monument." It dates from the ninth or tenth century and, according to
Bertaux, has the same plan and the same dimensions as the famous
"Cattolica" at Stilo, which the artistic Lear, though he stayed some
time at that picturesque place, does not so much as mention. They say
that this chapel of Saint Mark was built by Euprassius, protos-padarius
of Calabria, and that in the days of Nilus it was dedicated to Saint
Anastasius. Here, at Rossano, we are once more _en plein Byzance._

Rossano was not only a political bulwark, the most formidable citadel of
this Byzantine province. It was a great intellectual centre, upon which
literature, theology and art converged. Among the many perverse
historical notions of which we are now ridding ourselves is this-that
Byzantinism in south Italy was a period of decay and torpid dreamings.
It needed, on the contrary, a resourceful activity to wipe out, as did
those colonists from the east, every trace of Roman culture and language
(Latin rule only revived at Rossano in the fifteenth century). There was
no lethargy in their social and political ambitions, in their military
achievements, which held the land against overwhelming numbers of
Saracens, Lombards and other intruders. And the life of those old monks
of Saint Basil, as we now know it, represented a veritable renaissance
of art and letters.

Of the ten Basilean convents that grew up in the surroundings of Rossano
the most celebrated was that of S. M. del Patir. Together with the
others, it succeeded to a period of eremitism of solitary anchorites
whose dwellings honeycombed the warm slopes that confront the
Ionian....

The lives of some of these Greco-Calabrian hermits are valuable
documents. In the _Vitae Sanctorum Siculorum_ of O. Caietanus (1057)