle to the Romans, is sometimes confused in later lists with Olympius; the two names are not the same. Episcopal subscriptions of the fourth through sixth centuries occasionally include bishops named Olympius, as would be expected for a common Greek name, but those notices typically give only a see and a council and do not yield a birth year, a monastic affiliation, a spouse, children, or a developed passio or vita. No Bishop of Rome and no patriarch or catholicos of the principal Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, or Church of the East sees is recorded under the name Olympius.

Because no single, identifiable Olympius can be matched to a stable cult, claims of a religious order, a documented marriage or celibacy, children, a feast day, or patronages cannot be verified. Early local commemorations, if any existed under this name, would belong to the age of popular cult rather than to later papal canonization or beatification processes, for which no reliable act survives. The historian therefore records gender from the masculine form of the name, records that the subject was neither pope nor patriarch of a major see, and leaves all remaining biographical fields empty rather than conjecturing them from homonymous officials, bishops, or apostles.