St. Anatolius of Constantinople

J. M. Neale calls Anatolius the first poet who freed himself from the tyranny of the old laws and boldly struck out the new path of harmonious prose, and compares him to Venantius Fortunatus in the West. Neale's headnote records that he had been apocrisiarius, or legate, from Dioscorus to the Emperor's court, and that after the death of S. Flavian he was raised to the throne of Constantinople in 449. At the Council of Chalcedon he procured the enactment of the 28th Canon, which raised Constantinople to the second place among the Patriarchal Sees, and he died in 458 after eight years as Patriarch. John Brownlie also gives 458 as the year of his death.

Neale notes that Anatolius's compositions are not numerous and are almost all short, but usually very spirited. This file gives four of Neale's versions from Hymns of the Eastern Church (1862), including the stichera on the Lord stilling the storm and the Evening Hymn, and Brownlie's 1900 rendering of the Christmas hymn that begins 'What shall we bring to Thee?'. Each poem's translator is recorded.