Palladius

• The most outstanding historian of Egyptian monasticism and a pupil of Evagrius Ponticus.
• Born in Galatia, he received a thorough education in the classics.
• In 388 he went to Egypt to become acquainted with the hermits. After a year at Alexandria the priest Isidore who gave him the first introduction to the ascetic life, handed him over to the Theban hermit Dorotheus in the so-called Solitudes five miles away from the city in order to complete there a kind of novitiate.
• Being unable to finish the three years owing to a breakdown in health, he went on in 390 to Nitria and then to Cellia, where he spent nine years, first with Macarius and then with Evagrius. The latter had a lasting influence on him.
• When he fell ill again, the doctors advised him to betake himself to Palestine in search of a better climate.
• About 400 he was consecrated bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia and soon became involved in the Origenistic controversies.
• In 405 he traveled to Rome to plead the cause of St. John

Chrysostom. The following year the Emperor Arcadius exiled him to Upper Egypt. When in 412-413 he was permitted to leave Egypt, he became bishop of Aspuna in Galatia.

• Palladius said, “those who imagine that they have no need of teachers , and who will not be convinced by those who teach them things of good, are sick with the want of the knowledge which is the mother and producer of pride.”

1. Historia Lausiaca His greatest work is entitled the Lausiac History after Lausus, chamberlain at the court of Theodosius II, to whom he dedicated it. Composed in 419/420, it gives a description of the monastic movement in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor in the 4th century and therefore represents an extremely important source for the history of early monasticism. 2. Dialogus de vita S. Joannis About the year 408, while in exile at Syene, Palladius composed his famous Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom, which is the most important biographical source for the later years of the Saint. For him Theophilus, the pope of Alexandria, was his worst enemy he disfigured his biography. 3. On the People of India and the Brahmins A small treatise preserved under the name of Palladius,consists of four parts,of which only the

first seems to be from his pen. It gives an account of the experiences of an Egyptian scholar on his journey to India. The second and third parts are perhaps by the historian Arian; the fourth by an unknown Christian author. The second and fourth contain an address delivered by Dadamis, the third a report of a meeting between Alexander the Great and the Brahmins.