Palladius of Antioch

Palladius lived as a hermit in the hill country near Antioch in Syria in the fourth century and died around 390. He is a different man from Palladius of Galatia, the bishop who wrote the Lausiac History, and the two are often confused; this one wrote nothing that survives.

What is known about him comes from a single chapter of Theodoret of Cyrus's Religious History, a book of thirty short lives of the Syrian ascetics written in the 440s. Theodoret grew up in the region, knew many of his subjects or their surviving disciples personally, and set out to record what the monks of Syria, as distinct from the more famous Egyptians, had actually done.

Theodoret's Palladius lived in a small cell in the hills, alone, in the strict Syrian style: exposure to weather, minimal food, long standing prayer. He was a friend and neighbour of Symeon the Elder, another hermit of the same district, and the two are described visiting one another.

The story Theodoret tells at length concerns a murder. A merchant travelling with money was killed on the road, and the killer dragged the body to the door of Palladius's cell so that the hermit would be blamed. In the morning a crowd gathered, saw the corpse, and turned on him, this, they said, is what your holiness amounts to. Palladius asked them to wait, prayed aloud over the dead man, and, according to Theodoret, the man sat up and named the one who had killed him. The crowd let the hermit alone.

A modern reader will weigh that account for himself. What it records without dispute is what the people of fourth-century Syria expected of these men and how quickly they could turn on them, and that the hermits lived near enough to the roads and the villages to be caught up in ordinary crime.

Beyond that chapter there is very little. The Eastern Orthodox church commemorates him on 28 January as Palladius the Hermit and repeats Theodoret's account in its synaxarion. Later notices credit him with written works; none have come down, and the attributions are late.

He belongs to the great movement of Syrian asceticism that produced Symeon the Stylite, Julian Saba, and James of Nisibis, men who went out into the limestone hills between Antioch and Aleppo by the hundreds, built nothing, wrote nothing, and left the countryside changed. Theodoret wrote his book because that generation was dying out and no one had written it down.

Sources: Theodoret of Cyrus, A History of the Monks of Syria (Historia Religiosa, chapter 7; English translation by R. M. Price, Cistercian Studies 88); the Orthodox synaxarion for 28 January; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.