figure who thrives on threats, whether real or perceived. This is particularly true of his relationship to Panopolis, the local town across the river, where he likes to claim for himself the status of persona non grata. Panopolis was one of the success stories of late antique Egypt. The city is well known to have been an important center of Hellenism in this period. Numerous poets and grammarians—many of them pagan—were educated there and went on to have successful careers in the imperial bureaucracy. During Shenoute’s lifetime, for example, Cyrus of Panopolis, a poet and bureaucrat, managed to become both praetorian prefect and urban prefect in Constantinople. His power and popularity were such that the emperor himself felt threatened. Nonnus of Panopolis, on the other hand, also a contemporary of Shenoute, reformed Greek poetry and became one of the most influential poets of his age. His Dionysiaca is considered the last great epic poem from antiquity. Shenoute’s mockery of Aristophanes—who had displaced Menander as one of the “four pillars” of literary education in late antiquity—and of philosophers who “grow their hair like women” also point to the importance of Hellenistic schools in the city.7
Like Madaura in Africa, also a provincial center of education associated with paganism, Panopolis had a bad reputation among Christian ascetics. When Pachomius established a monastery outside the city in the mid-fourth century, a delegation of philosophers, “who prided themselves on being teachers,” came out to challenge the Christian monks in a vain attempt to humiliate them. And the later “Apocalypse of Čarour,” a text that attacks the moral decadence of the Pachomian monastic communities, complains that “the roads of Phbow (the main monastery of the Pachomian federation) have become like the roads of Panopolis; we yell like in the agora of Panopolis.”8
But Panopolis was also a Christian city with its own bishop. Its temples had been converted into churches, and it was surrounded by an impressive number of monasteries. Numerous Christian texts, in Greek and Coptic, have been found in the city’s environs. They show a remarkable symbiosis between Christianity and Greek literature.9 Shenoute’s own writings, in fact, leave no doubt that many of his supporters and admirers must have lived there, and that many wealthy and powerful Panopolitans attended his sermons, offered gifts to his monastery, and were moved to tears by his denunciations.10 The pious rich man from Panopolis who—according to Besa’s account—came to the monastery every weekend to make an offering and attend Mass must have been a fairly typical character.11 Yet Shenoute sees only enemies in Panopolis. He addresses curses and rebukes to the city as a whole (a feminine “you”), while speaking of himself—again in the third person—as “he from whom the people of Panopolis hate to hear about the glory of God.”12 He never mentions the Christian bishop of the city, not even when protesting against the invasion of the city’s churches by dubious martyrs’ relics—a sacrilege he has witnessed “only in Panopolis.”13 “That worthless city,”14 he argues in a revealing pun, deserves to be called not Panos polis (the city of Pan) but instead Panomos polis, “Sin City.”15 It is there that his archenemy, Gesios, whom he never names but always references (“the fox,” “the fruitless tree,” “the liar,” “that hostile man from Panopolis,” “that pestilent child,” “the man worthy of being cursed,” “he who does not deserve to be named,” etc.), lives and rules. This rich pagan—whose impiety was matched only by his avarice—is such an obsessive concern to Shenoute that he keeps preaching against him even after he and “his companions” had died, and when nobody “recalled his memory.”16 And he was by no means Shenoute’s only enemy in Panopolis. By not naming Gesios, he generalizes his rivalry with one powerful notable to the city as a whole. His enemies seem to be everywhere. They are both pagan and Christian, and they never tire of plotting against him. They are all certainly liars—he claims—but they have good reasons to resent his formidable presence:
As for those of you (people of Panopolis) who will hide behind what you accuse me of having done, you are hateful and hostile to me. And if you (pl.) know God and belong to Jesus (i.e., if you are Christians), truly you are worthy of the curse and you will not escape denying yourselves before the angels of God. For you have lied before Him when you set unlawful words against me in documents. For it is unlawful for you to have written them [but] it is even more unlawful against the crown of your head. For you have left me alive, whereas I deserve to die according to the works that you ascribe to me.
And perhaps this is the reason that such a great curse has come upon that unlawful governor from God, who delivered him into the hands of the emperors that they might take revenge on him, even before he goes into the hands of Him who will judge him and you. Him because he did not take my head, you (pl.) because you have not completed your task, oh friends. For if I had not shaken you (sg.), oh Panopolis, against your works of violence and your servitude of Kronos, you would have accused me to the rulers for nothing. How can a foreign man (i.e., a foreign governor) know whether I am good or I am bad? How will this impure judge—who brought these afflictions onto himself because of bribes—how will he dare say these words, namely, sometimes “What am I going to do with the places of Christ (i.e., Shenoute’s monasteries)?” Sometimes also “Shall I kill him?” Just as also that miserable military governor sent to me saying: “Get wisdom.”17
This confrontational style differs markedly from the self-confident poise of Isidore of Pelusium, Shenoute’s contemporary in the northeastern corner of the Nile delta. Isidore was also a monk of the “desert” heavily involved in the affairs of the “world.” Like Shenoute in Panopolis, he had plenty of enemies in the important harbor town of Pelusium. His blunt denunciations of corruption and injustice recall those so vehemently voiced by Shenoute. Yet Pelusium was his city in a way that Panopolis could never be Shenoute’s. He considered it his particular right and duty to plead in front of governors on behalf of his hometown. On the arrival of a new friendly governor, his address to his fellow citizens opened with an exulting “God still cares for Pelusium!”18 His numerous letters to members of the civic elite emphasize the paideia shared by him and his interlocutors. Shenoute, in contrast, owes nothing—or so he claims—to Panopolis. His rivals and accusers seem to have a tight hold over urban life there. They compete with him and his city on the “hill”—that is, his monastery—for access to usually well-minded but ignorant foreign governors, whose ears they poison with lies about him. Shenoute does not represent Panopolis before Roman magistrates. He represents the “poor,” and the oppressors of the “poor” happened to be landowners who lived and ruled in Panopolis.
His attitude toward the “violent”—as he usually calls these villains—wavers between self-righteous victimization and daring provocation. He is constantly answering their accusations and insisting that he is not afraid of them. He disclaims, time and again, the need to do what he is permanently doing, justifying himself. A good example—one of many—of this “doubletalk in which the provocateur is playing at one and the same time the role of assailant and victim”19 is the “discourse which he preached to the crowd attached to the man worthy of the curse (i.e., Gesios) wishing that they would tell him what he (Shenoute) often says about him”:
What will I fear from senseless men? Will the lawlessness of the pagans surround me?
What will Christ’s enemies say against me except for lying about me and [saying] all sorts of things that are not true?
Those wealthy and violent people? They have nothing to say against me except for saying: “You turn the heart of the poor away from us, so that they no longer labor beyond their power in the vineyards and everywhere else.”
And they also say: “He came into our houses openly. He removed what we worship (i.e., our pagan idols) to our shame for we could not hinder him.”
Therefore I am not worried about these things (i.e., these accusations): Didn’t [even] a pagan military governor dare to say when he came here: “I am amazed that you are happy”? I told him: “Why wouldn’t they be happy, those who have no God but Jesus?”20
