Lausiac History
Short accounts of some seventy monks and nuns of Egypt, Palestine and elsewhere, written about 420 by a bishop who had lived among them. A chief source for the first generations of Egyptian monasticism, including the communities of Pachomius.
Read the text at tertullian.org ↗The translator’s introduction ↗
Palladius came from Galatia. He went to Egypt as a young man about 388 and spent some twelve years among the monks of Alexandria, Nitria and the Cells before he became bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia. Exiled for his support of John Chrysostom, he was sent to Upper Egypt and came to know the Thebaid as well. He wrote the book for Lausus, a chamberlain at the court of Theodosius II, and says in his prologue that he was then in the twentieth year of his episcopate.
Where he speaks of people he lived with, he is an eyewitness. For Pachomius, who died before Palladius was born, he reports what the monks told him and what he saw of their houses two generations later: he describes a monastery of three hundred at Panopolis that he entered himself, and gives figures for the whole federation (32.7–9). His translator notes that the arrangement of the monks by letters of the Greek alphabet, which Palladius attributes to the angel’s rule, has no counterpart in the rules that survive in Jerome’s Latin, and that Palladius is mistaken in taking Tabennisi for the head house.
Cited in
- c. AD 270–285, estimated date
- about AD 320, estimated date