other · 372 · Edessa
The story is that the rich of Edessa were holding grain back and would not trust anyone with the distribution, and that Ephrem — a deacon, never a priest, holding no office at all — went and told them that the fault was not avarice but the want of someone to trust, and offered himself. They gave him the grain. He set up beds for the sick in the public porticoes, about three hundred of them, and ran the relief until the famine broke, and died about a month afterwards. It is a hagiographical scene and it is marked traditional here, but the shape of it is unusually plausible: the authority is entirely personal, exercised by a man with no rank, which is exactly what the sources say he was.
To get grain out of people who were hoarding it while Edessa starved.
Three hundred beds, a distribution that worked, and a death about a month after the crisis ended.