The Lausiac History and the Historia Monachorum

The two great travelogues of the Egyptian desert: Palladius’ Lausiac History, written around 419–420 by a man who had lived among the monks, and the anonymous Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, the record of a journey through monastic Egypt in the winter of 394–395. This file treats them as sources — their authorship, character, and agendas — and asks, with the repository’s attestation discipline (§3.5), what these accounts can and cannot bear as history.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

Two Kinds of Witness

Beside the terse, cell-born sayings of the Apophthegmata stand two longer works of a different genre — the travelogue or descriptive account of the monks, written for readers outside Egypt who wanted to know what the desert held. Together with the Life of Antony and Cassian, they are the principal literary sources for the desert, and each attests it in a different way (William Harmless, Desert Christians, Oxford, 2004, ch. 9–10, on both works). Where the Apophthegmata preserves what the fathers said, these works describe what a visitor saw — the geography of the settlements, the numbers and names of the monks, the marvels reported of them — and so their value and their limits are of a different order.

The Lausiac History

The Lausiac History was written around 419–420 by Palladius, a monk of Galatian origin who had lived the ascetic life in Egypt — at Alexandria, in Nitria, and for years at Kellia as a disciple of Evagrius Ponticus — before becoming bishop of Helenopolis and a supporter of St. John Chrysostom in his exile (on Palladius, Meyer, introduction to The Lausiac History, ACW 34, New York: Newman Press, 1964; Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 10). He composed the work at the request of, and named it for, Lausus, the chamberlain (praepositus sacri cubiculi) of the emperor Theodosius II — hence “Lausiac” History. Its great value is that Palladius writes in large part as an eyewitness: he had known many of the monks and mothers he describes, and he reports what he saw and heard, naming his informants (Meyer, introduction, 1964).

The Lausiac History is thus the closest thing the desert has to a firsthand memoir. It preserves invaluable information — on Nitria and Kellia and their organization, on Amoun, on the two Macarii, on Evagrius, on the holy women (Melania the Elder, whom Palladius knew well, and others) — and it gives the movement a human texture the sayings alone would not (Palladius, Lausiac History 7–8, 17–18, 38 on Evagrius, and the chapters on women; trans. Meyer, 1964). It also carries an agenda: Palladius was a disciple of Evagrius and an Origenist sympathizer, and the History quietly defends the Evagrian tradition that the Origenist controversy had condemned (see The Fathers of Nitria and Kellia); its portrait of the desert is shaped accordingly (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 10). And it mingles sober eyewitness report with edifying tales and marvels — miraculous feats of asceticism, encounters with demons, wonders — that belong to the hagiographical register rather than to the documentary.

The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto

The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto (“The Inquiry about the Monks in Egypt”) is the record of a pilgrimage: seven monks from a monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem traveled through Egypt in the winter of 394–395, visiting the monastic settlements from the Thebaid in the south northward, and one of them wrote the anonymous Greek account soon after (on the work, Norman Russell, translation and Benedicta Ward’s introduction, The Lives of the Desert Fathers, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981; Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 9). It was translated into Latin, with additions, by Rufinus of Aquileia around 404, and in that form circulated widely in the West alongside the Vitae Patrum.

The Historia Monachorum is a more frankly marvelous book than Palladius’. It describes visits to famous monks — John of Lycopolis, the clairvoyant recluse of the Thebaid; Apollo; Or; Pambo; Bes — and is crowded with miracles: healings, prophecies, dominion over wild beasts, food multiplied, the Nile obeying a holy man’s prayer (Historia Monachorum, ch. 1 on John of Lycopolis, and throughout; trans. Russell, 1981). Its purpose is manifestly propagandistic and edifying — to display the sanctity and power of the Egyptian monks to an admiring Christian world and to draw readers to imitate them — and its wonders are told with an enthusiasm that outruns Palladius’ relative sobriety (Ward, introduction to The Lives of the Desert Fathers, 1981; Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 9). Its famous claims about the numbers of monks — the near-equality of monks and townsfolk at Oxyrhynchus, the ten thousand monks under Abba Serapion — belong to this rhetoric of abundance and cannot be read as census figures.

What the Travelogues Can and Cannot Bear (§3.5)

Read with the repository’s attestation discipline (METHODOLOGY §3.5), the two works yield firm and soft ground alike.

What they can bear. Both are strong evidence for the existence, scale, geography, and character of the movement by the 390s–410s. Palladius, as eyewitness, reliably attests the organization of Nitria and Kellia, the identity of leading figures, and the texture of the life; the Historia Monachorum attests the extent of monastic settlement across Egypt from the Thebaid to the Delta and the veneration in which the monks were held. That Egypt by the end of the fourth century held a vast, geographically dispersed, and socially prominent monastic population is well founded on their combined testimony (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 9–10).

What they cannot bear. The numbers are rhetorical, not statistical, and are so treated by all serious scholarship (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 9). The miracles are reported as what the sources attest — Palladius’ and the Historia‘s wonders are given here as their authors’ testimony to the monks’ reputed sanctity, not certified as documented events (per §3.5; the same discipline the repository applies to all hagiography, cf. the Xenia methodology). And each work’s agenda must be weighed: Palladius’ Evagrian sympathies color his selection and emphasis; the Historia Monachorum’s promotional purpose inflates its marvels. The genre of both is closer to hagiography than to chronicle, and they are read accordingly.

[Disputed: the historical reliability of the two travelogues is weighed differently for each. Palladius' *Lausiac History* is generally treated as the more sober and valuable, because of its eyewitness character and named informants, though its Evagrian bias and its edifying marvels are recognized (Meyer, introduction, ACW 34, 1964; Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 2004). The *Historia Monachorum* is regarded as more heavily rhetorical and miracle-laden, a work of monastic propaganda whose factual core (the itinerary, the settlements, the leading names) is embedded in edifying wonder (Ward, introduction, 1981; Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 2004). Both are indispensable and neither is a chronicle; the honest course is to take their firm testimony to the movement's scale and character and to report their marvels as the reputation the sources record.]

The Value of the Travelogues

For all their agendas and wonders, the two travelogues do something the Apophthegmata cannot: they give the desert a panorama. The sayings show the inside of a single cell and a single “word”; Palladius and the Historia Monachorum show the whole landscape — the Thebaid and the Delta, the great settlements and the famous recluses, the numbers and the fame — as it appeared to visitors at the movement’s height. Together with the Apophthegmata, the Life of Antony, and Cassian, they make up the small body of texts through which the fourth-century desert reaches us, and the reader who holds them together, weighing each for what it can bear, sees the movement more truly than any one of them alone would allow (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, the whole book being an argument for reading the sources together and critically).

References

Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Authorship, date c. 419–420, dedication to Lausus; Nitria and Kellia; Evagrius; the holy women; the introduction on Palladius’ life and reliability.)
The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto. Trans. Norman Russell; intro. Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1981. (The 394–395 journey; John of Lycopolis; the numbers; Rufinus’ Latin version; the introduction on genre and reliability.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Ch. 9 on the Historia Monachorum; ch. 10 on Palladius; the critical reading of both.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The travelogues in the history of the movement.)