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Dialogues
St Gregory the Dialogist, tr. P. W., 1608
Book 3, 13. Of Herculanus, Bishop of Perusium
1 Not long since, the virtuous Bishop Floridus told me a notable miracle, which was this. “The great holy man,” quoth he, “Herculanus, who brought me up, was Bishop of Perusium, exalted to that dignity from the state of a monk: in whose time the perfidious king Totila besieged it for seven years together, and the famine within was so great that many of the townsmen forsook the place: and before the seventh year was ended, the army of the Goths took the city. The commander of his camp dispatched messengers to Totila, to know his pleasure what he should do with the Bishop, and the rest of the citizens: to whom he returned answer, that he should, from the top of the Bishop’s head to his very foot, cut off a thong of his skin, and that done, to strike off his head: and as for the rest of the people, to put them all to the sword. When he had received this order, he commanded the reverent Bishop Herculanus to be carried to the walls, and there to have his head strooken off, and when he was dead, that his skin should be cut from the very crown down to the very foot, as though indeed a thong had been taken from his body; after which barbarous fact they threw his dead corpse over the wall. Then some upon pity, joining the head to the body, did bury him, together with an infant that was there found dead. Forty days after, Totila making proclamation that the inhabitants, which were gone, should without all fear come back again: those, which upon extremity of hunger departed, returned home to their houses, and calling to mind the holy life of their Bishop, they sought for his body, that it might, as he deserved, be buried in the church of St. Peter. And when they came to the place where it lay, they digged, and found the body of the infant that was buried together with him, putrefied and full of worms: but the Bishop’s body was so sound as though it had been newly put into the earth, and that which is more to be admired, and deserveth greater reverence, his head was so fast joined to his body as though it had never been cut off, neither did any sign of his beheading appear at all. Then they viewed likewise his back, whether that were also whole and sound, and they found it so perfect and well, as though never any knife had touched the same.”
PETER. Who would not wonder at such miracles of them that be dead: wrought, no question, for the spiritual good of the living?
Notes
- Chapter XIII. p. 121. The capture of Perusia (the modern Perugia) by the Goths and the martyrdom of St. Herculanus (Sant’ Ercolano) took place in 549, after a siege of three years, during which the city was gallantly defended by a Greek imperial garrison under Cyprian. According to the legend, when the defenders were reduced to extremities, Herculanus ordered a lamb or an ox to be fed with all the store of grain that remained, and then hurled down from the walls, in order that the besiegers might suppose that supplies abounded, and abandon their hope of reducing the city by starvation. A young ecclesiastic, either accidentally or by treachery, revealed the trick to the Goths, who straightway took the city by storm.