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…
In 906, the famous historian Giovanni
Diacono, the subdeacon, Aligerno and the provost Maiorino transported
from
Miseno to Naples
saint Sossio's remains.
For
many centuries the glorious remains of saint Sossio and saint Severino's
bodies had been united, until monsignor Michele Arcangelo Lupoli, great
personage of the history of Frattamaggiore and of elsewhere as well as
glamorous prelate, promoted their transfer in 1807 to the parish of Fratta.
The city welcomed its Patron saint's relics with a memorable exultation;
it came back to his fellow-citizens' heirs the martyr Sosio of Miseno!
With regard to the exact name, some
considerations are opportune.
In
the texts of all the “passiones”, which carry the name of the
Saint Deacon of Miseno, it came out the name Sossio and also the one Sosio. Giovanni Diacono,
the most trustworthy of the authors being an "eye" reporter
and not by hearsay exclaimed on the “tomb arched in a circle shaped
as a Basilica”, as described by the super-witness “old priest
of Miseno”, to the archbishop of Naples: “hic est Sossius levita et martyr”.
He
called the Saint Sossius all the times except in the title of the report
which he headed “Acta
translationis s. Sosii”,
with only one "s". The Latins wrote the name Sosius with one
hiss: from the I century B.C. it is not rare to find the name written
with two sibilants. The Greeks, from whom the Latins learnt it, wrote
both Sossius and Sosios.
…
And the name Sosso? It comes from the Ode of Pope
Simmaco, because in the Geroriniano Martyrology it is written Sesontus
and not Sossus, as erroneously reported and supported by an esteemed
scholar. In the Roman Martyrology, at 23th September it is written: “In Campania,
the commemoration of the blessed Sosio deacon of Miseno, from whose head
the bishop Gennaro saw a flame raising while he was reading the Gospel
in church and so he prophesied that Sosio would have been martyr.
Shortly after, when he was 30 years old, he suffered the martyrdom by
beheading together with the aforesaid bishop”.
… Not even only one Sossus is in the
vocabularies, works and deeds, and in the lists of the cursus honorum.
The ode of pope Simmaco dates back to the VI century (501-506), that
is to an age during which the Latin epigraphy underwent the “degeneratio litteraturae”
and was influenced by various “misprints”, using the
journalistic jargon, among which the fall of the “i” after
two sibilants, phenomenon of Greek origin.
Still
today there is someone who writes exactly
“classiari” and someone else who writes erroneously “classari”,
to indicate the sailors of the fleet of Imperial Rome. “Sossus”
is a mistake made by the ones who copied the ode. During that period language
had been changed or
mangled in some of its lemmas.
Anyway
it is always about the same Saint, deacon of Miseno, martyr in the Solfatara
with S. Gennaro: San Sos(s)io, patron of Frattamaggiore.
…
Nowadays Miseno, once symbol of Rome on the sea, is a little village set
among the blue of the sky and of the sea, the green of the hills and the
yellow of the tuff of the collapsed volcanoes.
The
little church of “its” Saint Sosio is a small museum under the
open sky: pieces of marble, majestic capitals, trunks of columns and a
polychromy of marbles drilled by date mussels, which testify the past
levels reached by the sea because of the bradiseysms.
But the most beautiful antique stands out
on the façade of the little church, above on the right of the
entrance: the tablet, placed by the inhabitants of Frattamaggiore in 1905,
when they came to Miseno in the anniversary of 1600 years after his
Martyrdom to honour saint Sosio, who was born here like their fathers.
A
memorable procession. Today that marble has the colour of ivory because
of age and rain, in a light of indelible feeling.
Gianni
RACE
from the “Historical Review of the Communes” Atellana
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