While Germanos the chief prelate was baptizing Leo's successor (in both his evil and his rule) Constantine [V], the boy because he was so young, gave a terrible, foul-smelling harbinger: he defecated in the holy font, as say those who were accurate eyewitnesses.178 This made the patriarch Germanos prophetically say, "This is a sign that in the future great evil shall befall the Christians and the church because of him."
178. This is the origin of the derisive title Kopronymos ("Dung-name").
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, September 29, 2025
How Copronymus Got His Name
Theophanes, Chronicle, annus mundi 6211 = 718/719 AD (tr. Harry Turtledove, with his note):