MARTYROLOGY, a catalogue or list of martyrs, arranged according to the succession of their anniversaries, and sometimes including an account of their lives and sufferings. The corresponding word in the Greek Church is Menologion, or Analogion ; from the Menologia the Synaxaria are compiled. The custom of paying honour to the memory of those who had “witnessed the good confession” ip perilous times established itself very early in the Christian church, and one particular manner of commemoration was formally recognized by at least one ecclesiastical synod before the end of the 4th century; in the 47th canon of the third synod of Carthage (397 a.d.) it is decreed “liceat legi Passiones Martyrum quum anniversarii eorum dies celebrantur.” Apart from the still extant Depositio Martyrum, contained in the work of the chronographer of 354, edited in 1850 by Mommsen, the oldest “martyrologies” of which anything is known are the αρχαίων μαρτυρίων συναγωγή, or collection of records of past persecutions, to which Eusebius more than once alludes as having been made by himself, and the treatise On the Martyrs of Palestine, by the same author, the full text of which has been preserved in an ancient Syriac version edited by Cureton. Next to the general martyrology of Eusebius, in chronological order, it has been usual to place the calendar of saints’ days referred to in a letter, attributed to Jerome, which purports to be written in answer to bishops Chromatins and Heliodorus, who had asked him to search the archives of Eusebius with the view of enabling them to observe the saints’ days with more regularity. This epistle is now admitted to be spurious; ultimately, however, a so-called Martyrologium Hieronymianum came into existence, but it is not ...