ON S. ARGIMIRUS THE MONK, MARTYR AT CORDOVA IN SPAIN.
A.D. 856.
Acts and notice from the Memorial of S. Eulogius.
Argimirus the Monk, Martyr at Cordova in Spain (S.)
D. P.
The last but one of the Martyrs, whose notice S. Eulogius the Presbyter of Cordova left us, in his Memorial of the Saints, distinguished into three books, is the aforenamed Saint; The Author, three years after to be crowned with Martyrdom, of whom he, not much after, that is in the year 859, the Christian faith also himself with his own blood about to seal, thus writes in book 3, chapter 16, after relating in the preceding Chapter the Martyrdom of Elias the Presbyter, and Paul and Isidore, two months before Argimirus crowned in the Arabian persecution there at Cordova, of whom we treated on the 17th of April.
[2] Thence besides a certain Argimirus, a Confessor, a noble man and now full of age, from the town of Egabro drew his lineage; and at one time at Cordova Patricia a Censor had been set by the King. He praises the fortitude of Argimirus. When, removed from the administration of justice, the leisure of a convent he inhabited quiet, by the deceit or hatred of certain Heathens circumvented, he is accused before the Judge of derision of their Prophet, and is reproached for his profession of the divinity of the Son of God; and that than this one more omnipotent no other he confesses, and that one the author of vanity and leader he asserts to be of the lost. Whom the Judge before himself after some days bidding to stand, while with his exhortations and a certain enticement of words to the profane rite to enslave he strives, and prevails not; the soldier of Christ pertinacious in his holy purpose, on the rack living he placed, and with the sword pierced he slew on the 4th of the Kalends of July, in the Era 894. Whose body when after many days by the command of the Judge from the gibbet was taken down, by a certain Religious's diligence to the basilica of S. Acisclus it is carried, and by the worthy ministry of Priests near the tomb of the aforesaid Martyr, and of S. Perfectus, was buried.
[3] The Martyrdom of S. Perfectus, with which the aforepraised Memorial S. Eulogius begins, we gave from him on the 18th of April, on which he suffered in the year 851; of S. Acisclus, an ancient Martyr under Diocletian, to treat on the 17th of November. Ambrose Morales, who with scholia the Memorial itself illustrated, The observations of Ambrose Morales pertaining hither. suspects that Argimirus had already otherwise confessed the faith of Christ, for that he is entitled Confessor: but Egabro, where Argimirus acted as a Monk, he says is Cabra, a town 36 miles distant from Cordova, namely from the Greek name Αἴξ, αἰγὸς, which signifies Goat, rendered into Latin. But to others perhaps such a derivation will seem little apt. But what was the Magistracy of Censor among the Arabs, he confesses himself to be ignorant; he suspects however this name was borrowed by Eulogius from the Romans, by some reference to the Roman Censorship, which I would easily admit, since some of the Judiciary power, and indeed supreme, the Censors had: but I would not confound the Censorship with the Census; which they who made, were called not Censors but Censitors, as rightly observes Tamayus, bringing nothing else that makes for this.
[4] Galesinius in noting in the sacred Fasti the name of Argimirus, The name inscribed in the Fasti. went before the innovators of the Roman Martyrology under Gregory XIII: but these followed in their Monastic Martyrologies, Wion, Menardus, Dorganius, Bucelinus, by a right altogether best. The history from Eulogius into Spanish rendered John de Marietta the Dominican in book 3, chapter 3 of the Ecclesiastical History of the Saints of Spain: but our Martin de Roa the same paraphrastically explained: ending with it his work on the feasts of the Saints of Cordova, The history of the body found in the year 1615 is wanted. printed at Seville in the year 1615, and adds at the end these to our matter notable words: There were found and to this day are kept his holy Relics in the church of the Apostle Peter, as we wrote in the history of their finding. Worthy was this place, to which Tamayus adverting, would teach us something of such a history; but neither in the Library of our Society, even lately revised and augmented by Nathanael Sothwell; nor in the Spanish Library of Nicholas Antonius, more accurately even the writings of Martin recounting, anything is indicated that makes for this, whence vehemently I fear, lest all the labor in vain in seeking that History now the hagiophile friends asked by us will spend.