Throne on a Dunghill: Boucolia, the ‘Seat’ of Mark, and the Toilet-Death of Arius as Alexandrian Parody (2nd–5th c.)

Abstract

The standard story treats Arius’s “toilet death” in Constantinople (336) as a bit of lurid pro-Nicene propaganda and leaves it there. I want to argue instead that the scene encodes something much more specific: a parody of an Alexandrian “seat” tradition centered on Mark’s diminutive throne at Boucolia. Once you put together four lines of evidence – (1) Greek semantic overlap between “seat/throne” and “toilet,” (2) the small, perforated cathedra-like artifact preserved as the “Throne of St Mark,” (3) the topographical and rhetorical construction of Boucolia as a dump/tomb littoral, and (4) the way second–third century anti-Christian polemic already targets Alexandrian assemblies as a filthy, marginal “heap” – Arius’s latrine death starts to look like a late punchline to a much older Alexandrian joke. If Arius is remembered as presbyter at Baucalis/Boucolia, and if that locus was tied to a Markan “seat,” then having him expire mid-defecation, with his bowels spilling out in a place “worthy of filth” (to use later language), is a way of saying: your “throne” at Boucolia was always just a toilet on a dung-heap. On this reading, the Arius legend presupposes a Boucolia-centered Mark tradition already in circulation by the later second century.

Introduction: Why a Toilet, Why Arius, Why Alexandria?

If all you wanted was a generic story of divine punishment, you could have had Arius struck by lightning, swallowed by the earth, or choked at the altar. Instead, the tradition converges on something much more grotesque and oddly specific: Arius, on the eve of being received to communion in Constantinople, withdraws “for bodily necessity,” sits down in a latrine, and dies as his entrails pour out. Socrates and Sozomen give the public-privy version, Theodoret reproduces a supposedly Athanasian letter on the event, Epiphanius recycles it as a warning against the Arians, Gregory of Nazianzus alludes to Arius’s “shameful end.” Everyone agrees: the man dies on the toilet.

Why this setting? Why this man? And why do later sources keep circling back to his bowels and the privy? What looks at first like random scatological malice starts to make more sense if we bring back something that has been systematically forgotten in the neat Nicene-vs-Arian narratives: the Alexandrian geography of Mark and Boucolia, and the semantic range of “seat” and “throne” in Greek.

The chain I want to sketch runs like this. First, seat and throne vocabulary in Greek (θόκος, θώκος, θρόνος) already has a secondary life in medical and civic usage as a polite way of saying “toilet” or “latrine.” Second, the so-called “Throne of St Mark” – the Sedia di San Marco – is a small, perforated, chair-like object whose scale and form invite exactly the sort of “seat = chamber-pot” parody that hostile observers love. Third, Boucolia/Baucalis, the traditional locus of Mark’s preaching and burial “by the sea,” sits in a littoral zone characterized in Philo and other Egyptian material as the belt where shore, dumps, and tombs meet – a natural place for “dunghill” metaphors to stick. Fourth, already by the late second century Celsus is mocking Christians as grubby worms in a corner of filth and mire, and Clement and Origen respond with a manure-theology that insists God’s seed can sprout even on a dung-heap.

Overlay those four elements with the later memory of Arius as presbyter at Baucalis/Boucolia and the result is almost over-determined. If your opponent’s priest sits on a small “throne of Mark” on the border between dumps and tombs, and you have a vocabulary where “seat/throne” shades into “toilet,” then killing him on the latrine becomes the perfect Alexandrian parody. The “throne of Mark” is exposed as a toilet on a dunghill, and the Arian attempt to claim that seat is literally flushed away.

Seats, Thrones, and Toilets in Greek

None of this works if θόκος/θώκος and θρόνος are “pure” terms. They aren’t. The medical writers speak clinically of a patient’s θόκος in ways that LSJ already flags as “stool, privy seat.” Hippocratic material and later technical texts use polite circumlocutions for defecation that revolve around “sitting” on a θόκος. Civic Greek has ἀφεδρών as the straightforward “latrine,” but the social euphemism is often some form of “go to sit,” “go to the seat.” By Late Antiquity the overlap is well established enough that a storyteller who wants to humiliate someone can easily pivot from “throne” to “toilet” without breaking the linguistic world of the audience.

In that light, Alexander of Constantinople’s prayer in the Arius story – asking God to remove Arius if his creed is false – and Arius’s subsequent retreat “to the place of easement” can be heard as more than a generic miracle. It is also a joke at the level of diction. The man who presumed to “sit” in the apostolic seat dies on the wrong kind of θρόνος. His rectum and his doctrine fail together.

The “Throne of St Mark” and the Problem of Scale

The Sedia di San Marco in Venice is usually treated in the West either as an exotic piece of liturgical furniture or as a reliquary. But its size and form matter. It is small. It has the outline of a cathedra but on a reduced scale, with a footprint much more like a child’s seat than an adult’s monumental throne. It is also pierced: there are through-holes and cavities that, quite apart from their actual function, make the object visually kin to various kinds of “seats with openings.”

If you think of it as a reliquary-throne – a small “seat” into which Mark’s relics or contact-relics could be placed, and on which certain ritual actions (limited sitting, standing, touching) occurred – the dual reading becomes very plausible. To insiders, it is the humble cathedra of the evangelist. To outsiders, especially opponents primed by Celsus-type filth rhetoric, it looks like a ridiculous little stool with holes in it. It begs to be called a toilet.

