The Lausiac History

Many people at various times have left many and varied writings to the world. Some, by the inspiration of grace from above, given by God, wrote for the building up and the safety of those who follow the teachings of the Saviour with a faithful purpose. Others, from a man-pleasing and corrupt purpose, ran riot in writing to comfort those who itch for vainglory. Still others, from a kind of madness and from the working of the demon who hates the good, out of pride and spite, to the ruin of light-minded people and to the staining of the spotless catholic church, slipped into the minds of the foolish to the injury of the holy way of life. So it seemed good to me also, lowly as I am, out of respect for the command of your magnanimity, most studious one, which aims at the advancement of the mind, to set out for you from the beginning, in the form of a narrative, this book. I am in my thirty-third year in the community of the brothers and in the solitary life, the twentieth of my episcopate, and the fifty-sixth of my whole life; and you long for the stories of the fathers, both men and women, those I have seen and those I have heard about, and those with whom I lived in the desert of Egypt and Libya and the Thebaid and Syene, under which lie also the so-called Tabennesiots, then in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria, and in the regions of the West, Rome and Campania and the places around it. I write so that, having a holy and soul-profiting reminder and an unfailing remedy against forgetfulness, you may put away through it all drowsiness that comes from irrational desire, all double-mindedness and meanness in necessities, all hesitation and smallness of soul in character, quick temper, agitation, grief, and irrational fear, and the distraction of the world, and may advance with unceasing longing in your purpose of godliness, becoming a guide both to yourself and to those with you and those under you and to the most pious emperors. Through such right conduct all who love Christ hasten to be united to God, awaiting also the departure of the soul day by day, as it is written: “It is good to depart and be with Christ”; and, “Prepare your works for the departure, and make ready for the field.” For he who always remembers death, that it will come of necessity and will not delay, will not stumble greatly. Do not misjudge the counsel of these instructions, and do not spurn the plainness and lack of elegance of the style. For it is not the business of divine teaching to speak with sophistication, but to persuade the mind with thoughts of truth, as it is said: “Open your mouth with the word of God”; and again: “Do not miss the narrative of the elders, for they too learned from the fathers.”

I, then, most studious man of God, following this saying in part, have met many of the saints. I did not do this from idle curiosity; I travelled a journey of thirty days and twice as many, and, as before God, trod on foot the whole land of the Romans, gladly accepting the hardship of travel to meet a man who loved God, so that I might gain what I did not have. For if Paul, who was far better than I and surpassed me in way of life, knowledge, conscience, and faith, made the journey from Tarsus to Judea to meet Peter, James, and John, and tells of it as a kind of boast, publishing his own labours to rouse those who live in sloth and idleness, when he says, “I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas,” not content with the report of his virtue but longing also to meet him face to face, how much more was I, the debtor of ten thousand talents, obliged to do this, not doing them a favour but helping myself. For those who wrote the lives of the fathers, Abraham and those after him, Moses, Elijah, and John, did not tell their stories to glorify them, but to help those who read them.

Knowing this, then, most faithful servant of Christ, Lausus, and admonishing yourself, bear also with our chatter for the guarding of a godly mind, which by nature is tossed about by various vices, visible and invisible, and can be calmed only by constant prayer and by minding one's own business. For many of the brothers, priding themselves on labours and almsgiving, boasting of celibacy or virginity, and trusting in the study of the divine oracles and in zealous efforts, have missed the mark of freedom from passion. Under an indiscriminate pretence of godliness they fell sick with meddlesomeness, from which are born busybodiness or evil-doing, which drive out good-doing, the mother of minding one's own business.

Play the man, then, I beg you, and do not fatten your wealth. You have in fact done this already, having reduced it sufficiently by distributing it to those in need, for the service of virtue that comes from this. Nor should you, from some impulse or irrational prejudice, to please men, fetter your free choice with an oath, as some have done: out of rivalry and love of glory they enslaved their free will to the compulsion of an oath not to eat or drink, and then again fell pitiably under it, and through love of life, listlessness, and pleasure brought forth perjury. If you partake with reason and abstain with reason, you will never sin. For the reason that governs the movements within us is divine: it banishes what is harmful and takes up what is profitable. “For the law is not laid down for the righteous.” Better is wine-drinking with reason than water-drinking with pride. Look, I pray you, at holy men who drank wine with reason, and at profane people who drank water without reason, and no longer blame or praise the material, but call blessed or wretched the intention of those who use the material well or badly. Joseph once drank wine among the Egyptians, but his mind was not harmed, for he had made his intention secure. Pythagoras, Diogenes, and Plato drank water, and among them also the Manichaeans and the rest of the company of self-made philosophers, who went so far in the licence of empty opinion that they did not know God and worshipped idols. Those around the apostle Peter also made use of wine, so that even their teacher, the Saviour, was reproached for partaking of it, the Jews saying, “Why do your disciples not fast as John's do?” And again, assailing the disciples with reproaches, they said, “Your teacher eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners.” They would not have found fault over bread and water, but plainly over cooked food and wine. And to those who irrationally admire water-drinking and blame wine-drinking the Saviour said: “John came in the way of righteousness, neither eating nor drinking” (that is, meat and wine, for without the other things he could not have lived), “and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a wine-drinker, a friend of tax collectors and sinners,’” because he ate and drank. What then shall we do? Let us follow neither those who blame nor those who praise, but either fast with reason with John, even if they say, “They have a demon,” or drink wine in wisdom with Jesus, if the body needs it, even if they say, “Look, gluttons and wine-drinkers.” For in truth neither eating nor abstaining is anything, but faith extending itself through love into works. When faith accompanies every action, the one who eats and drinks because of faith is not condemned, “for whatever is not from faith is sin.” But since every one of those who do wrong will say that he partakes in faith, or does something else, with an irrational confidence and a corrupted conscience, the Saviour made a distinction, saying, “By their fruits you will know them.” That the fruit of those who live by reason and understanding is, according to the divine apostle, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control, is agreed; for Paul himself said, “For the fruit of the Spirit is” this and that. And that one who is eager to have such fruits will not eat meat or drink wine irrationally, aimlessly, or at the wrong time, nor live with a bad conscience, the same Paul said again: “Everyone who competes exercises self-control in all things.” When the flesh is healthy, he abstains from what fattens it; when it is ill, or in pain, or shares in griefs and troubles, he will use foods or drinks as medicines to heal what afflicts it, but he will abstain from what harms the soul: anger, envy, vainglory, listlessness, slander, and irrational suspicion, giving thanks in the Lord.

Having said enough on this, I bring yet another exhortation to your love of learning. Flee as far as you can from meeting men who are of no use and who adorn their skin unfittingly, even if they are orthodox, not to speak of heretics, who do harm by their hypocrisy, even if they seem to drag out a long span of time with grey hairs or wrinkles. For even if you suffer no harm from them because of the nobility of your character, at least you will be made slack or puffed up by laughing at them, which is harm to you. But, as through a bright window, seek out the company of holy men and women, so that through them, as in a finely written book, you may clearly see your own heart also, being able by comparison to test your own sloth or negligence. For the complexion of their faces blooming with grey hair, the arrangement of their clothing, the modesty of their words, the reverence of their speech, and the grace of their thoughts will strengthen you, even if you happen to be in listlessness. “For a man's attire and the step of his foot and the laughter of his teeth tell about him,” as Wisdom says.

Beginning my narratives, then, I will leave unknown to you none of them, neither those in the cities nor those in the villages or deserts. For it is not the place where they lived that is to be sought, but the manner of their purpose.

When I first set foot in the city of Alexandria, in the second consulship of Theodosius the Great, the emperor, who is now among the angels because of his faith in Christ, I met there a wonderful man, adorned in every way in character and in knowledge, Isidore the presbyter, guest-master of the church of Alexandria. He was said to have accomplished the first contests of his youth in the desert; I even saw his cell on the mountain of Nitria. I found him an old man of seventy years; he lived fifteen years more and died in peace. To the very end he wore no linen except a headband, never bathed, and never ate meat. Yet by grace his little body was so well knit that all who did not know his way of life expected that he lived in luxury. If I wished to tell of the virtues of his soul one by one, time would fail me. He was so kind and peaceable that even his enemies, the unbelievers, revered his very shadow because of his great goodness. He had such knowledge of the holy Scriptures and of the divine teachings that even at the brothers' meals his mind would go out of itself and he would fall silent; and when he was asked to tell what happened in the ecstasy, he said, “I was away from home in my mind, caught up by a kind of contemplation.” I myself knew him often to weep at table, and when I asked the reason for his tears, I heard him say, “I am ashamed to partake of irrational food, being rational and bound to live in a paradise of delight because of the authority given us by Christ.” He was known to the whole senate at Rome and to the wives of the great men, from the time when he went there first with Athanasius the bishop and afterwards with Demetrius the bishop. And though he abounded in wealth and plenty of goods, he made no will when he died and left no money, nor any property to his own sisters, who were virgins; instead he commended them to Christ, saying, “He who created you will provide for your life, as he did for mine.” With his sisters there was a community of seventy virgins.

When I visited him as a young man and asked to be grounded in the solitary life, while my age was still lusty and needed not words but bodily labours, he, like a good breaker of colts, led me out of the city to the place called the Solitudes, five miles away,

and handing me over to a certain Dorotheus, a Theban ascetic who was in his sixtieth year in a cave, he told me to complete three years with him to tame my … passions; for he knew that the old man lived in great hardship. He instructed me to come back to him afterwards for spiritual teaching. But I could not complete the three years, for I fell ill, and so I was taken away from him before the three years were up; for his diet was squalid and very dry. All day long, in the heat, in the desert by the sea, he gathered stones, and continually building with them and making cells, he gave them over to those who could not build, completing one cell each year. Once when I said to him, “What are you doing, father, at such an age, killing your little body in this heat?” he answered, “It kills me; I kill it.” He ate six ounces of bread and a bunch of small herbs, and drank water in proportion. As God is my witness, I never knew him to stretch out his feet or to sleep on a reed mat or on a bed; but all night long he sat plaiting rope of palm fronds to earn his food. Supposing that he did this because I was there, I inquired carefully and learned exactly from others, his disciples, who lived on their own, who said that he had lived this way from his youth, never once lying down to sleep on purpose; only when he was working or eating he would close his eyes, overcome by sleep, so that often the morsel even fell from his mouth at mealtime from excess of drowsiness. Once when I was urging him to lie down for a little on the mat, he said, much grieved, “If you persuade the angels to sleep, you will persuade the zealous man too.”

Once, about the ninth hour, he sent me to his well to fill the bucket for our meal. When I got there I happened to look down and see an asp in the well, and I did not draw the water but went and said to him, “We are dead, abba, for I saw an asp in the well.” He smiled gravely, looked at me for a long time, and, shaking his head, said, “If the devil chose to become a snake or a tortoise in every well and to fall into the springs of water, would you go on never drinking?” And he went out, drew the water himself, and, still fasting, drank first, saying, “Where the cross comes, no one's wickedness has strength.”

This blessed Isidore, who had met Antony of blessed memory, told me a thing worth writing down, which he had heard from him. There was a girl named Potamiaena, in the time of Maximian the persecutor, a very beautiful young woman, the slave of a certain man. Her master pressed her with many promises but could not persuade her. At last, in a rage, he handed her over to the then prefect of Alexandria, giving her up as a Christian who reviled the times and the emperors for the persecutions. With money he instructed him: “If she agrees to my purpose, keep her unpunished; but if she persists in her severity, I ask you to have her punished, so that she may not live to laugh at my debauchery.” She was brought before the tribunal, and her resolve was assailed with various instruments of torture. Among these the judge ordered a great cauldron to be filled with pitch and a fire lit beneath it. When the pitch was boiling and burning fiercely, he put the choice to her: “Either go and submit to your master's wishes, or know that I order you to be lowered into the cauldron.” She answered, “Never may there be such a judge as orders submission to debauchery.” In a rage he ordered her to be stripped and thrown into the cauldron. But she cried out, “By the head of your emperor whom you fear, if you have decided to punish me in this way, order me to be lowered into the cauldron little by little, so that you may know how much endurance Christ, whom you do not know, gives me.” And being lowered little by little over the space of about an hour, she breathed her last when the pitch reached her neck.

Very many men and women were perfected in the church of the Alexandrians, worthy of the land of the meek. Among them was Didymus the writer, who was blind. I met him on four occasions, visiting him at intervals over ten years; he died at the age of eighty-five. He was blind, as he himself told me, having lost his sight at four years old, before he had learned letters or gone to teachers; for he had a strong natural teacher, his own conscience. He was adorned with such grace of knowledge that in him the Scripture was literally fulfilled: “The Lord makes the blind wise.” He interpreted the Old and New Testaments word by word, and he gave such care to doctrines, setting out the account of them subtly and powerfully, that he surpassed all the ancients in knowledge. Once he was urging me to offer a prayer in his cell, and when I was unwilling, he told me this story: “The blessed Antony came into this cell for the third time to visit me, and when I asked him to offer a prayer, he knelt at once in the cell and did not make me repeat my request, teaching me obedience by his deed. So if you are walking in the footsteps of his way of life, as a monk and a stranger for virtue's sake, put away contentiousness.”

He also told me this: “I was anxious about the life of Julian, the wretched emperor, as a persecutor, and was distressed. One day, until late evening, I had not tasted bread because of this anxiety. As I sat in my chair I happened to be overcome by sleep, and in an ecstasy I saw white horses running about with riders who proclaimed, ‘Tell Didymus: today, at the seventh hour, Julian died. Get up, then, and eat, and send word,’ they said, ‘to Athanasius the bishop, so that he too may know.’ And I noted,” he said, “the hour, the month, the week, and the day, and so it was found to be.”

He also told me about a maidservant named Alexandra, who left the city, shut herself up in a tomb, and received what she needed through an opening, for ten years seeing neither women nor men face to face. In the tenth year she fell asleep, having laid herself out; so the woman who went to her as usual and got no answer reported it to us. We forced the door, went in, and found her fallen asleep. The thrice-blessed Melania, of whom I will speak later, also said of her: “I did not see her face to face, but standing by the opening I asked her to tell me the reason why she had shut herself up in the tomb. She spoke to me through the opening, saying, ‘A man was wounded in his mind because of me, and so as not to seem to grieve him or to defame him, I chose to bring myself alive into the tomb rather than cause a soul made in the image of God to stumble.’ When I said,” she continued, “‘How then do you endure, meeting no one but wrestling with listlessness?’ she said, ‘From dawn to the ninth hour I pray hour by hour, spinning flax; in the remaining hours I go over in my mind the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs. Then, having eaten my bread, I wait out the other hours in perseverance, awaiting the end with good hope.’”

In my narrative I will not pass over those also who lived in contempt of the good, to the praise of those who succeeded and for the safety of those who read. There was a virgin in Alexandria, humble in dress but haughty in disposition, exceedingly rich in money, who never gave an obol to a stranger, a virgin, the church, or a poor person. Despite many admonitions from the fathers she would not rid herself of her material goods. She had relatives too, and she adopted as her child her own sister's daughter, to whom night and day she promised her property, having fallen from the heavenly longing. For this too is a form of the devil's deceit: he prepares people to labour for greed under the pretext of love for their kin. That he does not care about family is agreed, since he teaches the murder of brothers, mothers, and fathers. Even if he seems to instil concern for relatives, he does it not out of goodwill toward them but to train the soul in injustice, knowing the sentence: “The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God.” One who is moved by divine prudence can, without despising his own soul, also give comfort to his relatives if they are in want. But when someone subjects his whole soul to concern for relatives, he falls under the law, reckoning his own soul as a vain thing. The holy psalmist sings of those who care for their soul in fear: “Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord?” (that is, rarely) “or who shall stand in his holy place? He who is innocent in hands and pure in heart, who has not taken his soul in vain.” Those take it in vain who neglect the virtues, thinking that it is dissolved together with the flesh.

This virgin the most holy Macarius, the presbyter who was in charge of the hospital for cripples, wished, as the saying goes, to bleed, to relieve her of her greed, and he devised this scheme. In his youth he had been a stone-cutter, what they call a gem-engraver. He went and said to her, “Some fine stones, emeralds and hyacinths, have fallen into my hands, and whether they were found or stolen I cannot say. They are beyond price, being past valuation, but the owner is selling them for five hundred gold coins. If you would like to take them, you can recover the five hundred coins from one stone and use the rest to adorn your niece.” The virgin, hanging on his words, took the bait and fell at his feet, saying, “I clasp your feet: do not let anyone else take them.” He urged her, “Come to my house and see them.” But she would not; she threw the five hundred coins to him, saying, “Take them as you wish; I do not want to see the man who is selling them.” He took the five hundred coins and gave them for the needs of the hospital.

Time went by, and because the man was held in great esteem in Alexandria as one who loved God and was merciful (he flourished to a hundred years, and we too spent time with him), she was afraid to remind him. At last she found him in the church and said to him, “Please, what do you say about those stones for which we gave the five hundred coins?” He answered, “From the moment you gave me the gold I paid it out for the price of the stones. If you wish to come and see them in the hospital, for they lie there, come and see whether they please you; if not, take back your gold.” She came most gladly. The hospital had women on the upper floor and men on the lower. He brought her in at the gate and said to her, “What do you want to see first, the hyacinths or the emeralds?” She said to him, “As you think best.” He took her up to the upper floor and showed her women who were maimed and had disfigured faces, and said to her, “Look, the hyacinths.” Then he brought her down again and, showing her the men, said, “Look, the emeralds. If they please you, well; if not, take back your gold.” So she went out put to shame, and going home she fell ill from great grief that she had not done the thing for God's sake. Later she gave thanks to the presbyter, when the girl she had cared for died childless after her marriage.

After meeting and living for three years with the monasteries around Alexandria, with excellent and most zealous men, about two thousand of them, I withdrew from there and came to the mountain of Nitria. Between this mountain and Alexandria lies a lake called Mareotis, seventy miles long. I crossed it in a day and a half and came to the mountain on its southern side. Next to this mountain lies the great desert, stretching as far as Ethiopia, the Mazices, and Mauretania. On this mountain live about five thousand men with different ways of life, each as he can and as he wishes, so that one may live alone, or with one other, or with many. On this mountain there are seven bakeries which serve both them and the anchorites of the great desert, six hundred men. I lived on this mountain for a year and was greatly helped by the blessed fathers Arsisius the Great, Putubastes, Asion, Cronius, and Serapion; and spurred on by many stories of the fathers told by them, I went into the innermost desert.

