other · 420 · Galatia
He had lived among them — with Evagrius in the Cells for nine years, and with the two Macarii before that — and he wrote as somebody who had been there rather than somebody collecting edifying stories. That is what makes the book unusual and useful: he names people, reports sayings, and includes the failures. Monks who went mad, monks who gave up, monks whose asceticism curdled into vanity, and the women — Melania the Elder above all, whom he knew personally and whose page in this dataset rests on him. He was a partisan of Chrysostom, was exiled for it, and wrote a dialogue defending him as well. This dataset added palladius-lausiac as a source at seed 161 and cited it on four pages before its author had a single event of his own.
To write down, for the chamberlain Lausus, what the monks of Egypt and Palestine were actually like.
The eyewitness catalogue of the desert generation, and the reason a great many of them have names at all.