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Updated: June 13, 2025
"I believe you, monk, and no longer fear either deceit or ill-will from you. I have often heard talk of the hermits of the Thebaid. Marvellous things have been told concerning Anthony and Paul. Your name is not unknown to me, and I have heard say that, though you are still young, you equal in virtue the oldest anchorites.
In the earlier times of Egyptian history, when navigation was less easy, and when seas separated kingdoms instead of joining them, the Thebaid enjoyed, under the Koptic kings, the trading wealth which followed the stream of its great river, the longest piece of inland navigation then known; but, with the improvement in navigation and ship-building, countries began to feel their strength in the timber of their forests and the number of their harbours; and, as timber and sea-coast were equally unknown in the Thebaid, that country fell as Lower Egypt rose; the wealth which before centred in Thebes was then found in the ports of the Delta, where the barges of the Nile met the ships of the Mediterranean.
The gorgeous mazes of Coleridge no longer imprisoned her fancy; it wandered mid the silence, and desolation, and sand rivulets of the Thebaid desert; through the date groves of the lonely Laura; through the museums of Alexandria. Over the cool, crystal depths of "Hypatia" her thirsty spirit hung eagerly. In Philammon's intellectual nature she found a startling resemblance to her own.
Their main purpose seems to be to illustrate the advantage of the ascetic over the secular mode of life, and to school men into living with the fear of death before their eyes. The first displays the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid.
Nestorius then went to Panopolis to show himself to the governor, lest he should be accused of running away from his place of banishment, and soon afterwards he died of the sufferings brought on by these forced and painful journeys through the desert. About the same time Egypt was visited by Cassianus, a monk of Gaul, in order to study the monastic institutions of the Thebaid.
"I merely propose to expostulate with you upon the unfortunate and ruinous course of life you have decided to pursue. No eremite of the Thebaid, or the Nitroon, is more completely immured than I find you; and the seclusion from society is quite as deleterious as the want of out-door air and sunshine.
Before Printing these friars were the great circulators of those local annals and biographies which accumulated in the convents of every land. Then his teacher, Jerome, had been three years an anchorite on the heights of Camaldoli, where for more than four centuries the Thebaid had been revived; and Jerome, cold and curt on most religious themes, was warm with enthusiasm on this one.
The which bracelet, being taken home to the Laura of Scetis, and there dedicated in the chapel to the memory of the holy Amma, proved beyond all doubt the sanctity of its former possessor, by the miracles which its virtue worked; the fame whereof spreading abroad throughout the whole Thebaid, drew innumerable crowds of suppliants to that holy relic.
For the artist, it must be noted, does not attempt to illustrate a passage of an ancient writer; very probably, nay, almost certainly, he had never read the Thebaid of Statius, whence comes the story of Adrastus and Hypsipyle; the subject would have been suggested to him by some friend, a student of the Classics, and Giorgione thereupon dressed the old Greek myth in Venetian garb, just as Statius had done in the Latin.
Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank to the hermit fathers of the desert serves merely to make him a thought madder and a grain more miserable than the whole Thebaid of Christomaniacs rolled into one.
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