On this mountain of Nitria there is a great church, in which stand three palm trees, each with a whip hanging from it. One is for monks who do wrong, one for robbers if any fall into their hands, and one for visitors who happen by; so that all who do wrong and are convicted as deserving blows embrace the palm tree, receive a fixed number of strokes on the back, and are so released. Next to the church is a guest house, where they welcome a stranger who arrives for as long as he wishes until he leaves of his own accord, even if he stays two or three years. They allow him one week of idleness, and for the rest of the days they occupy him with work, in the garden, the bakery, or the kitchen. If he is a man of note, they give him a book, and do not let him meet anyone until the sixth hour. On this mountain live also doctors and pastry-cooks. They use wine too, and wine is sold. All of them work linen with their hands, so that none is in need. And indeed, about the ninth hour one can stand and hear how psalmody rises from each dwelling, so that one might think oneself caught up into paradise. They go to the church only on Saturday and Sunday. There are eight presbyters who lead this church; as long as the first presbyter lives, no other offers the sacrifice, preaches, or judges, but they only sit quietly beside him.

This Arsisius and many other old men with him, whom we have seen, were contemporaries of the blessed Antony. Among other things they said that they knew Amoun of Nitria, whose soul Antony saw being taken up and escorted by angels. He said that he also knew Pachomius of Tabennesi, a prophet, archimandrite of three thousand men, of whom I will tell later.

He said that Amoun had lived in this way. He was an orphan, a young man of about twenty-two, and was forced by his own uncle to be joined to a wife. Unable to resist his uncle's pressure, he agreed to be crowned, to sit in the bridal chamber, and to go through all the ceremonies of marriage. After everyone had gone out, having put them to bed in the bridal chamber and on the bed, Amoun got up, shut the door, sat down, called his blessed partner, and said to her, “Come, lady, now I will explain the matter to you. This marriage that we have contracted has nothing special about it. We shall do well, then, if from now on each of us sleeps apart, so that we may also please God by keeping our virginity untouched.” Then, taking from his bosom a little book, he read to the girl, who had no experience of the Scriptures, from the person of the apostle and the Saviour, and adding a great deal of his own understanding he set before her the teaching about virginity and purity, so that, convinced by the grace of God, she said, “I too am convinced, sir. What do you bid me do now?” “I bid,” he said, “that from now on each of us lives apart.” But she would not accept this, saying, “Let us live in the same house, but in separate beds.” So he lived eighteen years with her in the same house, spending the whole day in the garden and the balsam plantation, for he was a balsam-grower. Balsam is planted like a vine, and is cultivated and pruned with much labour. In the evening, then, he would come into the house, say prayers, and eat with her; and again, after saying the night prayer, he would go out.

While things went on in this way, and both had attained freedom from passion, Amoun's prayers took effect, and at last she said to him, “I have something to say to you, my lord, so that, if you listen to me, I may be convinced that you love me according to God.” He said to her, “Say what you wish.” She said to him, “It is right that you, being a man and practising righteousness, and I likewise, who have eagerly followed the same road as you, should live apart. For it is wrong that such virtue as yours should be hidden because you live with me in chastity.” He gave thanks to God and said to her, “Then you keep this house, and I will make myself another house.” He went out and settled in the inner part of the mountain of Nitria, for there were not yet monasteries then, and made himself two domed cells. Having lived twenty-two more years in the desert he died, or rather fell asleep, seeing his blessed partner twice a year.

The blessed Athanasius the bishop told a wonder of his in the Life of Antony: as he was crossing the river called Lycus with his disciple Theodore, and was shy of undressing lest he see himself naked, he was found on the other side without a ferry, carried across by an angel. This Amoun, then, so lived and so was perfected that the blessed Antony saw his soul being taken up by angels. I myself crossed this river by ferry, with fear; it is a canal of the great Nile.

On this mountain of Nitria there was an ascetic named Or, to whose great virtue the whole brotherhood bore witness, and especially that woman of God, Melania, who had come to this mountain before me; for I did not find him still alive. They said this in their stories: that he never lied, never swore, never cursed anyone, and never spoke except when necessary.

From this mountain came also the blessed Pambo, teacher of Dioscorus the bishop, of Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius the brothers, and of Origen, the nephew of Dracontius, a wonderful man. Pambo had very many noble deeds and excellences, and among them this: he despised gold and silver as much as Scripture demands. The blessed Melania told me: “When I first came to Alexandria from Rome and heard of his virtue, the blessed Isidore telling me of it and guiding me to him in the desert, I brought him a silver chest of three hundred pounds of silver, asking him to share in my possessions. He was sitting plaiting palm leaves, and he blessed me with his voice alone and said, ‘May God give you your reward.’ And he said to his steward, Origen, ‘Take it and distribute it to the whole brotherhood in Libya and the islands, for these monasteries are poorer’; and he ordered him to give none to those in Egypt, because that region is better off. I stood there,” she said, “expecting to be honoured or praised by him for the gift, and hearing nothing from him, I said to him, ‘So that you may know, sir, how much it is: it is three hundred pounds.’ Without even looking up he answered me, ‘He to whom you brought it, child, has no need of weighing. He who weighs the mountains knows much better the quantity of the silver. If you were giving it to me, you would be right to say so; but if to God, who did not overlook the two obols, be silent.’ So the Lord arranged it,” she said, “when I came to the mountain. A little while later the man of God fell asleep, without fever or illness, while sewing a basket, at the age of seventy. He sent for me, and when the last stitch was about to complete it, as he was dying he said to me, ‘Take this basket from my hands, so that you may remember me; for I have nothing else to leave you.’” She buried him, wrapped his body in linen, and laid it to rest; and so she left the desert, keeping the basket with her until her death.

This Pambo, at the very hour of his death, is said to have spoken thus to Origen, the presbyter and steward, and to Ammonius, men of renown, and to the other brothers who stood by: “From the time I came to this place in the desert and built my cell and lived in it, I do not remember eating bread for nothing, apart from the work of my hands; and I have not repented of any word I have spoken up to this hour. And so I go to God as one who has not even begun to serve God.” Origen and Ammonius, telling us this, bore further witness that, when asked about a passage of Scripture or any other practical matter, he never answered on the spot but would say, “I have not yet found it.” Often three months would pass and he would give no answer, saying that he had not grasped it. Yet his decisions, made with such circumspection according to God, were received as if from God. For in this virtue, exactness of speech, he was said to have surpassed even the great Antony and everyone else.

This act of Pambo is also reported. Pior the ascetic visited him and brought his own bread, and when Pambo reproached him, “Why have you done this?” he answered, “So as not to be a burden to you.” Pambo taught him a lesson in silence: some time later he visited Pior, bringing his own bread already soaked, and when he was asked, “Why have you done this?” he said, “So as not to be a burden to you, I even soaked it.”

This Ammonius, his disciple, together with three other brothers and two sisters of his, having attained the height of love for God, settled in the desert; the women made a dwelling by themselves and the men by themselves, far enough apart from one another. Since the man was exceedingly learned, a certain city wanted him for its bishop, and they went to the blessed Timothy and asked him to ordain him bishop for them. He said to them, “Bring him to me and I will ordain him.” So they went with an armed escort, and when he saw that he was caught, he pleaded with them and swore that he would not accept ordination nor leave the desert; but they would not let him go. So while they watched, he took shears and cut off his left ear to the root, saying to them, “Now at least be convinced that it is impossible for me, since the law forbids one whose ear is cut off to be brought to the priesthood.” So they left him and went away, and went and told the bishop. He said to them, “Let that law be kept among the Jews. As for me, if you bring me a man even with his nose cut off, if he is worthy in character, I will ordain him.” So they went again and pleaded with him, and he swore to them, “If you force me, I will cut out my tongue.” So they left him and went away.

This wonder is reported of this Ammonius: whenever pleasure rose up in him, he never spared his body, but heated an iron in the fire and applied it to his limbs, so that he was always covered with sores. From his youth until his death his table was raw food; for he never ate anything that had passed through fire except bread. He learned the Old and New Testaments by heart, and he went through six million lines of the writings of learned men, Origen, Didymus, Pierius, and Stephen, as the fathers of the desert testify. He was as encouraging to the brothers in the desert as anyone. The blessed Evagrius, a man who bore the Spirit and had discernment, gave him his vote, saying, “I have never seen a man more free from passion than he.” [Once he came to Constantinople on some business, and after a short time he fell asleep and was buried in the martyr's shrine called Rufinianae. His tomb is said to heal all who suffer from fevers.]

On this mountain of Nitria a man called Benjamin, who lived for eighty years and practised asceticism to the highest degree, was granted the gift of healing, so that everyone on whom he laid his hand, or to whom he gave oil he had blessed, was freed from every illness. Yet this man, who had been granted such a gift, became dropsical eight months before his death, and his body swelled so much that he looked like another Job. Dioscorus the bishop, who was then a presbyter of the mountain of Nitria, took us, myself and the blessed Evagrius, and said to us, “Come and see a new Job, who in such swelling of the body and in an incurable affliction holds boundless thankfulness.” So we went and saw a body so swollen that one could not get one's fingers around one finger of his hand. Unable to look at the terrible sight of the affliction, we turned our eyes away. Then that blessed Benjamin said to us, “Pray, children, that my inner man may not become dropsical. For this outer one neither helped me when it was well nor harmed me when it was ill.” For those eight months a very broad seat was set for him, on which he sat continually, no longer able to lie down on a bed because of his other bodily needs. And while in this affliction he healed others. I have of necessity described this affliction, so that we may not be surprised when some calamity befalls righteous men. When he died, the lintels and the doorposts were taken down, so that the body could be carried out of the house; so great was the swelling.

A man named Apollonius, formerly a merchant, renounced the world and settled on the mountain of Nitria. Since he was too old to learn a craft or the practice of copying, he lived twenty years on the mountain with this as his ascetic practice: with his own money and his own labour he bought all kinds of medicines and provisions in Alexandria and supplied the whole brotherhood in their illnesses. One could see him from early morning until the ninth hour going round the monasteries, going in at each door to see whether anyone was lying ill. He carried raisins, pomegranates, eggs, and fine wheaten bread, which the sick need. He found this way of life profitable and kept to it until old age. When he died he left his stock to someone like himself, asking him to carry on this service. For since five thousand monks lived on the mountain, this visiting was needed, because the place is a desert.

Paesius and Isaiah, as they were called, were brothers, sons of a merchant who traded with Spain. When their father died they divided the property they had, real estate, five thousand gold pieces, and what was found in clothing and slaves. They took counsel with each other and deliberated together, saying, “What way of life shall we take up, brother? If we take up the trade our father followed, we too shall leave our labours to others; and perhaps we shall fall into dangers from robbers or the sea. Come, then, let us take up the solitary life, so that we may both gain the benefit of our father's goods and not lose our souls.” So the aim of the solitary life pleased them. But they were found to differ, each in his own way. Having divided the money, each held to the aim of pleasing God, but with different ways of life. One scattered everything to ascetic houses, churches, and prisons, learned a small craft by which to earn his bread, and devoted himself to asceticism and prayer. The other scattered nothing, but made himself a monastery, took a few brothers with him, and welcomed every stranger, every sick person, every old man, every poor man, setting three tables every Sunday and Saturday; in this way he spent his money.

When both had died, various beatitudes were pronounced on them, since both had been perfected; some preferred one, some the other. Since rivalry broke out in the brotherhood over their praises, they went to the blessed Pambo and referred the judgment to him, asking to learn which was the higher way of life. He said to them, “Both are perfect. One showed the work of Abraham, the other that of Elijah.” Some said, “By your feet, how can they be equal?” and preferred the ascetic, saying, “He did the gospel thing, selling everything and giving to the poor, carrying the cross every hour, day and night, and following the Saviour and the prayers.” Others contended against them, saying, “This one showed such kindness to the needy that he even sat on the highways and gathered the afflicted; and he gave rest not only to his own soul but to many others, nursing and helping them.” The blessed Pambo said to them, “Again I tell you that both are equal. And I assure each of you that the one, had he not practised asceticism so much, would not have been worthy to be compared with the goodness of the other; and the other, in giving rest to strangers, was himself refreshed with them, and even if he seemed to bear the burden of toil, he also had the rest that came with it. But wait until I also receive a revelation from God, and come afterwards and you will learn.” So they came back some days later and pleaded with him, and he said to them, “As before God, I saw both of them standing together in paradise.”

A young man named Macarius, about eighteen years old, while playing with his companions by the lake called Mareotis as he pastured cattle, committed an unintentional murder. Without saying anything to anyone he went off to the desert, and he came to such fear of God and of men that he lost all sense of himself and stayed three years in the desert without a roof. The land there has no rain, as everyone knows, both those who have heard of it and those who have experienced it. Afterwards he built himself a cell, and having lived another twenty-five years in that cell he was granted the gift of spitting on demons, delighting in solitude. I spent much time with him and asked him how his mind stood regarding the sin of the murder. He said that he was so far from grief that he even gave thanks for the murder, for the unintentional murder had become for him the occasion of salvation. And bringing testimony from the Scriptures he said that Moses would not have been counted worthy of the divine vision, of so great a gift, and of the writing of the holy words, had he not, from fear of Pharaoh because of the murder he committed in Egypt, gone to Mount Sinai. I say this not to open a road to murder, but to show that there are also virtues that come from circumstances, when someone does not come to the good of his own will; for some virtues are chosen, others come from circumstances.

There was another of the old monks named Nathanael. I did not find him alive, for he had fallen asleep fifteen years before my arrival; but I met those who had practised asceticism and spent time with him, and I inquired closely into the man's virtue. They also showed me his cell, in which no one lives any longer because it is too near the inhabited world; for he built it at a time when anchorites were rare. They told this about him especially: that he had such endurance in his cell that he was never shaken from his purpose. Among other things, he was at first mocked by the demon who mocks and deceives everyone, and he seemed to grow listless in his first cell, so he went off and built another nearer a village. After he had finished the cell and settled in it, three or four months later the demon came by night, holding an ox-hide whip like the executioners and having the appearance of a soldier in rags, and he made a noise with the whip. The blessed Nathanael answered him and said, “Who are you that do these things in my lodging?” The demon answered, “I am the one who drove you out of that cell; I have come to chase you out of this one too.” Realizing that he had been mocked, he went back again to his first cell. And he completed thirty-seven years without crossing the threshold, contending with the demon, who showed him more things than can be told to force him to come out.

Among these, the demon watched for the visit of seven holy bishops, which happened either by God's providence or by that demon's temptation, and almost drove him off course from his purpose. For when the bishops left after the visit, he did not escort them even a step. The deacons said to him, “You are doing a proud thing, abba, in not escorting the bishops.” He said to them, “I have died both to my lords the bishops and to the whole world. I have a hidden aim, and God knows my heart; that is why I do not escort them.” The demon, having failed in this plot, nine months before his death disguised himself and became a boy of about ten, driving a donkey that carried loaves in a basket. Arriving late in the evening near his cell, he made it appear that the donkey had fallen and the boy was crying out, “Abba Nathanael, have mercy on me and give me a hand!” Hearing the voice of the supposed boy, he opened the door a little and, standing inside, said to him, “Who are you, and what do you want me to do for you?” He said to him, “I am so-and-so's servant boy, and I am carrying loaves, since it is this brother's agape, and tomorrow, at dawn on Saturday, the offerings will be needed. I beg you, do not abandon me, lest I be eaten by hyenas.” For there are many hyenas in those parts. The blessed Nathanael stood speechless, very dizzy, his heart troubled, and he reasoned with himself, saying, “Either I must fall from the commandment or from my purpose.” But afterwards, considering that it was better not to shake the purpose of so many years, to the shame of the devil, he prayed and said to the supposed boy who was speaking to him, “Listen, boy. I believe in the God whom I serve that, if you are in need, God will send you help, and neither hyenas nor anything else will harm you; but if you are a temptation, God will reveal the matter right now.” And he shut the door and went in. The demon, put to shame by the defeat, dissolved into a whirlwind and into wild asses leaping and fleeing and making a din. This was the contest of the blessed Nathanael, this his way of life, and this his end.

The deeds of the two Macarii, those celebrated men, are many and great and hard to believe, and I hesitate to speak of them or write them down, lest I gain the reputation of a liar. Yet the Holy Spirit has declared that “the Lord destroys all who speak falsehood.” Since I am not lying, then, most faithful one, do not disbelieve. Of these Macarii, one was an Egyptian by birth, the other an Alexandrian, a seller of sweetmeats.

First I will tell of the Egyptian, who lived ninety years in all. Of these he spent sixty in the desert, having gone up there as a young man of thirty. He was granted such discernment that he was called “the old young man”; and so he made progress all the faster. For when he was forty he received grace against spirits, and the gifts of healing and prophecy; he was also counted worthy of the priesthood. Two disciples lived with him in the innermost desert, called Scetis. One was a servant near him because of those who came to be healed; the other spent his time in a nearby cell. As time went on, foreseeing with prophetic eye, he said to the one who served him, named John, who later became presbyter in Macarius's own place: “Listen to me, brother John, and bear with my warning. You are being tempted, and the spirit of avarice will tempt you. So I have seen; and I know that if you bear with me you will be perfected in this place and glorified, and ‘no scourge shall come near your dwelling.’ But if you disobey me, the end of Gehazi will come upon you, whose disease you already have.” It happened that he disobeyed, fifteen or twenty years after the falling asleep of Macarius, and having embezzled the money of the poor he was so stricken with elephantiasis that no sound place could be found on his body where one could put a finger. This was the prophecy of the holy Macarius.

It is superfluous to tell about his food and drink, since not even among the lax can gluttony or indifference be found in those places, both because of the scarcity of necessities and because of the zeal of the inhabitants. But I speak of the rest of his asceticism: he was said to be continually in ecstasy, and to spend much more time with God than with the things under heaven. The following wonders are told of him.

An Egyptian man fell in love with a freeborn married woman, and being unable to seduce her, he consulted a sorcerer, saying, “Draw her to love me, or do something so that her husband casts her off.” The sorcerer, having received a good sum, used his magic arts and made her appear to be a mare. When her husband came in from outside and saw this, he was astonished that a mare was lying on his bed. The husband weeps and laments; he speaks to the animal and gets no answer. He … the presbyters of the village, brings them in, shows them; he does not discover what has happened. For three days she ate neither hay as a mare nor bread as a human being, deprived of both kinds of food. At last, so that God might be glorified and the virtue of the holy Macarius be shown, it came into her husband's heart to take her to the desert; and putting a halter on her like a horse, he led her into the desert. As they drew near, the brothers were standing near Macarius's cell, quarrelling with her husband and saying, “Why have you brought this mare here?” He said to them, “So that she may receive mercy.” They said to him, “What is wrong with her?” Her husband answered them, “She was my wife, and she has been changed into a horse, and today is the third day she has tasted nothing.” They reported it to the saint, who was praying inside; for it had been revealed to him, and he was praying for her. The holy Macarius answered the brothers and said to them, “You are the horses, who have the eyes of horses. She is a woman, not transformed, except only in the eyes of those who are deceived.” And he blessed water, poured it over her bare body from the head, and prayed; and at once he made her appear a woman to all. He gave her food and made her eat, and sent her away with her own husband, giving thanks to the Lord. And he counselled her, saying, “Never stay away from the church; never abstain from Communion. This happened to you because for five weeks you had not come to the mysteries.”

