The life of St Gregory Decapolites
As a young man he left his family's home in secret rather than accept the marriage his parents had arranged for him. He spent the years that followed wandering widely across the Mediterranean world, living for a time as an ascetic on Mount Olympus and passing through Corinth, Rome, and Constantinople, preaching wherever he went and speaking out firmly against the iconoclast policy still enforced by the empire in his lifetime. On one of these travels, at the monastery of Latomos in Thessalonica, he took notice of a young monk named Joseph and brought him along to Constantinople, where the two settled together near the church of Sergius and Bacchus and continued together to defend the veneration of icons under an emperor still hostile to the practice. Gregory's health gave way as he renewed that struggle, and he reposed in 816, leaving behind Joseph and another disciple, John, to carry the work forward. Joseph would go on, after John's own early death, to become renowned in his own right as a hymnographer, and later built a church to house the relics of both his teacher and his fellow disciple. Gregory's own writings, chiefly ascetic and moral in character, survive in smaller measure than the legacy of the disciple he had once simply noticed in a Thessalonian monastery.
