other · 342 · Thebaid
It is the best-known episode in the Life and the least defensible as history. Antony, already famous and already old, is told in a dream that there is a better monk deeper in the desert; he goes looking, meets a centaur and a satyr on the way who give him directions, and finds Paul. They talk. The raven that had brought Paul half a loaf every day for sixty years brings a whole one, and the two of them argue courteously about which should break it. Paul says he is about to die and asks for the cloak Athanasius gave Antony, to be buried in. Antony goes to fetch it, sees Paul's soul going up among angels on the way back, finds the body kneeling, and cannot dig — so two lions come out of the desert and dig the grave, and go away when he blesses them. All of it is marked legendary here, which is not the same as deleted: the cult is old, the iconography is enormous, and this dataset's rule is that a traditional claim is kept and marked rather than quietly dropped.
To find the man a dream had told Antony was further into the desert and holier than he was.
The scene every later painter used, and the reason the two men appear together on altarpieces for a thousand years.