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After some years, the two hermits went together to the desert of the Thebaid and began the work to which God had called Pachomius, for Palemon died soon after. Many monasteries were founded, and men flocked to the desert to give themselves to God.
The verbal conceits, the florid ornament, the sparkling but quite untranslatable epigrams which enliven every description and give point to every speech, need only be noted in passing; for no reader of a single book of the Thebaid can fail to mark them.
These provinces were Upper Libya or Cyrene, Lower Libya or the Oasis, the Thebaid, Ægyptiaca or the western part of the Delta, Augustanica or the eastern part of the Delta, and the Heptanomis, now named Arcadia, after the late emperor.
And just compare your strigula-polished Roman, morally and physically, with his contemporary, the filth-encrusted anchorite of the Thebaid the former flickering briefly in a puerile, semi-vital way, and going out with a sulphurous smell; the latter, on a ration of six dates per week, attaining an interminable longevity, and possessing the power of striking scoffers dead, or blind, or paralytic, at pleasure.
The holy man sat doggedly at the entrance of his cavern, with an expression of fathomless stupidity, which seemed to defy all the fiends of the Thebaid to get an idea into his head, or make him vary his attitude by a single inch. "These people did not exist in our time," said Apollo aloud, "or at least they knew their place, and behaved themselves."
The Roman legionaries should be good judges on that point. They used to say that no armed barbarian, Goth or Vandal, Moor or Spaniard, was so terrible as the unarmed monk of the Thebaid.
It is in this silent Thebaïd, so far from the atmosphere of cities, the vain agitations and storms of the world, that his life has been passed, in unchanging uniformity; and here he has been able to pursue, with resolute labour and incredible patience, that prodigious series of marvellous observations which for nearly fifty years he has never ceased to accumulate.
This has been the true reason of mystical isolation in every age and country. So thought Macarius and the Christian fakeers of the Thebaid. So thought the medieval monks and nuns. So thought the German Quietists when they revolted from the fierce degradation of decaying Lutheranism. So are hundreds thinking now; so may thousands think ere long.
In those days, in the Lower Thebaid, was Paul left at the death of both his parents, in a rich inheritance, with a sister already married; being about fifteen years old, well taught in Greek and Egyptian letters, gentle tempered, loving God much; and, when the storm of persecution burst, he withdrew into a distant city. But "To what dost thou not urge the human breast Curst hunger after gold?"
And Goethe added: "I could begin nothing with an eternal happiness before me, unless new tasks and new difficulties were given me to overcome." And true it is that there is no happiness in a vacuity of contemplation. But may there not be some justification for the morality of the hermit, of the Carthusian, the ethic of the Thebaid?
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