other · 330 · Tremetousia
Spyridon kept sheep in Cyprus, married, had a daughter, and was made bishop of Trimythous without giving up the farm. Socrates, in the volume this project holds, singles him out at the Council of Nicaea as one of two bishops of extraordinary celebrity, the other being Paphnutius of Upper Thebes, and the stories told of him are all of the same kind: he is plain, he is poor, he is unimpressed by rhetoric, and he keeps working. The most repeated has him answering a philosopher at the council not with argument but with a statement of the creed, after which the philosopher gives up debating. What makes him worth a page beyond the anecdotes is what he represents in this dataset. Almost everyone else here is a bishop of a great city, a writer, or both, and the record is naturally made of writing. Spyridon wrote nothing at all, held a see nobody has heard of, and was famous in his own lifetime anyway. His body is at Corfu and is still carried through the town four times a year.
Can a man be a bishop and go on being a peasant?
Socrates thought it remarkable enough to say so at Nicaea.