Another practice of his asceticism: over a long time he made a tunnel under the ground from his cell for about half a stade and finished it at the end with a cave. Whenever crowds troubled him, he would leave his cell secretly, go off to the cave, and no one could find him. One of his zealous disciples told us that on the way to the cave he said twenty-four prayers, and twenty-four on the way back.

A report went out about him that he raised a dead man in order to convince a heretic who did not confess that there is a resurrection of bodies; and this report prevailed in the desert.

Once a demon-possessed young man was brought to him by his own weeping mother, bound to two young men. The demon worked in this way: after he had eaten three measures of bread and drunk a Cilician jar of water, he would belch and dissolve the food into vapour; so what had been eaten and drunk was consumed as if by fire. For there is an order of demons called fiery; for there are differences among demons, as among men, not of nature but of disposition. This young man, then, not getting enough from his mother, used to eat his own excrement and often drank his own urine. As his mother wept and begged the saint, he took him and prayed over him, entreating God. After a day or two, when the affliction had eased, the holy Macarius said to her, “How much do you want him to eat?” She answered, “Ten pounds of bread.” He rebuked her that this was too much, prayed over him with fasting for seven days, and set him at three pounds, so that he would also be able to work. And having so cured him he gave him back to his mother. God worked this wonder through the wonderful Macarius. I did not meet him, for he had fallen asleep a year before my entry into the desert.

The other Macarius, the Alexandrian, I did meet; he was presbyter of the place called the Cells. I lived in these Cells for nine years, and he survived three of my years there. Some things I saw, some I heard from him, and some I learned from others. His asceticism was this: whatever he ever heard of, he achieved completely. Hearing from some people that the Tabennesiots eat uncooked food throughout Lent, he decided for seven years to eat nothing that had passed through fire, and apart from raw vegetables, when any were to be found, and soaked pulse, he tasted nothing else. Having achieved this virtue, he heard again of someone else that he ate a pound of bread; so he broke up his biscuit, put the pieces into a jar, and decided to eat only as much as his hand could bring up. As he told it, jesting, “I would grab several pieces, but I could not get them all out because of the narrowness of the opening; for the tax-collector would not let me eat nothing at all.” He kept this practice for three years, eating four or five ounces of bread and drinking as much water, and a pint of oil in the year.

Another of his ascetic practices: he determined to overcome sleep, and he told us that he did not go under a roof for twenty days in order to conquer sleep, burned by the heat by day and shrivelled by the cold at night. And as he said, “If I had not gone under a roof quickly and taken some sleep, my brain would have dried up so much as to drive me out of my mind at last. As far as it depended on me, I conquered; as far as it depended on nature, which needs sleep, I gave way.”

Once, as he sat in his cell in the morning, a gnat settled on his foot and stung him; in pain he crushed it with his hand when it was full of blood. Condemning himself for having avenged himself, he sentenced himself to sit naked for six months in the marsh of Scetis, which is in the great desert, where the gnats pierce even the hides of wild boars, being like wasps. So he was bitten all over and broke out in swellings, so that some thought he had elephantiasis. When he came back to his cell after six months, he was recognized as Macarius only by his voice.

Once he wished to enter the garden-tomb of Jannes and Jambres, as he himself told us. This garden-tomb was made by the magicians who were once powerful at Pharaoh's court. Since they held power for a long time, they built the work of square stones, made their tomb there, and laid up much gold; they also planted trees, for the place is damp, and dug a well among them. Since the saint did not know the way, but followed the stars by guesswork, crossing the desert as one crosses the sea, he took a bundle of reeds and set one up every mile as a mark, so as to find the way back. Having travelled for nine days he drew near the place. Then the demon, who always works against the athletes of Christ, gathered up all the reeds and, while he slept about a mile from the garden-tomb, put them by his head. When he got up he found the reeds, God perhaps allowing this too for his greater training, so that he might put his hope not in reeds but in the pillar of cloud that guided Israel forty years in the desert. He said, “Seventy demons came out from the garden-tomb to meet me, shouting and flapping like crows against my face and saying, ‘What do you want, Macarius? What do you want, monk? Why have you come to our place? You cannot stay here.’ I said to them,” he said, “‘Let me only go in and look, and I will go away.’ So I went in,” he said, “and found a small bronze bucket hanging, and an iron chain over the well, by now consumed with age, and pomegranate fruit with nothing inside, because it had been dried up by the sun.” So he turned back and came home in twenty days. When the water he carried and his loaves ran out, he was in great distress. And when he was near collapse, a girl appeared to him, as he told it, wearing clean linen and holding a jar dripping with water. He said she was about a stade away from him, and he walked for three days, seeing her with the jar as though standing still but unable to reach her, as in dreams; but sustained by the hope of drinking he held out. After her a herd of antelopes appeared, one of which stood still with a calf (there are many in those places). And as he said, her udder was flowing with milk. So he went under the antelope, sucked, and was satisfied. And the antelope came as far as his cell, suckling him and not letting her own calf near.

Another time, while digging a well near some brushwood, he was bitten by an asp, a deadly creature. He took it in both hands, gripped it by the jaws, and tore it apart, saying to it, “If God did not send you, how did you dare to come at me?”

He had several cells in the desert: one in Scetis, in the inner great desert, one in Libya, one in the place called the Cells, and one on the mountain of Nitria. Some of them have no windows, and he was said to sit in them in the dark during Lent; another was too narrow for him to stretch out his feet; another, wider, was where he met those who came to him.

He healed so great a number of the possessed that they could not be counted. While we were there a noble virgin was brought to him from Thessalonica, who had been paralysed for many years. He anointed her with holy oil with his own hands for twenty days, praying, and sent her back healthy to her own city; and when she had gone she sent him many gifts.

Hearing that the Tabennesiots had a great way of life, he changed his clothes, put on the secular dress of a workman, and went up to the Thebaid in fifteen days, travelling through the desert. Arriving at the ascetic house of the Tabennesiots, he asked for their archimandrite, named Pachomius, a well-proven man with the gift of prophecy; but the facts about Macarius were hidden from him. Meeting him, he said, “Please receive me into your monastery so that I may become a monk.” Pachomius said to him, “You have already reached old age and cannot practise asceticism. The brothers are ascetics, and you will not bear their labours; you will be scandalized and leave speaking ill of them.” And he did not receive him either the first day or the second, for seven days. But when he held out, remaining there fasting, at last he said to him, “Receive me, abba, and if I do not fast and work as they do, order me to be thrown out.” Pachomius persuaded the brothers to receive him; the community of that one monastery numbers fourteen hundred men to this day. So he went in. A little while later Lent came, and he saw each of them practising a different way of life: one eating in the evening, one every two days, one every five days; another again standing all night and sitting in the daytime. So he soaked a large quantity of palm leaves and stood in a corner, and until the forty days were completed and Easter came he touched neither bread nor water; he did not bend his knee or lie down; he took nothing but a few cabbage leaves, and that on Sundays, so as to seem to be eating. If ever he went out for his needs, he quickly came back in and stood, speaking to no one, not opening his mouth, but standing in silence; apart from the prayer in his heart and the leaves in his hands he did nothing. When all the ascetics saw this, they rose against their superior, saying, “Where did you bring us this fleshless man from, to condemn us? Either throw him out, or know that we are all leaving you.” Having heard about his way of life, he prayed to God that it might be revealed to him who he was. It was revealed to him, and taking him by the hand he led him out to the house of prayer, where the altar was, and said to him, “Come, good old man. You are Macarius, and you hid yourself from me. For many years I have longed to see you. I am grateful to you for knocking my children about, so that they may not think great things of their own ascetic practices. Go back, then, to your own place, for you have edified us enough; and pray for us.” Then, being thus asked, he left.

Another time he told this: “When I had achieved every way of life I desired, I came to another desire. I wanted for just five days to keep my mind undistracted from God. Having decided this, I shut up my cell and the courtyard so as not to answer anyone, and I stood, beginning at the second hour. I commanded my mind, saying, ‘Do not come down from heaven. You have there angels, archangels, the powers above, the God of all; do not come down below heaven.’ I held out for two days and two nights, and so provoked the demon that he became a flame of fire and burned up everything in my cell, so that even the reed mat on which I stood was consumed by fire and I thought I was wholly ablaze. At last, struck with fear, I gave up on the third day, unable to keep my mind undistracted, and I came down to the contemplation of the world, so that it should not be reckoned to me as pride.”

I once visited this holy Macarius, and outside his cell I found lying a village presbyter, whose whole head had been eaten away by the disease called cancer, so that the very bone showed at the crown. He had come to be healed, and Macarius would not receive him for an audience. I pleaded with him, “Please, have pity on him and give him an answer.” He said to me, “He is unworthy to be healed, for a chastisement has been sent to him. If you want him healed, persuade him to give up the liturgy; for he was celebrating the liturgy while committing sexual immorality, and for this he is being chastised; and God will heal him.” When I told the sufferer, he agreed, swearing not to serve as a priest any longer. Then Macarius received him and said to him, “Do you believe that there is a God?” He said to him, “Yes.” “You were not able to mock God, were you?” He answered, “No.” He said to him, “If you recognize your sin and the chastisement of God for which you have suffered this, amend yourself from now on.” So he confessed the cause and gave his word no longer to sin or to celebrate the liturgy, but to embrace the lay state. And so Macarius laid his hand on him, and in a few days he was healed, his hair grew again, and he went away well.

Before my eyes a little boy possessed by an evil spirit was brought to him. He laid one hand on his head and the other on his heart, and prayed so long that he made him hang in the air. The boy swelled up like a wineskin and became so inflamed that he was red all over as with erysipelas. Suddenly he cried out and discharged water through all his senses, and when the swelling went down he returned to his former size. Macarius gave him back to his father, having anointed him with holy oil and poured water over him, and ordered that for forty days he should touch neither meat nor wine. And so he healed him.

Once thoughts of vainglory troubled him, driving him out of his cell and suggesting that, as a matter of good stewardship, he should go to Rome to heal the sick; for grace worked powerfully in him against spirits. For a long time he did not obey, but he was violently driven. So he fell down on the threshold of his cell, put his feet outside, and said, “Drag me, demons, and pull! I will not go on my own feet; if you can carry me off like this, I will go.” And he swore to them, “I will lie here till evening; if you do not move me, I will not listen to you.” After lying a long time he got up. When night came they attacked him again, and he filled a basket holding two bushels with sand, put it on his shoulders, and walked about the desert. Theosebius the cosmetor, an Antiochene by birth, met him and said to him, “What are you carrying, abba? Let me have the load, and do not trouble yourself.” He said to him, “I am troubling the one who troubles me; for when he is at ease he suggests journeys to me.” After walking about for a long time he went into his cell, his body worn out.

This holy Macarius, who was a presbyter, told us: “At the time of the distribution of the mysteries I noticed that I never gave the offering to Mark the ascetic, but an angel gave it to him from the altar; I saw only the knuckle of the hand of the one who gave it.” This Mark was a young man who knew the Old and New Testaments by heart, exceedingly meek, and self-controlled if anyone ever was. One day, when I had leisure, in his extreme old age, I went and sat by his door, thinking him above human nature, as being so ancient, and listened to what he was saying or doing. Quite alone inside, already nearly a hundred years old and having lost his teeth, he was fighting with himself and with the devil, and saying, “What do you want, you bad old man? Look, you have touched oil and taken wine. What more do you want, you grey-haired glutton?” So he abused himself. Then to the devil he said, “Do I still owe you anything? You find nothing; go away from me.” And as if humming, he talked with himself: “Come on, grey-haired glutton; how long shall I be with you?”

Paphnutius his disciple told us that one day a hyena took her cub, which was blind, and brought it to Macarius; she knocked on the door of the courtyard with her head and came in while he was sitting outside, and threw the cub at his feet. The saint took it, spat on its eyes, and prayed, and at once it could see. Its mother suckled it, took it, and went away. The next day she brought the saint the fleece of a large sheep. And the blessed Melania told me, “I received that fleece from Macarius as a guest-gift.” And what wonder is it, if he who tamed the lions for Daniel also gave understanding to the hyena?

He said that since he was baptized he had not spat on the ground, and it was sixty years since he was baptized. In appearance he was rather short, with a scanty beard, having hair only on his lip and at the tip of his chin; for through excess of asceticism not even the hairs of his beard grew. Once, when I was in listlessness, I went to him and said, “Abba, what shall I do? My thoughts afflict me, saying, ‘You are doing nothing; go away from here.’” He said to me, “Say to them: ‘For Christ's sake I am guarding the walls.’” These are a few of the many things I have recorded for you of the holy Macarius.

A man called Moses, an Ethiopian by race, black, was the slave of a government official. His own master drove him out because of his great depravity and brigandage; for he was said to have gone as far as murder. I am compelled to speak of his wickedness in order to show the virtue of his repentance. They said that he was even the leader of a band of robbers. One of his deeds as a robber is reported: he once bore a grudge against a shepherd who had hindered him with his dogs in some enterprise at night. Wanting to kill him, he went round the place where the shepherd kept his sheep, and was told that he was across the Nile. The river was in flood and about a mile wide; so he took his sword in his teeth, put his tunic on his head, and crossed the river swimming. While he was swimming across, the shepherd managed to escape him by burying himself in the sand. So he slaughtered the four best rams, tied them with a rope, and swam back again. Coming to a small farmyard, he flayed them, ate the best of the meat, sold the fleeces for wine, drank a measure of about eighteen Italian pints, and went off fifty miles to where his gang was.

This man, so great a criminal, late in life was struck to the heart by some circumstance, gave himself to a monastery, and so devoted himself to the work of repentance that he brought even the demon who had been his accomplice in evil from his youth, who had sinned with him, openly to the knowledge of Christ. Among other things it is said that robbers once fell upon him while he sat in his cell, not knowing who he was. There were four of them. He tied them all up, put them on his back like a sack of chaff, carried them to the church of the brothers, and said, “Since I am not allowed to harm anyone, what do you bid me do with these?” Then they confessed, and when they learned that this was Moses, once famous and notorious among robbers, they too glorified God and renounced the world because of his conversion, reasoning, “If this man, so capable and powerful among robbers, feared God, why do we put off our salvation?”

Demons attacked this Moses, driving him toward his old habit of sexual licence. He was tempted so severely, as he himself told, that he very nearly ran aground from his purpose. So he went to the great Isidore in Scetis and reported the war. Isidore said to him, “Do not be grieved. These are the beginnings, and that is why they have attacked you more fiercely, seeking your old habit. For just as a dog at a butcher's shop does not leave it from habit, but if the shop is shut and no one gives him anything, he no longer comes near, so you too, if you persevere, the demon will grow weary and have to leave you.” Withdrawing, then, from that hour he practised asceticism more severely, especially in food, taking nothing but dry bread, twelve ounces, doing a great deal of work, and completing fifty prayers. Though he wasted his body away, he remained inflamed and still troubled by dreams. Again he visited another of the saints and said to him, “What shall I do? The dreams of my soul darken my mind according to the habit of pleasure.” He said to him, “Because you have not turned your mind away from the imaginations of these things, you suffer this. Give yourself to vigil and pray soberly, and you will quickly be freed from them.” Hearing this counsel too, he went off to his cell and gave his word not to sleep all night and not to bend his knee. So he stayed in his cell for six years, standing every night in the middle of the cell praying, not closing his eyes; and he could not overcome the thing.

Then he set himself yet another way of life. He went out by night to the cells of the old men and the more ascetic monks, took their water jars, and secretly filled them with water; for they fetch their water from far off, some from two miles, some from five, others from half a mile. One night the demon, watching him and unable to bear it, struck him on the loins with a club as he bent over the well, and left him as if dead, not knowing what he had suffered or from whom. The next day someone came to draw water, found him lying there, and told the great Isidore, the presbyter of Scetis. He took him and carried him to the church, and he was ill for a year, so that his body and soul barely recovered their strength. The great Isidore said to him, “Stop contending with the demons, Moses; there are limits even to courage in asceticism.” He said to him, “I will not stop until my imaginations from the demons stop.” He said to him, “In the name of Jesus Christ your dreams have ceased. Receive Communion, then, with boldness. You were overpowered for your own good, so that you might not boast of having overcome passion.” And he went back again to his cell. When Isidore asked him about two months later, he said that he had suffered nothing more. He was granted such a gift against demons that we fear these flies more than he feared the demons. This was the way of life of Moses the Ethiopian, who was himself numbered among the great fathers. He died at seventy-five in Scetis, having become a presbyter, and left seventy disciples.

There is a mountain in Egypt leading to the great desert of Scetis, which is called Pherme. On this mountain about five hundred men live practising asceticism. Among them a man called Paul had this way of life: he touched no work, no business, and took nothing from anyone except what he ate. His work and his asceticism was to pray without ceasing. He had a fixed number of three hundred prayers; he would collect as many pebbles, hold them in his lap, and at each prayer throw one pebble out of his lap. He visited the holy Macarius called the citizen to talk with him, and said to him, “Abba, I am distressed.” Macarius made him say for what reason. He said to him, “In a certain village lives a virgin who has practised asceticism for thirty years. They told me about her that apart from Saturday and Sunday she never tastes food, but she draws out the whole year, week after week, eating every five days, and she says seven hundred prayers. And I was disgusted with myself because I could not say more than three hundred.” The holy Macarius answered him, “I have been sixty years saying a fixed hundred prayers, working for my food, and paying the brothers the debt of conversation, and my mind does not condemn me as negligent. But if you, saying three hundred, are condemned by your conscience, it is clear that either you do not pray them with purity, or you could pray more and do not.”

Cronius, the presbyter of Nitria, told me: “When I was young, I ran away out of listlessness from the monastery of my archimandrite, and wandering about I reached the mountain of the holy Antony. He lived between Babylon and Heracleopolis, in the great desert that leads toward the Red Sea, about thirty miles from the river. So I came to his monastery by the river, at the place called Pispir, where his disciples Macarius and Amatas lived, who also buried him when he fell asleep, and I waited five days to meet the holy Antony. For he was said to visit this monastery sometimes every ten days, sometimes every twenty, sometimes every five, as God led him, for the benefit of those who happened to be in the monastery. Various brothers had gathered with various needs, among them Eulogius, an Alexandrian monk, and another man who was crippled. They had come for the following reason.

