conversion · 313 · Thebaid
He was taken in a levy in the Thebaid and held under guard on the way downriver. People from the town came to the prison with food and looked after the conscripts, and Pachomius — who had never heard of them — asked why anyone would do that for strangers. He was told they were Christians and that they did it for the sake of the God of heaven. The Lives all agree on what he did with that: he prayed that if he were let go he would spend his life serving other people. He was discharged when the campaign ended, was baptised, and went to a hermit named Palamon to learn the solitary life before deciding, some years later, that it could be lived in common with a written rule. Sozomen, who had it from the same tradition, adds that an angel gave him the rule on a brass tablet, which the profile of the foundation event is the place for and not this one.
Nothing of his own — he was twenty, conscripted for Constantine's army, and locked up overnight with the rest of the levy.
A vow made in a prison by a pagan who did not know what a Christian was, and the whole of cenobitic monasticism downstream of it.