Triphyllius

Triphyllius, whose name also appears as Tryphillius, Triphyllios, or Tryfillios in Greek and Latin sources, was a Christian bishop on the island of Cyprus in the fourth century. He held the see of Ledra, which Saint Jerome also calls Leucotheon and which later tradition identifies with Leukosia, the city that became Nicosia. Strictly contemporary evidence says nothing secure about his family or about the place and date of his birth. Later hagiographical lives present him as a convert from paganism who received a thorough secular education and studied law at Berytus (Beirut), then one of the chief schools of Roman jurisprudence in the eastern Mediterranean. That training, together with a gift for public speaking, made him one of the more cultured bishops of his generation on an island whose church had already produced figures such as Spyridon of Trimythous.

He attached himself to Saint Spyridon and was counted among that bishop’s disciples. A well-known anecdote in the Spyridon legend was meant to show how the older saint corrected the younger man’s taste for classical elegance. When Spyridon asked Triphyllius to read a Gospel lesson that referred to a poor man’s bed or pallet, Triphyllius replaced the simple New Testament word with a more refined synonym drawn from literary Greek. Spyridon stopped him and asked whether he was ashamed of the words of Christ. The episode was remembered as a lesson in humility and in fidelity to the language of Scripture rather than to rhetorical fashion, and it indicates that by then Triphyllius was already a cleric close to the famous wonder-working bishop of Trimythous.

As bishop of Ledra, Triphyllius took part in the Council of Sardica, assembled about 343 to address the status of Athanasius of Alexandria and the conflicts generated by Arian and anti-Arian parties in the East. His presence there places him among the Nicene-leaning bishops of the mid-fourth century. Toward the end of the same century Jerome, in his catalogue of Christian writers (De viris illustribus), devoted a short notice to him. Jerome called Triphyllius the most eloquent man of his age and a person of distinction in the reign of Constantius II, and he recorded that he had read a commentary by Triphyllius on the Song of Songs. Jerome added that other works were attributed to the Cypriot bishop but had not come into his possession. None of those writings is known to survive, so Triphyllius’s reputation as an exegete rests on Jerome’s testimony rather than on an extant corpus.

Church calendars and later Cypriot tradition assign his death to about 370. He was honored as a saint without a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type, as was usual for bishops of the immediately post-Nicene era who enjoyed a local cult. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps his feast on 13 June; Western martyrologies likewise remember him in mid-June. In Cyprus he has been regarded as an early shepherd of the community that later became the church of Nicosia. Beyond the outline given by Jerome, the Sardica attendance, and the Spyridon legend, the details of his birth, the exact circumstances of his death, and any family life remain unknown in the surviving historical sources.