“This Eulogius was a scholar, trained in the general education. Smitten with love of immortality, he renounced the tumult of the world, distributed all his property, and kept for himself a few coins, since he could not work. Being listless on his own, and neither wishing to enter a community nor satisfied to live alone, he found in the market-place a cripple lying abandoned, who had neither hands nor feet; only his tongue was unimpaired, to the misfortune of those he met. Eulogius stood and gazed at him, prayed to God, and made a covenant with God: ‘Lord, in your name I take this cripple and will care for him until death, so that through him I too may be saved. Grant me patience in serving him.’ And going up to the cripple he said to him, ‘Would you like me, great one, to take you into my house and look after you?’ He said to him, ‘Very much.’ ‘Then,’ he said, ‘shall I bring a donkey and take you?’ He agreed. So he brought a donkey, lifted him onto it, took him to his own lodging, and looked after him. The cripple held out for fifteen years being nursed by him, washed and tended by Eulogius's hands and fed as his illness required. But after the fifteen years a demon entered into him, and he rebelled against Eulogius and began to lash the man with such abuse and insults, saying, ‘Villain, runaway from your master! You stole other people's money, and you want to be saved through me! Throw me into the market-place. I want meat.’ He brought him meat. Again he shouted, ‘I am not satisfied; I want crowds; I want the market-place. Violence! Throw me where you found me!’ Had he had hands, he might have hanged himself, so savage had the demon made him.

“So Eulogius went to the ascetics nearby and said to them, ‘What shall I do? This cripple has driven me to despair. Shall I throw him out? I gave my pledge to God and I am afraid. But if I do not throw him out, he gives me bad days and nights. What to do with him I do not know.’ They said to him, ‘Since the Great One is still alive (for so they called Antony), go up to him, putting the cripple in a boat; take him to the monastery and wait until Antony comes out of the desert, and refer the case to him. Whatever he tells you, abide by his judgment, for God speaks to you through him.’ He agreed with them, put the cripple in a herdsman's skiff, left the city by night, and brought him up to the monastery of the disciples of the holy Antony.

“It happened that the Great One came the next day, late in the evening,” as Cronius told it, “wrapped in a leather cloak. When he came to their monastery, his custom was to call Macarius and ask him, ‘Brother Macarius, have some brothers come here?’ He would answer, ‘Yes.’ ‘Are they Egyptians or Jerusalemites?’ He had given him a sign: ‘If you see that they are rather simple, say “Egyptians”; but when they are more devout and learned, say “Jerusalemites.”’ So he asked him as usual, ‘Are the brothers Egyptians or Jerusalemites?’ Macarius answered and said to him, ‘They are a mixture.’ When he told him, ‘They are Egyptians,’ the holy Antony would say to him, ‘Make some lentils and give them to eat,’ and he would say one prayer with them and send them away. But when he said, ‘They are Jerusalemites,’ he would sit up all night speaking to them about salvation. That evening, then,” he said, “he sat down and called everyone, and though no one had told him what his name was, in the dark he called out, ‘Eulogius! Eulogius! Eulogius!’ three times. The scholar did not answer, thinking that another Eulogius was being called. Then he said to him again, ‘I am speaking to you, Eulogius, who have come from Alexandria.’ Eulogius said to him, ‘What do you command, I pray you?’ ‘Why have you come?’ Eulogius answered and said to him, ‘He who revealed my name to you has revealed my business too.’ Antony said to him, ‘I know why you have come; but say it before all the brothers, so that they too may hear.’ Eulogius said to him, ‘I found this cripple in the market-place, and I gave my pledge to God to nurse him, so that I might be saved through him and he through me. Since after so many years he torments me to the utmost, and I have thought of throwing him out, I have come to your holiness so that you may advise me what I ought to do, and pray for me; for I am terribly tormented.’ Antony said to him in a grave and stern voice, ‘You would throw him out? But he who made him does not throw him out. You would throw him out? God will raise up someone better than you and take him in.’ Eulogius fell silent and cowered. Then, leaving Eulogius, Antony began to lash the cripple with his tongue and to shout at him: ‘Crippled, maimed, unworthy of earth and of heaven, will you not stop fighting against God? Do you not know that it is Christ who serves you? How dare you say such things against Christ? Was it not for Christ's sake that he made himself your slave?’ Having rebuked him too, he left him. And after talking with all the others about their needs, he took Eulogius and the cripple aside and said to them, ‘Do not wander off anywhere; go away. Do not be separated from each other, but go to the cell in which you have lived so long. For God is already sending for you. This temptation has come upon you because you are both near the end and are about to be counted worthy of crowns. So do nothing else, lest the angel come and not find you in your place.’ They travelled quickly and came to their own cell; and within forty days Eulogius died, and within three more days the cripple died.”

Cronius, after spending time in the region of the Thebaid, came down to the monasteries of Alexandria. And it happened that the fortieth-day memorial of the one was being celebrated by the brotherhood, and the third-day memorial of the other. Cronius learned of it and was astounded; and taking a Gospel book and placing it in the middle of the brotherhood, he swore, telling what had happened: “I was the interpreter of all these words for the blessed Antony, who did not know Greek; for I knew both languages, and I interpreted for them in Greek and for him in Egyptian.”

Cronius also told this: “That night the blessed Antony told us, ‘For a whole year I prayed that the place of the righteous and of sinners might be revealed to me. And I saw a tall giant reaching to the clouds, black, with his hands stretched out to heaven, and beneath him a lake the size of a sea. And I saw souls flying up like birds. Those that flew above his hands and his head were saved; but those that were struck by his hands fell into the lake. Then a voice came to me, saying, “These souls that you see flying over are the souls of the righteous, which are saved into paradise; the others are those dragged down into Hades, who followed the desires of the flesh and the remembrance of wrongs.”’”

Cronius, the holy Hierax, and several others, about whom I am going to speak, told this also. A certain Paul, a rustic farmer, exceedingly innocent and simple, was married to a very beautiful woman of wicked disposition, who sinned undetected for a very long time. Coming in suddenly from the field, Paul found them doing the shameful thing, Providence leading Paul to what was for his good. He laughed gravely and called out to them, “Fine, fine! Truly it does not matter to me. By Jesus, I will not take her back. Go, have her and her children; for I am going away to become a monk.” Saying nothing to anyone, he ran off across the eight stages and went to the blessed Antony and knocked at the door. Antony came out and asked him, “What do you want?” He said to him, “I want to become a monk.” Antony answered and said to him, “An old man of sixty cannot become a monk here. Rather go to a village and work, and live a working life, giving thanks to God; for you cannot endure the afflictions of the desert.” The old man answered again and said to him, “Whatever you teach me, I will do.” Antony said to him, “I have told you that you are old and cannot do it. If you really want to become a monk, go to a community of many brothers, who can bear with your weakness. I sit here alone, eating every five days, and that in hunger.” With these and similar words he tried to drive Paul away; and since Paul would not give in, Antony shut the door and did not come out for three days because of him, not even for his needs. But Paul did not go away. On the fourth day, compelled by need, Antony opened and came out and said to him again, “Go away from here, old man. Why do you oppress me? You cannot stay here.” Paul said to him, “It is impossible for me to die anywhere but here.” Antony looked round and saw that he carried nothing for food, neither bread nor water, and that he had held out fasting for four days. “Lest he die,” he said, “and stain my soul,” he received him.

In those days Antony took up a way of life such as he had never practised even in his youth. He soaked palm leaves and said to him, “Take them and plait a rope as I do.” The old man plaited until the ninth hour, toiling at fifteen fathoms. When Antony saw it he was displeased and said to him, “You have plaited it badly. Unplait it and plait it again from the beginning.” He imposed this vexation on him while he was fasting and at his age, so that the old man would lose patience and flee from Antony. But Paul unplaited and plaited the same leaves again, though it was harder because they were creased. When Antony saw that he neither grumbled nor lost heart nor became indignant, he was moved to compunction. At sunset he said to him, “Would you like us to eat a piece of bread?” Paul said to him, “As you think best, abba.” This too bent Antony, that he did not run eagerly at the mention of food but left the decision to him. So he set the table and brought bread. Antony set out the biscuits, each of six ounces; for himself he soaked one, since they were dry, and for Paul three. Antony then began a psalm he knew, and having sung it twelve times, he prayed twelve times, to test Paul. But Paul again prayed with him eagerly; for he would rather, I think, have herded scorpions than live with an adulterous wife. After the twelve prayers they sat down to eat, late in the evening. Antony ate his one biscuit and touched no other. The old man, eating more slowly, still had some of his biscuit; Antony waited until he finished and said to him, “Eat another biscuit, little father.” Paul said to him, “If you eat, so will I; but if you do not eat, I will not.” Antony said to him, “It is enough for me; for I am a monk.” Paul said to him, “It is enough for me too; for I too want to become a monk.” Antony got up again, said twelve prayers, and sang twelve psalms. He slept a little in the first sleep, and got up again at midnight to sing psalms until day. When he saw the old man eagerly following his way of life, he said to him, “If you can do this every day, stay with me.” Paul said to him, “If there is anything more, I do not know; but what I have seen I do easily.” The next day Antony said to him, “Look, you have become a monk.”

After some months Antony was convinced that he had a perfect soul, being very simple, with grace working with him; so he made him a cell about three or four miles away and said to him, “Look, you have become a monk; stay by yourself, so that you may also have experience of demons.” Paul lived there a year and was granted a gift against demons and diseases. Among other cases, once a man was brought to Antony who was exceedingly violently possessed, with a ruling spirit, who blasphemed even heaven itself. Antony considered him and said to those who had brought him, “This is not my work; against this ruling order I have not yet been granted a gift. But this is for Paul.” So Antony went off to Paul, took them to him, and said to him, “Abba Paul, cast this demon out of the man, so that he may go home healthy.” Paul said to him, “And what about you?” Antony said to him, “I have no time; I have other work.” And Antony left him and went back to his own cell. The old man stood up, prayed an effective prayer, and spoke to the possessed man: “Abba Antony has said, ‘Come out of the man.’” But the demon shouted with blasphemy, “I am not coming out, you bad old man.” So Paul took his sheepskin and beat him on the back with it, saying, “Come out! Abba Antony has said so.” The demon abused both Antony and him again more violently. At last he said to him, “Will you come out, or shall I go and tell Christ? By Jesus, if you do not come out right now, I am going to tell Christ, and woe to you, what he will do!” The demon blasphemed again, crying, “I am not coming out.” Paul, angry with the demon, went out of the lodging at the height of noon (the heat of the Egyptians is akin to the furnace of Babylon), and standing on a rock on the mountain he prayed thus: “You see, Jesus Christ, who were crucified under Pontius Pilate, that I will not come down from the rock, nor eat nor drink until I die, unless you cast the spirit out of the man and set the man free.” Before the words had left his mouth, the demon cried out, saying, “Violence! I am being driven out! The simplicity of Paul drives me out, and where shall I go?” And at once the spirit came out and was changed into a great serpent seventy cubits long, which crawled away to the Red Sea, so that the saying might be fulfilled: “A righteous man declares faith made manifest.” This is the wonder of Paul, who was called the Simple by the whole brotherhood.

A man named Pachon, about seventy years old, lived in Scetis. It happened that I was troubled by desire for a woman and was oppressed both by thoughts and by night fantasies; and being near to leaving the desert, driven by the passion, I did not refer the matter to my neighbours or to my teacher Evagrius, but went secretly into the great desert and for fifteen days met with the fathers who had grown old in the desert of Scetis; among them I also came upon Pachon. Finding him purer and more ascetic, I ventured to lay open my mind to him. He said to me, “Do not be surprised at this thing; you do not suffer it from slackness. The place bears witness for you, and the scarcity of necessities, and the absence of meetings with women; rather it comes from zeal. For the war of sexual immorality is threefold. Sometimes the flesh attacks us when it is in good health; sometimes the passions, through the thoughts; and sometimes the demon himself, out of envy. I have observed much and found this. Look, as you see, I am an old man. I have been forty years in this cell caring for my own salvation, and at this age I am still tempted up to now.” And he swore: “For twelve years after my fiftieth year it did not leave me a night or a day, attacking me. Suspecting that God had left me, and that this was why I was overpowered, I chose to die irrationally rather than to disgrace myself shamefully through a passion of the body. So I went out, wandered about the desert, and found a hyena's den. I put myself into the den in the daytime, naked, so that the beasts might come out and eat me. When evening came, as it is written, ‘You made darkness and it was night; in it all the beasts of the forest will go about,’ the beasts came out, the male and the female, sniffed me from head to foot and licked me all over; and when I expected to be eaten, they went away from me. I lay there all night and was not eaten; and reckoning that God had spared me, I went back again to my cell.

“The demon held off a few days and attacked me again more fiercely than before, so that I nearly blasphemed. Transforming himself into an Ethiopian girl whom I had once seen in my youth gleaning in summer, he sat on my knees and so aroused me that I thought I had had intercourse with her. In a rage I gave her a slap, and she vanished. For two years I could not bear the stench of my hand. Disheartened and in despair, I went out wandering into the great desert, and finding a small asp, I took it and put it to my genitals, so that being bitten even in that way I might die. I rubbed the head of the beast against the parts, as being the cause of my temptation, and even so I was not bitten. Then I heard a voice come into my mind: ‘Go away, Pachon, and fight. This is why I let you be overpowered, so that you might not think highly of yourself as being strong, but, recognizing your weakness, might not trust in your own way of life but run to the help of God.’ Thus assured, I returned, and sitting down with confidence and no longer concerned about the war, I have had peace for the rest of my days. And the demon, knowing my contempt, came near me no more.”

A man named Stephen, a Libyan by birth, lived for sixty years on the border of Marmarica and Mareotis. Having become an ascetic of the highest order and a man of discernment, he was granted the gift that anyone who met him, grieved by any grief whatever, went away free of grief. He was known also to the blessed Antony, and lived on into our own days. I did not meet him because of the distance of the place; but Ammonius and Evagrius and their companions met me and told me: “We found him fallen into an illness of this kind: an ulcer called a cancer had formed on the testicles and the glans. We found him being treated by a doctor; with his hands he was working, plaiting palm leaves and talking with us, while the rest of his body was being operated on. He was disposed as though someone else were being cut. When the members were cut off like hair, he was without feeling, through the abundance of divine preparation. While we were grieved and also offended that such a life had fallen into such an affliction and such surgery, he said to us, ‘Little children, do not be harmed by this thing. Nothing God does, he does out of malice, but for a good end. Perhaps the members were liable to punishment, and it is better for them to pay the penalty here than after the departure from the stadium.’ So, comforting and strengthening us, he edified us.” I have told this so that we may not be surprised when we see some saints fallen into such afflictions.

There was a man named Valens, a Palestinian by birth but a Corinthian in disposition; for the holy Paul attributed the vice of being puffed up to the Corinthians. He came to the desert and lived with us for several years. He went so far in pride that he was deceived by demons. For by deceiving him little by little they brought him to think great things of himself, as though angels were meeting him. One day, as they told it, while he was working in the dark he dropped the needle with which he was sewing up his basket, and when he could not find it, the demon made a torch, and he found the needle. Puffed up again by this, he thought great things of himself, and became so puffed up that he despised even the communion of the mysteries.

It happened that some strangers came and brought sweetmeats to the brotherhood in the church. The holy Macarius, our presbyter, took them and sent each of us a handful in our cells, Valens among the rest. Valens seized the one who brought it, insulted him, beat him, and said to him, “Go and tell Macarius: I am not worse than you, that you should send me a blessing.” Macarius, realizing that he had been deluded, went a day later to plead with him and said to him, “Valens, you have been deceived; stop.” And when he would not listen to his counsels, he went away.

The demon, convinced that he had been completely persuaded by the delusion, went and disguised himself as the Saviour, and came by night in an apparition of a thousand angels holding torches, and a fiery wheel in which he seemed to represent the Saviour; and one went ahead and said, “Christ has fallen in love with your way of life and the boldness of your life, and has come to see you. So go out of your cell, and do nothing else but, seeing him from afar, bow down and worship him, and go back into your cell.” So he went out, and seeing the array of torch-bearers, and the Antichrist about a stade away, he fell down and worshipped. The next day he was so deranged that he went into the church, and when the brotherhood was assembled he said, “I have no need of Communion; for I have seen Christ today.” Then the fathers bound him and kept him in irons for a year and cured him, pulling down his conceit by prayers, by indifference, and by a life of less activity; as the saying goes, “Opposites are cured by opposites.”

It is necessary to put the lives of such men too into this little book, for the safety of those who read, just as among the holy plants of paradise there was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so that if ever readers achieve some success they may not think great things of themselves because of their virtue. For often even virtue becomes an occasion of falling, when it is not carried out with a right aim. For it is written, “I saw a righteous man perishing in his righteousness; this too is vanity.”

There was a man named Heron, a neighbour of mine, an Alexandrian by birth, a refined young man, gifted in mind and pure in life. He too, after many labours, was struck by pride, threw off restraint, and thought great things of himself against the fathers, insulting even the blessed Evagrius, saying, “Those who obey your teaching are deceived; for one should not attend to other teachers except Christ.” He also misused Scripture for the purpose of his folly, saying, “The Saviour himself said, ‘Do not call anyone teacher on earth.’” He too was so darkened that afterwards he was put in irons, since he was unwilling even to approach the mysteries. But truth is dear: he was exceedingly austere in his way of life, so that many who knew him well said that he often ate only once in three months, content with the communion of the mysteries and any wild herb that might appear. I myself had experience of him when I went with the blessed Albanius to Scetis. Scetis was forty miles from us; in those forty miles we ate twice and drank water three times, but he, tasting nothing and going on foot, recited by heart fifteen psalms, then the great psalm, then the Epistle to the Hebrews, then Isaiah and part of Jeremiah, then Luke the Evangelist, then Proverbs. And though this was so, we could not keep up with him as he walked.

At last, as if driven by fire, he could not stay in his cell, but went off to Alexandria by providential arrangement and, as the saying goes, knocked out one nail with another. For he fell of his own will into indifference, and later found salvation against his will. He frequented the theatre and the races and spent his time in taverns; and so, being gluttonous and given to wine, he fell into the mire of desire for women. And as he was planning to sin, he met an actress and talked with her about what concerned his wound. While these things were going on, a carbuncle formed on the glans itself, and he was so ill for six months that his private parts rotted and fell off. Later, healed without those members and returning to a godly mind, he came and confessed all these things to the fathers; but before he could take up his work again he fell asleep a few days later.

