The life of St Symeon Metaphrastes
Drawing on roughly a hundred fifty older accounts of the saints, he assembled a menologion, a full year's cycle of lives for reading in church. He did not merely gather these older texts but rewrote them, giving their language a more polished and consistent shape for readers of his own age. That work of rewording earned him the name by which he is remembered, Metaphrastes, the paraphraser, and his versions spread so widely that they largely replaced the rougher originals they had reworked.
Late in life he set aside his offices and entered the monastic state. The years of his birth and death are not precisely fixed, though he is thought to have died near the close of the tenth century.
He is remembered as the great collector and reshaper of the Church's memory of her saints, a labor every later teller of those lives, in every age, still stands within.
