Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 797
The Great Old Man even provided a specimen letter, declining with civility
an invitation from a notable to a festival in which acts of non-Christian
worship might take place:
Say to him: ‘Your Charity knows that those who fear God hold to his commands;
and your own habits are to hand to convince you of that, because your own
affection for me would never cause you to transgress the precepts of your own
ancestral tradition.’ (Barsanuphius, Correspondance 776, Regnault (1971) 475)
One should have no illusions on one point. As in all other periods of the
ancient world, to cultivate mentors of this kind required wealth and leisure.
Holy men were often appropriated by well-to-do persons. The peasants of
Lipidiacum wanted to keep the body of Lupicinus, a ‘living martyr’ whose
bloody spittle, the result of his austerities, they would scrape from the walls
of his cell as a healing substance. But the body of the dead saint was
impounded by a ‘respectable woman’ from neighbouring Trézelle (Allier):
for she claimed it on the strength of having fed the saint from the produce
of her villa when he was alive (Greg. Tur. Vita Patrum xiii.3).
All over the Christian world, notables collected holy men, drawing constantly
on their services and, in turn, contributing to their upkeep and their
reputation. Archesilaus of Caesarea Maritima remembered how Zosimas,
a hermit from outside Tyre, was staying with him when the saint burst into
tears, flooding the pavement of Archesilaus’ town house. For Zosimas had
heard the roar of the collapse of Antioch in the earthquake of 526.The
holy man instantly called for a censer and filled the building with perfume,
so as to render it immune from a similar fate. When Archesilaus’ wife
injured her eye with an embroidery needle, Zosimas stood by, praying and
advising the surgeons who handled the injury. But Zosimas declared that it
was another friend of the family, John of Choziba, four hundred stadia
away in the desert of Judaea, to whom God had finally ‘given the grace’ of
healing the injury: it was to John’s prayers that he had listened (Evagr. HE
iv.7).
As a result of patronage by the great, holy men and their disciples found
themselves in a situation that generated permanent anxiety. They were frequently
settled on marginal lands. They usually drew to themselves, in the
heyday of their reputation, large bands of disciples and crowds of pilgrims,
many of whom stayed for long periods in their presence. If successful, they
required permanent facilities – such as buildings, a water supply and large
surpluses of food and money for the poor, the sick and the many strangers.
Altogether, the holy man came to weigh heavily on the most vulnerable
tracts of the ecology of his region. There was never much wealth or land
to go round, even in the most prosperous regions of the late Roman world.
There is hardly a single account of the successful establishment of a holy
man, from the autobiography of Valerius of Bierzo in seventh-century
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