Another man again, named Ptolemy, lived a life hard to describe, or rather indescribable. He lived beyond Scetis at the place called the Ladder, a place so named, where no one can live because the brothers' well is eighteen miles away. He carried off many Cilician jars, and in December and January he collected the dew with a sponge from the rocks (for there is heavy dew in those parts at that time), and so he held out, living there fifteen years. But, estranged from the teaching, company, and help of holy men and from continual communion of the mysteries, he so far left the straight road that he said that things are nothing, but are carried along at random. To this day he wanders about Egypt, having given himself up to gluttony and drunkenness, talking with no one about anything. This disaster befell Ptolemy from irrational conceit, as it is written: “Those who have no guidance fall like leaves.”

I knew a virgin in Jerusalem who wore sackcloth for six years and was shut up in a cell, taking nothing that leads to pleasure. Later she was abandoned because of her excessive pride and fell. She opened the window, received the man who served her, and was defiled with him, because she had practised her asceticism not with a godly purpose and for love of God, but for human show, that is, from vainglory and a rotten choice. For since her thoughts were taken up with condemning others, the guardian of her chastity was absent.

A certain Elias, an ascetic, was a great lover of virgins (for there are such souls, to whose virtue their aim bears witness). He took pity on the order of women ascetics, and having means in the city of Athribis he built a great monastery and gathered into it all who were wandering about, caring for them consistently and providing them with every comfort, gardens, utensils, and the other things life requires. These women, coming from different ways of life, were constantly fighting with one another. Since he had to hear them and make peace (for he had gathered about three hundred), he was obliged to act as mediator for two years. Being still young in age (he was about thirty or forty), he was tempted by pleasure. Leaving the monastery, he wandered fasting through the desert for two days, praying, “Lord, either kill me so that I may not see them afflicted, or take the passion from me so that I may care for them as I should.” When evening came he fell asleep in the desert, and three angels came to him, as he himself told it, took hold of him, and said, “Why did you leave the monastery of women?” He told them the matter: “Because I was afraid I might harm both them and myself.” They said to him, “Then if we free you from the passion, will you go back and care for them?” He agreed to these terms. They demanded an oath from him. He said the oath was this: “Swear to us: ‘By the One who cares for me, I will care for them.’” And he swore to them. Then one held his hands, one his feet, and the third took a razor and cut out his testicles, not in reality but in a vision. So in the ecstasy, as one might say, he seemed to have been cured. They asked him, “Have you felt any benefit?” He said to them, “I feel much lighter, and I am convinced that I have been freed from the passion.” They said to him, “Go away, then.” And he returned after five days to the monastery, which was mourning, went in, and from then on stayed inside in a cell at the side, from which, being nearer, he continually corrected them as far as lay in him. He lived another forty years, assuring the fathers, “Passion does not rise into my mind.” This was the gift of that holy man who cared for the monastery in this way.

He was succeeded by Dorotheus, a most well-proven man, grown old in a good and active life. Unable to stay in the monastery itself in the same way, he shut himself up in an upper room and made a window looking onto the women's monastery, which he would shut and open. He sat continually by the window, arranging peace among them. And so he grew old up there in the upper room, the women not coming up and he not able to come down; for there was no ladder.

There was a virgin, Piamoun, who spent the years of her life with her own mother, eating every other day in the evening and spinning flax. She was granted the gift of prophecy. Among other things it once happened in Egypt, at the time of the rising of the Nile, that one village attacked another; for they fight over the division of the water, so that murders and woundings follow. A stronger village attacked her village, and men came in a crowd with spears and clubs to destroy her village. But an angel stood by her and revealed their attack to her. She sent for the elders of the village and said, “Go out and meet those who are coming against you from that village, so that you may not perish together with the village, and beg them to stop the fight.” The elders were afraid, fell at her feet, and pleaded with her, saying, “We do not dare to meet them; we know their drunkenness and their madness. But if you have pity on the whole village and on your own house, go out yourself and meet them.” She did not agree to this, but went up to her own little room at night and stood all night praying, without bending her knee, and entreating God: “Lord, who judge the earth, to whom nothing unjust is pleasing, when this prayer comes to you, let your power nail them to the spot wherever it overtakes them.” And about the first hour, three miles away, they were nailed to the spot and could not move. It was revealed to them too that the hindrance had come upon them through her intercession. They sent to the village and asked for peace, declaring, “Give thanks to God and to the prayers of Piamoun

[… which also held us back.] … called …, in which there was a certain Pachomius, one of those who had lived uprightly, so that he was counted worthy of prophecies and angelic visions. He was exceedingly kind and loving to the brothers. As he was sitting in his cave, an angel appeared to him and said to him, “You have succeeded in what concerns yourself; it is superfluous for you to sit in the cave. Come, go out, gather all the young monks, and live with them; and give them laws according to the pattern I give you.” And he gave him a bronze tablet on which was written: “You shall allow each to eat and drink according to his strength [… and of palm leaf, from which they are still called Tabennesiots to this day]; and assign them work in proportion to the strength of those who eat; and prevent no one from fasting or from eating. In this way assign the heavy tasks to those who are stronger and eat, and the light tasks to those who are weaker and more ascetic. Make separate cells in the courtyard, and let them live three to a cell; but let the food of all be prepared in one house. Let them not sleep lying down, but let them make built seats sloping backward, put their bedding on them, and sleep sitting. At night let them wear linen sleeveless tunics, girded. Let each of them have a worked goatskin, without which they are not to eat. When they go to Communion on Saturday and Sunday, let them loosen their girdles, lay aside the goatskin, and go in with the hood only.” He prescribed for them hoods without nap, as for children, on which he ordered a brand in the form of a cross to be put in purple. He ordered that there be twenty-four classes, and to each class he assigned a Greek letter, from alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on. So when the abbot asked and inquired about so great a number, he would ask his second, “How is the class of alpha?” or “How is zeta?” and again, “Greet rho,” following a particular sign of the letters. “To the simpler and more innocent you shall assign iota, and to the more difficult and crooked you shall apply xi.” And so, according to the state of their dispositions, characters, and lives, he fitted a letter to each class, only the spiritual knowing what was signified.

It was written on the tablet: “A stranger from another monastery that has another rule shall not eat or drink with them or enter the monastery, unless he is found on a journey.” But one who comes in to stay with them they do not receive into the inner places for three years; only after doing the harder tasks does he enter after three years. When they eat, let them cover their heads with their hoods, so that one brother may not see another chewing. One may not talk while eating, or let one's eye wander anywhere but to one's plate or the table. He prescribed that they should say twelve prayers in the course of the day, twelve at lamp-lighting, twelve at the night vigils, and three at the ninth hour; and when the community is about to eat, he prescribed that a psalm be sung before each prayer. When Pachomius objected to the angel that the prayers were few, the angel said to him, “I have prescribed these so that even the little ones may manage to fulfil the rule and not be grieved. The perfect have no need of legislation, for by themselves in their cells they have given their whole life to the contemplation of God. I have legislated for those who do not have a discerning mind, so that, fulfilling the order of the life like servants, they may live in freedom.”

There are, then, several of these monasteries that hold to this rule, amounting to seven thousand men. The first and great monastery, where Pachomius himself lived, which gave birth to the other monasteries, has thirteen hundred men. Among them is the good Aphthonius, who became my true friend, now second in charge of the monastery; being unshakable, he is sent to Alexandria to sell their work and buy their necessities. There are other monasteries of two and three hundred; among them, going into the city of Panos, I found three hundred men. [In this monastery I saw fifteen tailors, seven smiths, four carpenters, twelve camel-drivers, fifteen fullers.] They work at every craft, and from their surplus they provide for the women's monasteries and the prisons. [They also rear pigs. When I criticized this, they said, “We have received in the tradition that they should be reared on account of the chaff, the vegetable trimmings, and the scraps that are thrown away, so that these may not be lost; and that the pigs be slaughtered, the meat sold, and the extremities used for the sick and the old, because the country is moderate in resources and populous; for the people of the Blemmyes live near them.”] Those whose turn of duty it is rise early, some to the kitchen, others to the tables. They lay them by the appointed hour, putting on each table loaves, charlock, preserved olives, cow's-milk cheeses, [the extremities of the meat,] and small herbs. Some come in and eat at the sixth hour, others at the seventh, others at the eighth, others at the ninth, others at the eleventh, others late in the evening, others every two days, so that each letter knows its own hour. So too with their work: one works the land as a farmer, another the garden, another the smithy, another the bakery, another the carpenter's shop, another the fullery, another plaits the large baskets, another the tannery, another the shoemaker's shop, another the scriptorium, another plaits the soft baskets. And they learn all the Scriptures by heart.

They also have a monastery of about four hundred women, with the same constitution and the same way of life, except for the goatskin. The women are across the river, and the men opposite. When a virgin dies, the virgins prepare her for burial, carry her out, and lay her on the bank of the river; the brothers cross over by ferry with palm branches and olive boughs and with psalmody carry her across and bury her in their own tombs. Apart from the presbyter and the deacon, no one crosses to the women's monastery, and that only on Sunday.

In this women's monastery the following happened. A tailor from the world crossed over in ignorance looking for work. A younger sister came out (for the place is deserted), met him unintentionally, and gave him the answer, “We have our own tailors.” Another, who had seen the meeting, some time later, when a quarrel arose, out of devilish suspicion, from great wickedness and the heat of anger, slandered her before the sisterhood; and a few others joined her in the malice. The first, grieved at having suffered such slander about something that had not even entered her mind, could not bear it and secretly threw herself into the river and died. Then the slanderer, realizing that she had slandered out of wickedness and had done this abomination, could not bear the thing either and hanged herself. When the presbyter came, the other sisters reported the matter, and he ordered that the offering should be made for neither of them; and those who had not made peace, as being accomplices of the slanderer and as having believed what was said, he excommunicated for seven years, barring them from Communion.

In this monastery there was another virgin who feigned madness and possession by a demon. The others came to loathe her so much that they would not even eat with her, which was what she had chosen. She went about the kitchen doing every kind of service, and was, as the saying goes, the sponge of the monastery, fulfilling in deed what is written: “If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool, so that he may become wise.” She tied a rag on her head (all the others are shorn and wear hoods), and in this way she served. None of the four hundred ever saw her chewing in all the years of her life. She never sat at table, never took a piece of bread, but wiping up the crumbs from the tables and washing out the pots, she was content with these. She never insulted anyone, never grumbled, never spoke little or much, though she was beaten, insulted, cursed, and loathed.

Now an angel stood by the holy Piteroum, a most well-proven anchorite who lived at Porphyrites, and said to him, “Why do you think highly of yourself as being devout and living in such a place? Do you want to see a woman more devout than you? Go to the women's monastery of the Tabennesiots, and there you will find one with a diadem on her head. She is better than you. For while she wrestles with so great a crowd, she has never turned her heart away from God; but you, sitting here, wander in your mind through the cities.” And he who had never gone out went off to that monastery and asked the teachers to let him enter the women's monastery. Since he was famous and old, they were bold to bring him in. Once inside he asked to see all of them. She did not appear. At last he said to them, “Bring me all of them; one is still missing.” They said to him, “We have one simple one inside in the kitchen” (for so they call those who are afflicted). He said to them, “Bring me her too; let me see her.” They went to call her; she would not obey, perhaps sensing the matter, or because it had been revealed to her. They dragged her by force and said to her, “The holy Piteroum wants to see you” (for he was famous). When she came, he saw the rag on her forehead, fell at her feet, and said to her, “Bless me.” Likewise she too fell at his feet, saying, “You bless me, lord.” They were all astonished and said to him, “Abba, do not take this insult; she is simple.” Piteroum said to them all, “You are the simple ones; for she is amma to me and to you” (for so they call spiritual women), “and I pray that I may be found worthy of her on the day of judgment.” Hearing this, they fell at his feet, all confessing various things: one that she had poured the dishwater over her; another that she had battered her with her fists; another that she had put mustard on her nose; in short, they all reported various insults. Having prayed for them, he went away. A few days later, unable to bear the glory and honour from the sisters, and weighed down by their apologies, she left the monastery; and where she went, or where she hid, or how she died, no one knew.

There was a John in the city of Lycopolis who as a boy learned carpentry; his brother was a dyer. Later, at about twenty-five, he renounced the world, and after spending five years in various monasteries he withdrew alone to the mountain of Lycopolis. On the very summit he made himself three domed cells, went in, and walled himself up. One dome was for the needs of the flesh, one where he worked and ate, and the other where he prayed. Having completed thirty years enclosed, receiving his necessities through a window from the one who served him, he was granted the gift of prophecy. Among other things he sent various prophecies to the blessed emperor Theodosius, about Maximus the usurper, that he would defeat him and return from Gaul; and likewise he brought him good news about Eugenius the usurper. A great report of his virtue went out.

While we were in the desert of Nitria, I and the companions of the blessed Evagrius, we sought to learn exactly what the man's virtue was. The blessed Evagrius said, “I would gladly learn from someone able to test mind and speech what sort of man he is. For if I cannot see him myself, but can hear exactly about his way of life from someone else's account, I will not go to the mountain.” Hearing this, and saying nothing to anyone, I kept quiet for one day; on the next I shut my cell, committed myself and it to God, and took the trouble to go to the Thebaid. I arrived in eighteen days, partly on foot and partly sailing on the river. It was the season of the flood, when many fall ill, as indeed I did. When I arrived I found his porch shut; for later the brothers built on a very large porch, holding about a hundred men, and locking it with a key they opened it on Saturday and Sunday. Learning the reason why it was shut, I waited quietly until Saturday. Coming at the second hour for an audience, I found him sitting at the window through which he used to encourage those who came. He greeted me and said through an interpreter, “Where are you from, and why have you come? I guess that you belong to the company of Evagrius.” I said, “I am a stranger who has come from Galatia,” and I admitted that I belonged to the circle of Evagrius. While we were talking, the governor of the region, named Alypius, came in; John hurried to him and broke off his conversation with me. I withdrew a little and gave them room, standing at a distance. As they talked a long time, I grew weary, and in my weariness I grumbled against the old man, as despising me and honouring the other. Offended at this in my mind, I was thinking of leaving in contempt of him. But he called his interpreter, named Theodore, and said to him, “Go and tell that brother, ‘Do not be impatient; I am just sending the governor away, and I will speak with you.’” So I thought it right, regarding him as a spiritual man, to wait patiently. When the governor had gone out, he called me and said to me, “Why were you offended against me? What did you find worth taking offence at, that you thought what is neither true of me nor fitting for you? Or do you not know that it is written, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick’? I find you when I wish, and you find me. And if I do not encourage you, other brothers and other fathers encourage you. But this man has been handed over to the devil through worldly affairs, and having found a brief hour's breathing space, like a runaway slave from his master, he came to be helped. It would have been wrong to leave him and spend the time with you, who are continually occupied with your salvation.” I asked him to pray for me and was convinced that he was a spiritual man.

Then, jesting, he gently tapped my left cheek with his right hand and said to me, “Many afflictions await you. You have been much assailed to leave the desert, and you were afraid and put it off; the demon fans the flame, bringing you devout and plausible pretexts. For he has suggested to you your longing for your father, and the instruction of your brother and sister in the solitary life. Look, I bring you good news: both have been saved, for they have renounced the world; and your father has yet more years to live. So persevere in the desert, and do not for these reasons wish to go to your homeland; for it is written, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plough and turns back is fit for the kingdom of heaven.’” Helped by these words and sufficiently rebuked, I gave thanks to God, learning that the pretexts driving me had been disposed of. Then again he said to me, jesting, “Do you want to become a bishop?” I said to him, “I am one.” He said to me, “Where?” I said, “In the kitchens, the taverns, the tables, the jars. I oversee them, and if the wine is sour I excommunicate it, and the good I drink. Likewise I oversee the pot, and if it lacks salt or some seasoning I put it in and season it, and so eat it. This is my bishopric; for gluttony ordained me.” He smiled and said to me, “Leave off your jokes. You are going to be ordained bishop and to toil much and suffer affliction. If you flee the afflictions, do not leave the desert; for in the desert no one will ordain you bishop.”

Leaving him, I came to my usual place in the desert and told all this to the blessed fathers; and two months later they sailed and went to meet him. But I forgot his words. Three years later I fell ill with a disease of the spleen and stomach, and from there I was sent by the brothers to Alexandria, with dropsy threatening. From Alexandria the doctors advised me, for the sake of the air, to go to Palestine, for its air is light, suited to our constitution. From Palestine I went to Bithynia, and there (I do not know how, whether by human effort or by the good pleasure of the One who is greater; God would know) I was counted worthy of an ordination beyond me, and I shared in the troubles that befell the blessed John. And hiding for eleven months in a dark cell, I remembered that blessed man, that he had foretold to me what I suffered. He told me this too, as if to lead me by the story to endurance in the desert: “I have been forty-eight years in this cell. I have not seen a woman's face, nor the look of a coin; I have not seen anyone chewing, nor has anyone seen me eating or drinking.”

He also did not meet the servant of God Poemenia, who came to visit him, but revealed to her some secret things. He charged her, when she came down from the Thebaid, not to turn aside to Alexandria: “For you will fall into temptations.” But she, misjudging or forgetting, turned aside to Alexandria to see the city. On the way, near the city of Nikiou, her boats put in to rest. Her servants went ashore and, through some disorder, got into a fight with the local people, desperate men. These cut off one eunuch's finger, killed another, and even ducked the most holy bishop Dionysius in the river, not knowing who he was; and they crushed her with insults and threats and wounded all the rest of the servants.

The deeds of Posidonius the Theban are many and hard to describe: how gentle he was and how very ascetic, and how great an innocence he had in himself; I do not know whether I have met anyone like him. I lived with him for a year in Bethlehem, when he was living beyond Poemenium, and I observed many of his virtues. Among other things he told me one day, “When I lived at the place called Porphyrites for a year, I met no human being the whole year, heard no conversation, touched no bread, but lived on a few dates and whatever wild plants I found. Once, when my food ran out, I left the cave to go to the inhabited world. After walking the whole day I was barely two miles from the cave. Looking round I saw a horseman in the dress of a soldier, with a helmet like a tiara on his head; and thinking he was a soldier, I rushed back to the cave, and found a basket of grapes and freshly cut figs. I took it with great joy and went into the cave, having that food as my comfort for two months.”