If that is right, then the formal features of the “throne of Mark” help explain why a later Alexandrian or Constantinopolitan satirist would seize on a latrine death for Arius. The instrument of his prestige (the Boucolian cathedra) is visually and semantically close enough to a chamber-seat that collapsing the two is an easy move.

Boucolia as Shore, Dumps, and Tombs

Topographically, Boucolia/Baucalis is the perfect stage for this joke. Already in Philo’s In Flaccum we encounter a strip outside the polite city where three things cluster: the seashore, the rubbish-heaps (κοπρίαι), and the tombs. This is where the bodies are dragged, where mobs desecrate, where governors dump their problems. Later scholarship (Pearson et al.) puts Boucolia/Shatby on the eastern littoral, a necropolis fringe with refuse mounds and burial structures.

So when Jerome casually locates Mark “inter Bucolia” near the sea, or when later Acts and Ethiopian traditions have the evangelist dragged to Boukolon and buried on the eastern margin, they are not just dropping a pin on a neutral map. They are inserting the Markan cult into a space that already codes as “dunghill + graves + sea-spray.”

Now add Celsus. His sneers about Christians as worms in a corner of filth, pigs who love mire, assemblies of the low and dirty – read generically, they’re just abuse. Read against Alexandrian topography, they begin to sound pointed: your church meets out on the dump/necropolis fringe and you call that the “seat of Mark”?

Clement and Origen, writing in Alexandria in the late second and early third centuries, do something very odd if you assume they are working in a vacuum: they keep talking positively about manure. The fig tree that can be made to bear fruit if you dig around it and heap dung on it. The rain and seed that fall on “manure and roofs” alike. Origen’s fig-tree exegesis where σκύβαλα (refuse) becomes κόπρια (fertilizer) in God’s hands. These are not abstract agrarian metaphors. In a city with literal rubbish-heaps and tomb belts, they are an attempt to seize the “dunghill” insult and invert it: yes, we are at the edge of the dump – and that is where God’s seed grows.

Arius, Baucalis, and the Toilet

Fast-forward a century. Arius is, by all the later accounts, associated with Baucalis/Boucolia. Whatever the exact configuration of his presbyterate, he is part of that line of clergy connected with the Markan complex by the sea. He is, in political terms, the man who tries to claim the Markan mantle against Alexander and the Nicene party.

Now overlay the legend of his death. The theological plot is familiar: Arius, having persuaded the emperor of his orthodoxy and secured imperial backing, is about to be received to communion in Constantinople. Alexander prays that if Arius is wrong God will prevent this profanation. Arius leaves the crowd temporarily, goes to a public place of easement, and there his bowels pour out and he dies.

On the surface, it is a morality play about God vindicating Nicaea. But to an Alexandrian ear, already conditioned by decades of “dunghill” rhetoric around Boucolia, it is also a local joke. The Baucalis priest, the would-be heir to Mark’s “throne,” ends up on the wrong kind of throne. The borderland filth of his Alexandrian seat is re-inscribed in his demise: the man of Boucolia dies in the most Boucolian way possible – in a latrine, with βόρβορος (filth) and κόπρος (dung) as his final companions.

Later elaborations only sharpen the point. Some Byzantine versions insist that his body is thrown away without burial, that the spot is obliterated so as not to become a shrine – exactly what you do with refuse at the edge of a city. Other texts say the place where he died was “worthy of filth,” tying location and moral judgment together. All this dovetails nicely with an older habit of imagining Mark’s Boucolia as a holy spot on a dunghill.

Backdating the Code

The claim here is not that someone in 336 sat down and consciously said, “Let’s parody the Sedia di San Marco.” It is that by the time Arius’s story is told in its familiar form, there is an Alexandrian code available that makes the latrine death the obvious gag. That code has three main components already in the second century:

1. A real topographical zone (Boucolia/Shatby) that combines sea, dumps, and tombs.

2. A filth-register in anti-Christian polemic (Celsus) aimed at a marginal, dirty assembly.

3. A Mark-Boucolia link in Christian self-memory, plus manure imagery in Alexandrian exegesis as a theological judo-move against that polemic.

If you then add, sometime between the third and fifth centuries, the concretization of the “throne of Mark” as a small perforated seat, the potential for “throne = toilet on a dunghill” parody is almost irresistible. Arius, as the villain who dares to occupy that seat, becomes the perfect butt of the joke.

Conclusion

The toilet-death of Arius has usually been treated as baroque pro-Nicene slander – too crude to take seriously, something to be mentioned with a wince and moved past. If we read it instead against Alexandrian geography, Greek seat/toilet semantics, and the long dossier of filth motifs around Boucolia and Mark, it begins to look like the fossilized tip of a much older iceberg. By making Arius die on the latrine, the storytellers aren’t just saying “God punished a heretic.” They are saying: your so-called throne of Mark at Boucolia was always nothing more than a small, ridiculous seat on a pile of dung – and that is exactly where your theology belongs.

If that is right, then the Arius legend is indirect evidence for a Boucolia-centered Mark tradition already robust in the later second century. The joke only works if everybody knows where the dunghill is and whose throne is sitting on it.