He did this wonder in Bethlehem. A pregnant woman had an unclean spirit, and when she was about to give birth she was in hard labour, the spirit tearing her. Since the woman was possessed, her husband came and begged that holy man to come. We went in together to pray; he stood and prayed, and after the second kneeling he cast out the spirit. Standing up, he said to us, “Pray, for the unclean spirit is now being driven out; and there must be some sign, so that we may be assured.” As the demon came out it threw down the whole wall of the courtyard from its foundation. The woman had not spoken for six years; after the demon came out she gave birth and spoke.

I also knew this prophecy of the man. A certain presbyter Jerome lived in those parts, adorned with excellence in Latin letters and with natural gifts; but he had such envy that the excellence of his learning was overshadowed by it. Posidonius, having spent many days with him, said to me in my ear, “The noble Paula, who looks after him, will die first, set free from his envy, I think. And because of this man no holy man will live in these parts, but his envy will reach even his own brother.” And so it happened. For he drove out the blessed Oxyperentius the Italian, and another, Peter, an Egyptian, and Simeon, wonderful men, whom I myself have noted. This Posidonius told me that he had not tasted bread since his fortieth year, and had not borne a grudge against anyone for so much as half a day.

There was another Sarapion, who was surnamed the Sindonite, because he never wore anything but a linen cloth. He practised great poverty, and being well educated he knew all the Scriptures by heart. Because of his great poverty and his study of the Scriptures he could not stay quiet in a cell; not being distracted by possessions, he went about the inhabited world and achieved this virtue. For he was of that nature too; for there are differences of natures, not of substances.

The fathers said that he took a fellow ascetic as a companion and sold himself to some Greek actors in a certain city for twenty pieces of gold, and sealing up the coins he kept them by him. He stayed and served the actors who had bought him until he had made them Christians and drawn them away from the theatre, taking nothing but bread and water and never keeping his mouth quiet from the study of the Scriptures. In the course of time first the man was pricked to the heart, then the actress, then their whole household. It was said that as long as they did not know who he was, he used to wash the feet of both of them. When both had been baptized, they gave up acting, and having taken up the holy and godly life, they revered the man greatly and said to him, “Come, brother, let us set you free, since you yourself have freed us from a shameful slavery.” He said to them, “Since God has worked and your soul has been saved, let me tell you the secret of the play. Taking pity on your soul, I, a free man, an ascetic, an Egyptian by birth, sold myself for this reason, to save you. Since God has done this and your soul has been saved through my humiliation, take your gold, so that I may go away and help others.” They pleaded with him much and assured him, “We will hold you as father and master; only stay with us”; but they could not persuade him. Then they said to him, “Give the gold to the poor, for it has been a pledge of salvation to us; but at least visit us once a year.”

In the course of his continual journeys he came to Greece, and spending three days in Athens he was not given bread by anyone; for he carried neither money nor bag nor sheepskin nor anything of the kind. When the fourth day came, he was very hungry; for involuntary hunger is terrible when it has unbelief for its advocate. Standing on a hill of the city, where the city's magistrates were gathered, he began to lament loudly, clapping his hands and crying, “Men of Athens, help!” All ran up at once, those wearing the philosopher's cloak and those wearing the hooded cloak, and said to him, “What is the matter with you, man? Where are you from? What is wrong?” He said to them, “By birth I am an Egyptian. Since I left my true homeland I have fallen among three creditors. Two of them have let me go, having been paid the debt and having nothing to charge me with; but one will not let me go.” They, inquiring after the creditors in order to satisfy them, asked him, “Where are they, and who are they? Who is the one troubling you? Show him to us so that we may help you.” Then he said to them, “From my youth love of money, gluttony, and sexual immorality troubled me. I have been freed from two, love of money and sexual immorality; they trouble me no longer. But from gluttony I cannot be freed. This is the fourth day I have not eaten, and my stomach goes on troubling me, demanding its usual due, without which I cannot live.” Then some of the philosophers, suspecting that it was an act, gave him a gold coin. He took it, put it down at a baker's, took one loaf, and immediately left the city, never returning to it. Then the philosophers knew that he was truly virtuous, and paying the baker the price of the loaf they took back the coin.

Coming to the region of Lacedaemon, he heard that one of the leading men of the city was a Manichaean with all his household, though virtuous in other respects. To him again he sold himself, as in the first play, and within two years he drew him away from the heresy and brought his wife to the church. Then they loved him and held him no longer as a servant but as a true brother or father, and glorified God.

Once he put himself on board a ship as if he were bound to sail to Rome. The sailors, supposing that he had either brought provisions on board or had his expenses in gold, took him on without inquiry, each thinking that someone else had taken his baggage. When they had set sail and were five hundred stades from Alexandria, the passengers began to eat about sunset, after the sailors had eaten first. They saw that he did not eat on the first day and supposed it was because of the voyage; likewise the second, the third, and the fourth. On the fifth day they saw him sitting quietly while everyone ate and said to him, “Why do you not eat, man?” He said to them, “Because I have nothing.” They inquired among themselves, “Who took his baggage or his provisions?” And when they found that no one had, they began to quarrel with him and say, “How did you come aboard without provisions? Where will you get the fare to give us? Or where will you get food?” He said to them, “I have nothing. Take me back and throw me off where you found me.” They would not have turned back even for a hundred gold pieces, but held to their course. So he stayed on the ship, and they ended up feeding him as far as Rome.

Arriving in Rome, he inquired who was a great ascetic, man or woman, in the city. Among others he met Domninus, a disciple of Origen, whose bed after his death healed the sick. Meeting him and being helped by him (for he was a man finished in character and knowledge), he learned from him who else there was, ascetic man or woman, and heard of a virgin living in seclusion who met no one. Learning where she lived, he went and said to the old woman who served her, “Tell the virgin that I must meet her, for God has sent me.” After waiting two or three days he met her and said to her, “Why are you sitting?” She said to him, “I am not sitting; I am travelling.” He said to her, “Where are you travelling?” She said to him, “To God.” He said to her, “Are you alive or dead?” She said to him, “I believe in God that I am dead; for one who lives in the flesh will not travel.” He said to her, “Then, to convince me that you are dead, do what I do.” She said to him, “Command me what is possible and I will do it.” He answered her, “To the dead all things are possible except impiety.” Then he said to her, “Come out and go forth.” She answered him, “I have been twenty-five years without going out; why should I go out?” He said to her, “If you have died to the world and the world to you, it is the same to you whether you go out or not; so go out.” She went out. And after she had gone out and they had come to a certain church, he said to her in the church, “Now, if you wish to convince me that you are dead and no longer live pleasing men, do what I do, and I will know that you are dead: take off all your clothes as I do, put them on your shoulders, and walk through the middle of the city with me going in front, in this state.” She said to him, “I would scandalize many by the indecency of the thing, and they would say, ‘She is out of her mind and possessed.’” He answered her, “And what does it matter to you if they say, ‘She is out of her mind and possessed’? For you are dead to them.” Then she said to him, “I will do anything else you wish; to this degree I do not even pray to come.” Then he said to her, “… then, no longer think great things of yourself as more devout than everyone and dead to the world; for I am more dead than you, and I show by deed that I have died to the world, for I do this without passion and without shame.” Then, leaving her in humility and having broken her pride, he went away.

There are many other wonderful things he did that tended toward freedom from passion. He died at the age of sixty and was buried in Rome itself.

It is not right to keep silent about the celebrated deacon Evagrius, a man who lived after the manner of the apostles; rather, these things should be committed to writing for the edification of readers and the glory of the goodness of our Saviour. I have thought it worth while to set out from the beginning how he came to his purpose, and how, having practised it worthily, he died in the desert at the age of fifty-four, as it is written: “In a short time he fulfilled many years.”

By birth he was from Pontus, of the city of Ibora, the son of a chorepiscopus. He was ordained reader by the holy Basil, bishop of the church of Caesarea. After the death of the holy Basil, the most wise and passionless Gregory of Nazianzus, the bishop, brilliant in learning, noticing his aptitude, made him deacon. From there, at the great synod in Constantinople, he left him with the blessed Nectarius the bishop, being a most skilful debater against all the heresies. He flourished in the great city, displaying youthful vigour in discourses against every heresy. It happened that, while he was highly honoured by the whole city, he became entangled in an image of desire for a woman, as he himself told us. Later, when he had freed his mind, the woman fell in love with him in turn; she was one of the great ladies. Evagrius, fearing God and respecting his own conscience, and setting before his eyes the greatness of the disgrace and the malicious joy of the heretics, prayed, entreating God that he might be hindered by him. But as the woman pressed him and raged, though he wished to leave he could not, held fast by the bonds of this courtship.

Not long after, his prayer having gone ahead of the actual deed, an angelic vision appeared to him in the form of soldiers of the prefect. They seized him, brought him as if to a court, and threw him into the so-called custody, binding his neck and hands with iron collars and chains, those who had come for him not stating the charge. But he knew in his conscience that he suffered this because of her, supposing that her husband had made a complaint. While he was in great anguish, another case was being tried and others were being tortured on a charge, and he remained in great anguish. Then the angel who had given the vision transformed himself into the likeness of a true friend and said to him, as he stood bound among a chain of forty condemned men, “Why are you held here, lord deacon?” He said to him, “In truth I do not know; but I suspect that so-and-so, the ex-prefect, has complained against me, struck with irrational jealousy; and I fear that the magistrate, corrupted by money, may subject me to punishment.” He said to him, “If you listen to your friend, it is not good for you to stay in this city.” Evagrius said to him, “If God frees me from this misfortune and you see me in Constantinople, know that I deservedly suffer this punishment.” The other said to him, “I will bring the Gospel book, and swear …” … [he confessed to her] the whole matter. She said to him, “Give me your word before the Lord that you will hold to the aim of the solitary life; and though I am a sinner, I pray that a furlough of life may be granted you.” He agreed. Within a few days he recovered; and rising up, he was clothed by her in different clothes, and he went out and journeyed to the mountain of Nitria in Egypt.

Having lived there for two years, in the third he went into the desert. He lived fourteen years in the place called the Cells, eating a pound of bread and a pint of oil every three months, though he had come from a most delicate, luxurious, and soft life. He said a hundred prayers, and wrote only enough in the year to pay for what he ate; for he wrote the sharp-pointed hand beautifully. Within fifteen years, having purified his mind to the utmost, he was granted the gift of knowledge, wisdom, and the discernment of spirits. He composed three holy books for monks, called Refutations, setting out arts against the demons. The demon of sexual immorality troubled him heavily, as he himself told us, and all night he stood naked in the well, in winter, so that his flesh froze. Another time a spirit of blasphemy troubled him, and for forty days he did not go under a roof, as he himself told us, so that his body broke out in ticks like that of irrational animals. Three demons once came to him by day in the form of clerics, disputing about the faith; one called himself an Arian, another a Eunomian, another an Apollinarian; and he overcame them with his wisdom in a few words. Again, one day when the key of the church was lost, he made the sign of the cross on the face of the lock, pushed it with his hand, and opened it, calling on Christ. He was so scourged by demons and had such experience of demons that it cannot be counted. He told one of his disciples what would happen to him eighteen years later, prophesying everything in detail. He said, “Since I came to the desert I have not touched lettuce, or any other green vegetable, or fruit, or grapes, or meat, or a bath.” Later, in the sixteenth year of his life without cooked food, since his flesh needed to take food prepared by fire because of the weakness of his stomach, he no longer touched bread, but taking vegetables or barley gruel or pulse for two years, he died on that diet, having received Communion in the church at Epiphany. Near his death he told us, “This is the third year that I have not been troubled by carnal desire,” after such a life, such labour and toil and unceasing prayer. When the death of his father was announced to him, he said to the one who brought the news, “Stop blaspheming; for my father is immortal.”

A certain Pior, a young Egyptian, renounced the world and left his father's house, and out of excessive zeal gave his word to God never again to see any of his own people. Fifty years later his sister, grown old and hearing that he was alive, was beside herself with longing to see him. Since she could not go into the great desert, she begged the bishop of the place to write to the fathers in the desert to send him so that she might see him. Under strong pressure he decided to take one other with him and go. He sent word to his sister's house: “Your brother Pior has come.” Standing outside, and hearing from the noise of the door that the old woman had come out to meet him, he shut his eyes and cried out to her, “So-and-so, so-and-so, I am Pior your brother; it is I. Look at me as much as you like.” She was satisfied and glorified God, and not having persuaded him to come into her house, she went back into her own house; and he, having prayed at the doorway, went off again to the desert.

This wonder too is told of him: in the place where he lived he dug and found very bitter water, and until he died he stayed there, putting up with the bitterness of the water to show his endurance. After his death many of the monks vied to stay in his cell, but could not complete a year; for the place is frightful and comfortless.

Moses the Libyan, a very gentle and loving man, was granted the gift of healing. He told me, “When I was young in the monastery, we dug a very large well, twenty feet across. Eighty men dug in it for three days, and we went about a cubit beyond the usual and expected level of the water-vein, but we found no water. Greatly grieved, we were thinking of giving up the work. Then Pior came from the great desert at the very height of the noonday heat, an old man wrapped in his sheepskin. He greeted us and after the greeting said, ‘Why have you lost heart, you of little faith? For I have seen you losing heart since yesterday.’ He went down the ladder into the shaft of the well and prayed with them; then taking the pick, as he struck the third blow he said, ‘God of the holy patriarchs, do not make vain the labour of your servants, but send them the water they need.’ And at once water spurted out, so that they were all drenched. He prayed again and went away. They pressed him to eat, but he would not, saying, ‘What I was sent for has been done; I was not sent for that.’”

You have surely heard about Ephrem, the deacon of the church of Edessa; for he is one of those worthy to be remembered by the holy. Having worthily completed the way of the Spirit and not turned aside from the straight road, he was granted the gift of natural knowledge, which is followed by theology and final blessedness. He always practised the quiet life and edified those who came to him for many years; but later he came out of his cell for the following reason. A great famine seized the city of Edessa, and pitying the whole countryside as it perished, he went to the wealthy and said to them, “Why do you not have pity on human nature as it perishes, but let your wealth rot, to the condemnation of your souls?” They considered and said to him, “We have no one to trust to minister to the starving; for they all make a trade of things.” He said to them, “What do you think of me?” For he had a great reputation with everyone, not falsely but truly. They said to him, “We know you to be a man of God.” “Then,” he said, “entrust it to me. Look, for your sakes I appoint myself guest-master.” And taking money, he partitioned off the porticoes, set up about three hundred beds, and nursed the starving, burying those who died, nursing those who had hope of life, and in short daily providing lodging and service to all who came in because of the famine, from what was supplied to him. When the year was over and plenty followed, and everyone went home, having nothing more to do, he went into his own cell and died a month later, God having given him this occasion as a kind of crown at the end of his life. He also left writings, most of them worth serious study.

It is necessary also to mention courageous women in this book, to whom God granted contests equal to those of men, so that they might not make the excuse that they are too weak for the achievement of virtue. I have seen many, and have met many refined women, virgins and widows. [Among them was Paula the Roman, the mother of Toxotius, a woman most refined in the spiritual life. A certain Jerome from Dalmatia became a hindrance to her; for though she was able to surpass all women, being most gifted, he hindered her by his envy, drawing her to his own purpose. Her daughter, named Eustochium, still practises asceticism now in Bethlehem. I have not met her, but she is said to be very chaste … having practised virtue scrupulously, and still holding fast to the contests vigorously. And Photeine, a virgin of the greatest holiness, the daughter of Theoctistus, the presbyter of Laodicea. In Antioch too I met a most holy woman who conversed with God, the deaconess Sabiniana, the aunt of John, bishop of Constantinople. In Rome I saw also the good Asella, the virgin grown old in the monastery, a very gentle woman who sustained a community. Among them I saw both men and women newly instructed in the faith. I saw also Avita, worthy of God, with her husband Apronianus and their daughter Eunomia, pleasing God so well that they openly changed over to the virtuous and continent life, … among these, and to falling asleep in Christ, freed from all sin and having attained knowledge, leaving their lives in good remembrance.]

I have heard of a certain Julian in the region of Edessa, a most ascetic man, who wasted his flesh so excessively that he carried about only bones and skin. At the very end he was granted the honour of the gift of healing.

I knew another man in Jerusalem named Adolius, a Tarsian by birth, who, coming to Jerusalem, travelled a very untrodden road, not the one most of us have walked, but cutting out for himself a strange way of life. He practised asceticism beyond human measure, so that even the demons, shuddering at his austerity, did not dare to come near him. Because of his excessive self-control and vigils he was even suspected of being a phantom. In Lent he ate every five days, and the rest of the time every other day. His great feat was this: from evening until the brotherhood gathered again in the houses of prayer, he stood on the Mount of Olives, on the hill of the Ascension, from which Jesus was taken up, singing psalms and praying continually; and whether it snowed or rained or froze, he stayed unmoved. When he had completed his usual time, he would knock on everyone's cells with the waking-hammer, gathering them to the houses of prayer; and in each house he sang one or two antiphons with them and prayed with them, and so went off to his own cell before daybreak. Indeed, the brothers often undressed him and wrung out his clothes as if from a wash-tub, and put others on him. So, after resting again until the hour of psalmody, he applied himself to it until evening. This, then, was the virtue of Adolius of Tarsus, who was perfected in Jerusalem and fell asleep there.

You have heard from many about the blessed Innocent, the presbyter of the Mount of Olives; but you will hear no less from us, who lived with him for three years. He was exceedingly simple. He had been one of the distinguished men at the palace at the beginning of the reign of the emperor Constantius, and he renounced the world after being married; he had a son named Paul, who served as a domesticus in the army. When this son sinned with the daughter of a presbyter, Innocent cursed his own son, entreating God and saying, “Lord, give him such a spirit that his flesh may no longer find occasion to sin,” thinking it better for him to wrestle with a demon than with licentiousness. And so it happened. He is still now on the Mount of Olives, wearing iron and being chastened by the spirit.

As for how merciful this Innocent was, I shall seem to be talking nonsense in telling the truth: he often stole from the brothers and gave to the needy. He was exceedingly guileless and simple, and was granted a gift against demons. Once, while we watched, a young man was brought to him, seized by a spirit and by paralysis, so that I, seeing him, wanted at once to send the mother of the one brought away, despairing of a cure. Meanwhile it happened that the old man came and saw her standing there, weeping and lamenting the indescribable misfortune of her son. The good old man wept, was moved with compassion, took the young man, and went into his martyr's shrine, which he himself had built, in which lie relics of John the Baptist. Having prayed over him from the third hour to the ninth, he gave the young man back healthy to his mother that same day, having driven out both the paralysis and the demon. Such was his paralysis that when the boy spat, he spat onto his back, so twisted round was he.

An old woman who had lost a sheep came to him weeping. He followed her and said, “Show me the place where you lost it.” She led him to the region of Lazarus. He stood and prayed. Some young men who had stolen it had already slaughtered it. As he prayed, no one confessing, and the meat hidden in the vineyard, a raven came from somewhere and settled, took a piece, and flew off again. The blessed man noticed and found the slaughtered animal; and so the young men who had slaughtered it fell down before him and confessed, and were made to pay its proper price.

[We met in Galatia, and spent a long time with, the presbyter Philoromus, a most ascetic and enduring man. He was born of a slave mother and a free father, but he showed such nobility in the life according to Christ that even those of unconquered nobility by birth revered his life and virtue. He renounced the world in the days of Julian, the emperor of evil name, and spoke boldly to him. Julian ordered him to be shaved and slapped by boys; he endured the thing and even thanked him, as he himself told us. At the beginning the war of sexual immorality and of gluttony attacked him. He drove out the passion by enclosure, by wearing iron, and by abstaining from wheaten bread and from everything cooked by fire. Persevering in these things for eighteen years, he sang the hymn of victory to Christ. Attacked in various ways by the spirits of wickedness, he persevered in one monastery for forty years. He told us, “For thirty-two years I have not touched fruit.” Once, when cowardice attacked him, to overcome it he shut himself up in a tomb for six years. The blessed Basil the bishop cared greatly for him, delighting in his austerity and severity. Even now he has not given up the pen and the quire for writing, though he is about eighty years old. He said, “From the time I was initiated and born again until this day I have not eaten another's bread as a gift, but from my own labours.” He assured us, as before God, that he had given two hundred and fifty gold pieces from the work of his hands to cripples, never having wronged anyone. He went on foot even as far as Rome itself to pray at the martyr's shrine of the blessed Peter, and he reached Alexandria too, to pray at the martyr's shrine of Mark. He went a second time to Jerusalem, travelling on his own feet and providing for himself from his own means. He said, “I do not remember ever departing in mind from my God.”]

The thrice-blessed Melania was Spanish by race, or rather Roman. She was the daughter of Marcellinus the ex-consul and the wife of a certain man of high rank, whom I do not clearly remember. Widowed in her twenty-second year, she was counted worthy of divine love. Saying nothing to anyone (for she would have been prevented, in the times when Valens held power in the empire), she had a guardian appointed for her son, took all her movable property, put it on a ship, and with children and women of rank sailed swiftly to Alexandria. There she sold her goods, turned them into gold, and went to the mountain of Nitria, meeting the fathers, Pambo, Arsisius, Sarapion the Great, Paphnutius of Scetis, Isidore the confessor, bishop of Hermopolis, and Dioscorus. She spent up to half a year with them, going round the desert and visiting all the saints. After this, when the Augustal prefect of Alexandria banished Isidore, Pisimius, Adelphius, Paphnutius, and Pambo, and among them Ammonius Parotes, and twelve bishops and presbyters, to Palestine near Diocaesarea, she followed them and served them from her own money. When servants were forbidden (as they told it; for I met the holy Pisimius, Isidore, Paphnutius, and Ammonius), she put on a slave-boy's hooded cloak and in the evenings brought them what they needed. The consular of Palestine learned of it, and wishing to fill his pocket he thought he could frighten her into paying; he arrested her and put her in prison, not knowing she was free-born. She informed him, “I am the daughter of so-and-so and the wife of so-and-so; but I am Christ's slave. Do not despise the cheapness of my dress; for I can exalt myself if I wish, and you cannot frighten me in this way or take any of my property. So I have informed you, so that you may not fall into charges through ignorance; for with the senseless one must use pride like a hawk.” Then the judge, realizing the situation, apologized, paid her homage, and ordered that she be allowed to meet the saints without hindrance.

After their recall she built a monastery in Jerusalem and stayed there twenty-seven years, having a community of fifty virgins. With her lived the most noble Rufinus, of like character and most steadfast, from Italy, from the city of Aquileia, who was later counted worthy of the presbyterate; a man more learned and more reasonable was not to be found among men. Both of them, during the twenty-seven years, welcomed at their own expense those who came to Jerusalem to pray, bishops, monks, and virgins, and edified all who came; they united the schism concerning Paulinus, of about four hundred monks, and persuading every heretic who fought against the Spirit, they brought them into the church. They honoured the local clergy with gifts and food, and so they continued to the end without scandalizing anyone.

A man named Chronius, from the village called Phoenix, measured from his own village, which is near the desert, fifteen thousand paces counted with his right foot, and there, after praying, he dug a well. Finding excellent water seven fathoms down, he built himself a small lodging there. And from the day he established himself in that dwelling he prayed to God never again to return to an inhabited place. A few years later he was counted worthy of the presbyterate, a brotherhood of about two hundred men having gathered round him. This is reported as the virtue of his asceticism: that for sixty years, attending the altar as priest, he did not leave the desert, and did not eat bread that was not the work of his own hands.

With him lived a neighbour, James, surnamed the Lame, a man of the highest knowledge. Both were acquaintances of the blessed Antony. One day Paphnutius, surnamed Kephalas, also joined them; he had the gift of knowledge of the divine Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, interpreting all of it without having read the Scriptures, and he was so gentle that his prophetic virtue was hidden. It is reported of him that for eighty years he never had two tunics at the same time. Meeting them, I and the blessed Evagrius and Albanius sought to learn the causes of the brothers who lapse or fall away or stumble in the proper life. For it happened in those days that Chaeremon the ascetic died sitting down and was found dead in his seat holding his work in his hands; and that another brother, digging a well, was buried by the well; and another, coming down from Scetis, died for lack of water; and among them the stories of Stephen, who fell into shameful debauchery, of Eucarpius, of Heron the Alexandrian, of Valens the Palestinian, and of Ptolemy the Egyptian in Scetis. So we asked together what was the cause that, of men living thus in the desert, some were deceived in mind and others broke out into licentiousness.

Paphnutius, the man of great knowledge, gave us this answer: “Everything that happens is divided into two: God's good pleasure and his permission. Whatever happens according to virtue, to the glory of God, happens by God's good pleasure; but whatever on the other hand is harmful, dangerous, calamitous, and ruinous happens by God's permission. And the permission happens for a reason; for it is impossible for one who thinks rightly and lives rightly to fall into shameful sins or the deceit of demons. Those, then, who seem to pursue virtue with a corrupt aim, from the disease of pleasing men and from self-willed thoughts, fall into errors, God abandoning them for their own good, so that through the abandonment, perceiving the alteration brought by the change, they may correct either their purpose or their action. For sometimes the purpose goes wrong, when it is done with a bad aim; sometimes the action, when it is done corruptly or not in the way it should be. So it often happens that a licentious man gives alms with a corrupt aim to young women for a shameful end, though the action, giving help to one who is an orphan, alone, and practising asceticism, is reasonable. It happens too that someone gives alms with a right aim to the sick, the old, or those fallen from wealth, but sparingly and with grumbling, so that the aim is right but the action unworthy of the aim; for one who shows mercy should show it with cheerfulness and liberality.”

They also said this: “There are advantages in many souls: in some a gifted mind, in others aptitude for asceticism. But when neither the action nor the gift is for the sake of the good itself, and those who possess the advantages do not ascribe them to God, the giver of good things, but to their own choice, giftedness, and capacity, such people are abandoned and taken either in shameful acts or in shameful passions and disgrace, and through the humiliation and shame that follow they gradually rub off the pride they had in their supposed virtue. For since the one who is puffed up and exalted by his gift of speech does not ascribe his giftedness or the supply of knowledge to God, but to his own discipline or nature, God withdraws the angel of providence from him; and when that angel has turned away, the one exalted by his giftedness is overpowered by the adversary and falls into licentiousness through his pride, so that, the witness of chastity being taken away, what such people say may become untrustworthy, the devout fleeing teaching from such a mouth as they would a spring containing leeches; so that what is written is fulfilled: ‘But to the sinner God said, Why do you declare my statutes and take my covenant in your mouth?’ For truly the souls of the passionate are like various springs: the gluttonous and the lovers of wine like muddy springs; the avaricious and grasping like springs with frogs; the envious and proud who have an aptitude for knowledge like springs that breed snakes, in which the word is always lying stagnant, but no one gladly draws from them because of the bitterness of their character. That is why David asked for three things: kindness, discipline, and knowledge; for without kindness knowledge is useless. And if such a one corrects himself, laying aside the cause of the abandonment, that is, pride, and takes up humility, recognizes his own limits, and is exalted against no one but gives thanks to God, then knowledge, with its witness, returns to him again. For spiritual words that have not a holy and chaste life riding along with them are ears of corn blasted by the wind, having the form but robbed of the nourishment. Every fall, then, whether through the tongue, through a sense, through action, or through the whole body, comes by abandonment in proportion to the pride, God sparing those who are abandoned. For if, together with their licentiousness, the Lord also bore witness to their giftedness by the supply of words, their pride would make them into demons, exalted in their uncleanness.”

Those holy men also said this to us: “When you see someone harsh in life but persuasive in speech, remember the demon who conversed with Christ from the holy Scripture, and the testimony that says, ‘Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the beasts on the earth.’ His cunning turned rather to harm, since no other virtue went with it. For the faithful and good man must think what God gives, say what he thinks, and do what he says. For if the kinship of the life does not run together with the truth of the words, it is bread without salt, according to Job, which will not be eaten at all, or if eaten will bring those who eat it into ill health: ‘Will bread be eaten without salt? And is there taste in empty words,’ not filled with the testimony of works? Of the causes of abandonment, one is because of hidden virtue, so that it may be revealed, as in the case of Job, when God gave him an oracle, saying, ‘Do not reject my judgment, and do not think that I have dealt with you otherwise than that you might be shown righteous.’ For to me, who see what is hidden, you were known; but since you were unknown to men, who suspected that you served me for your wealth, I brought on the calamity and cut down your wealth, to show them your grateful wisdom. Another is for the averting of pride, as in the case of Paul. For Paul was abandoned, being struck by calamities, blows, and various afflictions, and he said, ‘A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, so that I might not be exalted’; lest, along with the miracles, the ease, prosperity, and honour that came to him should throw him, grown slack, into devilish pride. The paralytic too was abandoned because of sins, as Jesus says: ‘See, you have become well; sin no more.’ Judas too was abandoned, having preferred money to the Word; and therefore he hanged himself. Esau too was abandoned and fell into licentiousness, having preferred the dung of the bowels to his father's blessing. So Paul, perceiving all these things, said of some: ‘Since they did not see fit to have God in knowledge, God gave them up to an unfit mind, to do what is not proper’; and of certain others who seem to have knowledge of God with a corrupt mind: ‘Since, knowing God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, God gave them up to dishonourable passions.’ From this we know that it is impossible for anyone to fall into licentiousness who has not been abandoned by the providence of God.”

In the caves of the Amorites near Jericho, which they once hewed out when fleeing from Joshua the son of Nun as he was then destroying the foreign peoples, on the mountain of Douka, a certain Elpidius, a Cappadocian, later counted worthy of the presbyterate, who had belonged to the monastery of Timothy the Cappadocian chorepiscopus, a most capable man, came and settled in one of the caves. He showed such self-control in asceticism that he eclipsed everyone. For twenty-five years he ate only on Sundays and Saturdays, standing and singing psalms through the nights. Like a king bee in the midst of the swarm, a multitude of brothers lived round him; I too lived with him; and so he made the mountain a city, and one could see various ways of life there. Once a scorpion stung this Elpidius while he was singing psalms at night and we were singing with him; he trod on it and did not even change his standing posture, disregarding the pain of the scorpion. One day a brother was holding a cutting from a vine; Elpidius took it while sitting by the edge of the mountain and buried it as if planting it, though it was not the season; and it grew so large and became such a vine that it covered the church. With him Aenesius, a notable man, and Eustathius his brother were also perfected. He attained such freedom from passion, his body so dried up, that the sun shone through his bones. A story is told by his zealous disciples that he never turned to the west, because the mountain rose high above the door of the cave; nor did he ever see the sun after the sixth hour, when it passed the summit and declined toward the west, nor the stars rising in the west, for twenty-five years. From the time he entered the cave he did not come down from the mountain until he was buried.

[A disciple of this Elpidius was Sisinnius by name, born to a slave's lot but free by faith, a Cappadocian by race; for these things too should be mentioned, to the glory of Christ, who ennobles us and leads us to true nobility. After spending six or seven years with Elpidius, he later shut himself up in a tomb and for three years continued in prayers in the tomb, neither by night nor by day sitting down, lying down, or walking outside. He was granted a gift against demons. Now he has returned to his homeland and has been counted worthy of the presbyterate, having gathered a brotherhood of men and women. By his holy way of life he has driven out the maleness of his own desire and muzzled the femaleness of the women by self-control, so that what is written is fulfilled: “In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female.” He is also hospitable, though owning nothing, to the reproof of the rich who do not share.

I knew an old man of Palestine named Gaddanas, who lived the life without a roof in the region of the Jordan. Once some Jews, attacking him out of zeal in the region of the Dead Sea, came at him with a drawn sword. And this is what happened: as the one who had drawn the sword raised it, meaning to strike Gaddanas, his hand withered, and the sword fell from the right hand of the one who held it.

Elias, again, a monk in the same region, lived in a cave, a man of most holy and lawful life. One day, when many brothers had come to him (for the place was on a route), he ran out of bread. And he assured us, “I was dismayed at the situation, but going into my cell I found three fresh loaves; and though twenty of us ate our fill of them, one was left over, which I used for twenty-five days.”

A man named Sabas, a layman, from Jericho by birth, who had a wife, became such a lover of monks that he went round the cells and the desert at night and outside each dwelling put a bushel of dates and enough vegetables, because the ascetics by the Jordan do not eat bread. One day a lion met him, and catching up with him, it drove him off for a mile and turned back, and took the donkey and went away.]

There was a certain Abraham, an Egyptian by race, who lived a very harsh and wild life in the desert. Struck in his mind by untimely conceit, he came into the church and contended with the presbyters, saying, “I was ordained presbyter by Christ this night; receive me as a priest.” The fathers removed him from the desert, led him to a more ordinary and indifferent life, and cured him of his pride, bringing him to the knowledge of his own weakness, since he had been mocked by the demon.

About the wonderful and holy Melania I have spoken above only superficially; but nonetheless I will now weave the remainder into my account. How much wealth she spent in her divine zeal, burning it up as if by fire, it is not for me to tell, but rather for those who live in Persia; for no one failed to receive her benefaction, neither east nor west, north nor south. For thirty-seven years she lived abroad and from her own means supported churches, monasteries, strangers, and prisons, her relatives, her son himself, and her own stewards supplying her with the money. Persevering so long abroad, she did not acquire a span of land; she was not drawn away by longing for her son, nor did desire for her only son divide her from her love of Christ. But through her prayers the young man reached the height of education and character, made a distinguished marriage, and attained worldly honours; and he had two children.

Many years later, hearing of the situation of her granddaughter, that she had married and intended to renounce the world, and fearing that they might be shattered by false teaching, heresy, or evil living, the old woman, sixty years old, put herself on a ship, and sailing from Caesarea she reached Rome in twenty days. There she met the most blessed and distinguished Apronianus, who was a pagan, instructed him, and made him a Christian, persuading him also to live in continence with his own wife, her niece, named Avita. She strengthened her own granddaughter Melania with her husband Pinianus, instructed Albina, her daughter-in-law, her son's wife, and preparing all of them to sell their possessions, she led them out of Rome and brought them to the holy and calm harbour of life. And so she fought like one fighting wild beasts against all the senators and their wives, who tried to prevent her because of the renunciation of their other houses. But she said to them, “Children, it was written four hundred years ago, ‘It is the last hour.’ Why do you cling to the vanity of life? Lest the days of the Antichrist overtake you, and you do not enjoy your wealth and your ancestral property.” And setting them all free, she led them to the solitary life. She also instructed the younger son of Publicola and led him to Sicily; and selling all the rest of her property and receiving the price, she came to Jerusalem; and having distributed her goods, within forty days she fell asleep in a good old age and in the deepest gentleness, leaving a monastery in Jerusalem and the funds for it.

When all of them had left Rome, a barbarian storm, which had long been foretold in prophecies, fell on Rome, and did not spare even the bronze statues in the forum, but plundering everything with barbarian madness gave it over to destruction, so that Rome, adorned for twelve hundred years, became a ruin. Then those who had been instructed and those who had opposed the instruction glorified God, who by the change of affairs persuaded the unbelievers that, when all the others were taken captive, these houses alone were saved, having become whole burnt offerings to the Lord through the zeal of Melania.

It happened that we were travelling together from Aelia to Egypt, escorting the blessed virgin Silvania, the sister-in-law of Rufinus the ex-prefect; Jubinus too was with us, then a deacon and now bishop of the church of Ascalon, a devout and learned man. When very fierce heat came upon us and we arrived at Pelusium, Jubinus happened to take a basin and wash his hands and feet thoroughly in very cold water, and after washing to rest on a leather mat thrown on the ground. She came up to him, like a wise mother to a true son, and mocked his softness, saying, “How dare you, at your age, while your blood is still hot, pamper your flesh so, not perceiving the harm that comes from it? Take courage, take courage: I am in my sixtieth year, and apart from the tips of my fingers neither my feet nor my face nor any one of my members has touched water; though I have been seized by various illnesses and urged by the doctors, I have not consented to give the flesh its custom; I have not rested on a bed, nor travelled anywhere in a litter.”

She was very learned, or rather a lover of learning, and turned her nights into days going through every writing of the ancient commentators, among them three million lines of Origen and two hundred and fifty thousand of Gregory, Stephen, Pierius, Basil, and some other most excellent writers; not reading them once or as it happened, but laboriously going through each book seven or eight times. So she was able, set free from knowledge falsely so called, to take wing by the grace of the words, making herself by good hopes a spiritual bird, and to cross over to Christ.

In her footsteps and track walked the most holy and zealous Olympias, who followed her purpose. She was the daughter of Seleucus the ex-count, the granddaughter of Ablabius the ex-prefect, and for a few days the bride of Nebridius, ex-prefect of the city, but the wife of no one; for she is said to have fallen asleep a virgin, but the partner of the word of truth. She scattered all her possessions and gave them to the poor, fought no small contests on behalf of the truth, instructed many women, spoke with dignity to presbyters, honoured bishops, and was counted worthy of confession on behalf of the truth. Those who live in Constantinople reckon her life among the confessors, since she died thus and departed to the Lord in contests for God's sake.

In her footsteps, and as in a mirror, the blessed Candida, the daughter of Trajan the general, lived worthily and attained the height of holiness, honouring churches and bishops. She instructed her own daughter and sent her on to Christ in the lot of virginity, a gift of her own womb; and later she followed her daughter in chastity, purity, and the scattering of her wealth. I knew her to toil all night, grinding with her own hands to subdue her body, saying, “Since fasting is not enough, I give it laborious vigil as an ally, to break down the insolence of Esau.” She abstained entirely from everything with blood and life, but taking fish and vegetables with oil on feast days, she continued so, content with vinegar-and-water and dry bread.

In emulation of her the most holy Gelasia, the daughter of a tribune, walked devoutly, drawing the yoke of virginity. This virtue of hers is reported, that the sun never set on her grief, whether against a slave, or a maidservant, or anyone else.

I spent four years in Antinoe in the Thebaid, and in that time I came to know the monasteries there. About twelve hundred men live round the city, living by their hands and practising asceticism to the utmost. Among them are also anchorites who have shut themselves up in the caves of the rocks. Among these is a certain Solomon, a very gentle and self-controlled man with the gift of endurance, who said he was in his fiftieth year in the cave, supporting himself by the work of his hands and having learned all the holy Scripture by heart. Dorotheus, a presbyter, lived in another cave, exceedingly good; he too lived a blameless life, was counted worthy of the presbyterate, and ministered the liturgy to the brothers in the caves. Melania the Younger, the granddaughter of the great Melania, of whom I will speak later, once sent him five hundred gold pieces, asking him to minister to the brothers there. He took only three and sent the rest on to Diocles the anchorite, a man of great knowledge, saying, “Brother Diocles is wiser than I, and can manage them without harm, knowing those who reasonably ought to be helped; for I am content with these.”

This Diocles was first trained in grammar, and later gave himself to philosophy, grace drawing him in time. In his twenty-eighth year he renounced the general education and enlisted with Christ; he too has spent thirty-five years in the caves. He told us, “A mind that departs from the thought of God becomes either a beast or a demon”; and he called desire bestial and anger demonic. When I objected, “How is it possible for a human mind to be with God unceasingly?” he said, “In whatever pious and godly thought or action the soul is, it is with God.”

Near him lived a certain Capito, a former robber, who had completed fifty years in the caves four miles from the city of Antinoe and did not come down from the cave even as far as the river Nile, saying that he was not yet able to meet crowds, because the adversary still worked against him.

With these we saw another anchorite, likewise in a cave, who, mocked by dreams under the sting of vainglory, in turn mocked those who were deceived, shepherding the winds. He had chastity of body because of his age and the length of time, and perhaps because of his vainglory; but his mind was corrupted by the licence of vainglory.

In this city of Antinoe there are twelve monasteries of women. In one of them I met Amma Talis, an old woman who had spent eighty years in asceticism, as she herself and her neighbours told. Sixty young women lived with her, who loved her so much that no key was set on the courtyard of the monastery, as in others, but they were held fast by love of her. The old woman had reached such freedom from passion that, when I came in and sat down, she came and sat down beside me and put her hands on my shoulders in her great freedom of speech.

In this monastery there was a virgin, her disciple, named Taor, who had been thirty years in the monastery and would never take a new garment, veil, or shoes, saying, “I have no need of them; otherwise I would be compelled to go out.” For all the others go out on Sunday to the church for Communion; but she stays in the monastery in rags, sitting continually at her work. Her face was so beautiful that even a very steadfast man might have come near to being led astray by her beauty, had she not had her chastity as an exceptional guard, forcing the licentious eye by her modesty into shame and fear.

Another woman, a neighbour of mine, whose face I never saw (for, they say, she never went out from the time she renounced the world), having completed sixty years in asceticism with her own mother, was later about to depart this life. The martyr of the place, named Colluthus, stood by her and said to her, “Today you are to journey to the Master and to see all the saints. Come, then, and dine with us in the martyr's shrine.” So she got up at dawn, dressed, put in her basket bread, olives, and small herbs, and after so many years went out, went to the martyr's shrine, and prayed. Watching all day for a time when no one was inside, she sat down and called on the martyr, saying, “Bless my food, holy Colluthus, and accompany me with your prayers.” She ate, prayed again, and came home about sunset. And giving her mother a treatise of Clement the Stromatist on the prophet Amos, she said, “Give this to the exiled bishop, and tell him, ‘Pray for me, for I am going on my journey.’” And she died that very night, without fever or headache, having laid herself out for burial.

Since I promised above to tell about the girl Melania, I must pay the debt. For it is not right to pass over her youth in the flesh and leave so great a virtue unrecorded, since she far surpassed old women and earnest ones. Her parents forced her into marriage with one of the first men of Rome. But she was constantly pricked by the stories about her grandmother, and was so goaded by them that she could not serve the marriage. For when two male children were born to her and both died, she came to such hatred of marriage that she said to her husband Pinianus, son of Severus the ex-prefect, “If you choose to practise asceticism with me according to the rule of chastity, I recognize you as master and lord of my life. But if this seems too heavy for you, being young, take all my property and set my body free, so that I may fulfil my desire according to God, becoming heir to the zeal of my grandmother, whose name I also bear. For if God wished us to have children, he would not have taken my offspring untimely.” After they had struggled together a long time, God at last took pity on the young man and put into him too the zeal for renunciation, so that in them the Scripture was fulfilled: “For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?” Married at thirteen, and having lived with her husband seven years, she renounced the world in her twentieth year.

First she gave her silk garments to the altars; this the holy Olympias also did. The rest of the silks she cut up and made into various church furnishings. Her silver and gold she entrusted to a certain Paul, a presbyter, a monk of Dalmatia, and sent by sea to the East: to Egypt and the Thebaid ten thousand gold pieces; to Antioch and its regions ten thousand; to Palestine fifteen thousand; to the churches in the islands and to those in exile ten thousand; and to the churches in the West she supplied likewise by her own hand. All this, and four times as much, she snatched, as before God, out of the mouth of the lion Alaric by her faith. She set free eight thousand slaves who wished it; the rest did not wish it, but chose to serve her brother, to whom she allowed them all to be sold for three gold pieces each. Selling her estates in Spain, Aquitaine, Tarraconensis, and Gaul, she kept for herself only those in Sicily, Campania, and Africa, and used them to support monasteries. This was her wisdom concerning the burden of wealth.

Her asceticism was this: she ate every other day (at first even every five days), and she put herself on the daily rota with her own slave women, whom she also made her fellow ascetics. She has with her also her mother Albina, practising asceticism likewise and distributing her own wealth separately. They live in the country, sometimes in Sicily, sometimes in Campania, with fifteen eunuchs and sixty virgins, both free and slave. Likewise Pinianus her husband lives with thirty monks, reading and occupied with the garden and with holy conversation. They honoured us not a little, when many of us went to Rome on behalf of the blessed John the bishop, refreshing us with hospitality and the most generous provisions for the journey, with great joy reaping eternal life by the God-given works of the best way of [life].

Their kinsman, Pammachius by name, an ex-proconsul, likewise renounced the world and lived the best life, scattering all his wealth, part while living and leaving the rest to the poor at his death. So likewise did a certain Macarius, an ex-vicar, and Constantius, who had been assessor to the prefects of Italy, distinguished and most learned men who reached the height of love for God. I believe they are still in the flesh, practising the best life.

In Alexandria I knew a virgin whom I found about seventy years old. The whole clergy bore witness to her that when she was young, about twenty, and very beautiful, she was avoided because of her beauty, lest she give anyone occasion for blame through suspicion. Now when the Arians plotted against the blessed Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, through Eusebius the chamberlain under the emperor Constantius, and accused him falsely of unlawful things, he fled to avoid being tried by a corrupt court. He confided in no one, neither relative nor friend nor cleric nor anyone else; but when the prefect's officers suddenly entered the bishop's house looking for him, he took his tunic and cloak and in the middle of the night fled to this virgin. She was startled at the thing and terrified. He said to her, “Since I am being sought by the Arians and falsely accused of unlawful things, I decided to flee, so that I might not bear an irrational reputation and lead into sin those who wish to punish me. And God revealed to me this night, ‘You can be saved with no one but her.’” She, in great joy, cast away every misgiving and gave herself wholly to the Lord; and she hid that most holy man for six years, until the end of Constantius's life, washing his feet, taking care of his needs, managing all his necessities, and borrowing books and supplying them to him. And no one in all Alexandria knew in those six years where the blessed Athanasius was living. When the death of Constantius was announced and reached his ears, he dressed properly and appeared again at night in the church, everyone being amazed and seeing him as one alive from the dead. He explained to his close friends, “I did not take refuge with you for this reason, so that you might be able to swear truthfully, and also because of the searches. I took refuge with one about whom no one could have suspicion, since she was beautiful and young, achieving two things: her salvation, for I helped her, and my own reputation.”

Again, a certain virgin Juliana in Caesarea of Cappadocia was said to be most learned and most faithful. When Origen the writer was fleeing the uprising of the pagans, she received him for two years and supported the man at her own expense and with her own service. I found this written in a very old book in verse-lines, in which was written in Origen's hand: “I found this book with Juliana the virgin in Caesarea, when I was hiding with her; she said she had received it from Symmachus himself, the translator of the Jews.”

I have not set down the virtues of these women as a side matter, but so that we may learn that there are many ways to gain profit if we are willing.

In another very old book inscribed with the name of Hippolytus, the acquaintance of the apostles, I found a story of this kind. There was a most noble and very beautiful virgin in the city of Corinth practising virginity. At that time, in the time of the persecutors, they slandered her to the judge then in office, who was a pagan, as blaspheming the times and the emperors and reviling the idols. Those who dealt in such things praised her beauty to him. The judge, being mad about women, gladly received the slander with his horse-like ears. When he had moved every device and could not persuade the woman, then, in a rage against her, he did not hand her over to punishment or torture, but put her in a brothel and ordered the keeper of the women, “Take her, and bring me three gold pieces a day from her.” He, exacting the gold, gave her up to whoever wished. When the woman-hunters learned of it, they haunted that workshop of destruction, and giving the money they spoke to her with a view to seduction. But she pleaded with them, begging them and saying, “I have a sore in a hidden place which smells very badly, and I am afraid that you will come to hate me. Allow me a few days, and then you may have me even for nothing.” In those days she entreated God with petitions; and God, seeing her chastity, put into a young man, a magistrianus, fair in mind and in appearance, a burning zeal even unto death. Going in the guise of licentiousness, he came late in the evening to the man who kept the women, gave him five gold pieces, and said to him, “Let me stay with her this night.” Going into the hidden room, he said to her, “Get up, save yourself.” And taking off her clothes and dressing her in his own garments, his shirts, his cloak, and all his man's clothing, he said to her, “Cover yourself with the edge of the cloak and go out.” And so, signing herself with the cross and going out, she was saved uncorrupted and undefiled. The next day the play was discovered; the magistrianus was handed over and thrown to the beasts, so that in this too the demon might be put to shame, because he became a double martyr, both for himself and for that blessed woman.

In Ancyra of Galatia, in the city itself, I met a certain most illustrious Verus, an ex-count, of whom I had long experience, together with his wife Bosporia. They attained such good hope that they even disregarded their children, seeing the things to come in practice. For they spend the revenues of their estates on the poor, though they have two daughters and four sons, to whom they give not even a vine-twig, except to the daughters who have married, saying, “After our death everything is yours.” They collect the fruits of their properties and distribute them in the churches of cities and villages. This too is a virtue in them: when a famine came and struck at people's very bowels, they brought the heretics over to orthodoxy, providing their granaries in many places for the feeding of the poor. In the rest of their way of life, having adopted a very holy and simple manner, they wear very inexpensive clothes and live on the simplest food, practising self-control toward God, spending most of their time in the country and avoiding the cities, lest through taking pleasure in society they draw in some of the city's tumult and fall from their purpose.

In this city of Ancyra many other virgins, about two thousand or more, and distinguished women practising continence are eminent. Among them Magna, a most holy woman, excels in devotion; I do not know what to call her, virgin or widow. For she was joined to a husband by force by her own mother, but by enticing him and putting him off, as most people say, she remained untouched. When he died soon after, she gave herself wholly to God, caring for her own household in a holy way, living a most ascetic and chaste life, and having such a manner of conversation that even bishops revered her for her exceeding devotion. Supplying the rest and the surplus of her necessities to hospices, the poor, and travelling bishops, she does not cease working secretly, by herself and through most faithful servants, nor does she fail to attend the church in the …

… so merciful that he even goes round at night and shows mercy to the needy. He neglects no prison, no hospital, no poor man, no rich man, but helps everyone: to some he gives words of compassion, as to the hard-hearted; others he protects; others he reconciles; to others he provides bodily necessities and clothing. What tends to happen in all great cities happens there too: in the portico of the church a crowd of sick people lie, begging their daily food, some unmarried, some married. One day it happened that at midnight, in winter, the wife of one of them gave birth in the portico. As she cried out in her pain, he heard; and leaving his usual prayers, he went out and looked, and finding no one, he himself took the place of a midwife, not loathing the defilement that accompanies women giving birth, his mercy having made him insensible to it. His clothing is not worth an obol, and his food is on a par with his clothing. He cannot bear to bend over a book, his love of others driving him away from reading. If one of the brothers gives him a book, he sells it at once, saying to those who mock him, “How can I persuade my teacher that I have learned his art, unless I sell him himself for the success of the art?”

A virgin ascetic living with two others had practised asceticism for nine or ten years. Seduced by a certain cantor, she fell, conceived, and gave birth. Coming to the utmost hatred of the one who had seduced her, she was pierced to the depths of her soul with compunction, and went so far in repentance that she was determined outright to starve herself to death. Praying, she besought God, saying, “Great God, who bear the evils of all creation and do not desire the death and destruction of those who stumble, if you wish me to be saved, show me your wonders in this: take away the fruit of my sin which I have borne, so that I may not use a rope or throw myself down.” Making these petitions, she was heard; for the child died not long after. From that day she never again met the man who had taken her captive, but giving herself up to the most extreme fasting, she served the sick and the crippled women for thirty years, so moving God that it was revealed to one of the holy presbyters, “So-and-so has pleased me more in her repentance than in her virginity.” I write this so that we may not despise those who genuinely repent.

The daughter of a certain presbyter in Caesarea of Palestine, a virgin, having fallen, was taught by the man who had corrupted her to slander a reader of the city. When she was already pregnant, being questioned by her father, she accused the reader. The presbyter confidently reported it to the bishop. The bishop assembled the clergy and had the reader summoned. The case was examined; questioned by the bishop, the reader did not confess, for how could what had not happened be told? The bishop, angry, said to him sternly, “Do you not confess, wretched, miserable man, full of uncleanness?” The reader answered, “I have told what is: that I have nothing to do with the matter; for I am innocent even of any thought toward her. But if you wish to hear what is not, I did it.” When he had said this, the bishop deposed the reader. Then the reader came forward and pleaded with the bishop, saying to him, “Since, then, I have stumbled, order her to be given to me as wife; for I am no longer a cleric, nor is she a virgin.” So he gave her over to the reader, supposing that the young man was attached to her and could not otherwise be cut off from his intimacy with her. The young man, receiving her from both the bishop and her father, placed her in a monastery of women and asked the deaconess of the sisterhood there to bear with her until her delivery.

In a short time the days of her giving birth were fulfilled. The critical hour came: groans, pangs, pains, visions of the underworld; and the baby did not come out. The first day passed, the second, the third, the seventh. The woman, conversing with Hades from her pain, did not eat, did not drink, did not sleep, but cried out, saying, “Woe is me, wretched one! I am in danger for having slandered that reader.” They went and told her father. The father, afraid of being condemned as a slanderer, kept quiet for two more days. The girl neither died nor gave birth. Since the ascetics could not bear her cries, they ran and told the bishop, “So-and-so has been confessing, crying out for days, that she slandered the reader.” Then he sent deacons to him with the message, “Pray that the woman who slandered you may give birth.” But he gave them no answer and did not open his door, from the day he had gone in praying to God. The father went again to the bishop; prayer was made in the church; and even so she did not give birth. Then the bishop got up and went to the reader, knocked at the door, went in to him, and said to him, “Eustathius, rise; loose what you have bound.” At once, as the reader bent his knee together with the bishop, the woman gave birth. His petition and his perseverance in prayer had the power both to reveal the slander and to chasten the woman who had slandered, so that we may learn to persevere in prayers and to know their power.

Having said a little, then, about the brother who has been with me from youth until today, I will end my account. I have known him for a long time not to eat from passion nor to fast from passion; to have conquered, I think, the passion for money, and for the most part that of vainglory; content with what he has, not adorning himself with clothes, giving thanks when despised, running great risks for true friends, having had experience of demons a thousand times and more. So much so that one day a demon tried to make a pact with him and said, “Agree with me to sin just once, and whatever woman you name to me in the world, I will bring her to you.” And again at another time the demon wrestled with him for fourteen nights, as he told me, and pulled him by the foot at night, addressing him with a voice and saying, “Do not worship Christ, and I will not come near you.” He answered, “For this very reason I worship him, and will glorify and worship him infinitely more, since you are altogether displeased at it.” Having set foot in a hundred and six cities and stayed in most of them, by God's mercy he has had no experience of a woman, not even in a dream, except for the war. Three times I knew him to receive his need of food from an angel. One day, in the most remote desert, without even a crumb, he found three hot loaves in his sheepskin; another time wine and loaves. Another time I knew of someone telling him, “You are in want; go and get grain and oil from so-and-so.” He went to the one to whom he had been sent, who said to him, “Are you so-and-so?” And he said, “Yes.” “Someone ordered me to give you thirty bushels of grain and twelve pints of oil.” “On behalf of such a man I will boast,” such as this one was. I knew him to weep often over men in need, at a loss in their poverty, and he gave them all he had except his flesh. I knew him also to weep over one who had fallen into sin; and by his tears he brought the fallen man to repentance. He once swore to me, “I have asked God never to prompt anyone, especially the rich and worthless, to give me anything in my necessities.”

For me it is enough to have been counted worthy to remember all these whom I have committed to writing. For it was not without God that your mind was moved to command the writing of this book and to commit to writing the lives of these saints. As for you, most faithful servant of Christ, reading them gladly, taking their lives, their labours, and their great endurance as sufficient proof of the resurrection, follow eagerly, nourished by good hope, seeing that the days ahead of you are shorter than those behind. Pray for me, keeping yourself such as I have known you from the consulship of Tatian until today, and such as I found you again when you were appointed chamberlain of the most pious bedchamber. For one whom such rank, with wealth, and such great power have not made worse in the fear of God, is consecrated to Christ, who heard from the devil, “All these I will give you, if you fall down and worship me.”