the importance of Gesios of Panopolis, Shenoute’s great rival and bête noire. Gesios was the social and economic counterpart to Shenoute’s “rustic audacity.” A former imperial governor and great landowner based in Panopolis, he seems to have been a fairly typical representative of the new aristocracy emerging in fifth-century Egypt. His rivalry with Shenoute is an exceptionally well-documented example of the chronic tensions that pervaded rural society in the late antique Near East. Yet this rivalry also had a religious dimension, for Gesios was a pagan with no taste for intolerant Christian monks: Panopolis’s own Libanius. The result was a bitter and protracted conflict between monk and landowner that has, in its viciousness, no parallel in the late antique world. This conflict is one of the leitmotifs of this study, and many of the most important sources I have used deal more or less explicitly with it.
Gesios was in fact more to Shenoute than a political, economic, and religious rival. He was an antitype, unnameable and omnipresent at the same time.46 It was always in contrast to Gesios that Shenoute defined his own public role. A compelling narrative needs two characters: while Shenoute builds a church and monasteries to honor God, Gesios builds mansions, baths, and boats to honor himself. If Shenoute is warmly received by the provincial governors and is their favorite friend, Gesios is rebuffed by them when he denounces Shenoute’s supposed crimes. When Shenoute denounces the hypocrisy of a superficially Christian society, which tolerates paganism in its midst, Gesios himself turns out to be a cryptopagan who worships his “gods” in secret at home. If Shenoute’s monastery receives thankful offerings from the population of the countryside (in fact, from Gesios’s own estate administrators), Gesios extracts this wealth with violence and deceit, a violence that Shenoute never tires of denouncing. Even after Gesios’s death, when Jesus had “scattered” his wealth, when nobody recalled his memory or mourned him anymore, Shenoute cannot stop talking about him and holding him up as a negative example.47 It is clear that he positively needed an enemy. As a result of this obsession, Gesios is scarcely less important for this book than Shenoute himself.
A study of this kind is made possible by the survival of a substantial if fragmentary part of Shenoute’s literary corpus. This corpus was originally divided by Shenoute himself into two parts. The “Canons” contain exhortations and a set of five hundred rules addressed to the monks and nuns at Shenoute’s three monastic communities. The “Discourses,” on the other hand, include sermons, treatises, and open letters that show an all-too-human holy man constantly interacting with the society that he had supposedly renounced.48 Together with a few fragmentary letters, the “Discourses” will be the main body of evidence used throughout this work.49
Much has been traditionally made of the fact that these texts are in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language. The nineteenth-century equation of language with culture has led many scholars to see in Shenoute a “native,” a “Copt.” His works have been read with an Orientalist mind-set: in search of the unique, the alien, and with an overriding concern for philological issues. More has been written on Shenoute’s use of specific verbal tenses or on the structure of his literary corpus than on his historical significance. This emphasis on Shenoute’s supposed “Copticism” is misleading. Shenoute was bilingual and—like Dioscorus of Aphrodito, for example—could write in both Greek and Coptic. He must have often preached in Greek, and I suspect that many of the letters and sermons contained in his corpus were originally written or delivered in Greek. Only one papyrus (fragments of a sermon) and one inscription related to Shenoute have survived from the fifth century, and both are in Greek.50 And several of his (Coptic) sermons, as preserved in his corpus, are actually “first-person reports” to his monastic audience of sermons and dialogues with the Roman authorities that can only have been held in Greek.51
Furthermore, the equation of language with “national” culture is particularly inappropriate to Coptic. Far from being the product of a native priestly literary tradition or of the reemergence of an ancient underground culture, Coptic was biblical Greek gone native: the linguistic equivalent, in fact, of the Greek mythology one finds in Palestinian mosaics and in Egyptian textiles.52 The Coptic writing system, which includes the Greek alphabet plus a few consonants taken over from Demotic, was invented in the early Roman period by Egyptian priests for whom linguistic virtuosity was a source of professional pride.53 Yet the Coptic language as it emerged in the late third century was a Christian, quasi-biblical language deeply influenced by Greek. And not just Greek: one-third of all the non-Greek words in Coptic have no attested Egyptian etymology, “including some of the most common vocabulary in Sahidic [the principal southern dialect of Coptic].”54
From this point of view, Coptic is not comparable to Syriac, that other late antique language with which it is usually grouped. Syriac was an older language with its own literary traditions, writing system, and educational institutions, and it did not experience a comparable influence from Greek until later. Egypt never had a counterpart to Edessa/Nisibis, their Syriac schools and partially autonomous literary culture. Coptic was used at schools in Egypt—it may have been Christian teachers who created it in the first place as a literary language to translate the Bible—but it was always limited to a primary education that focused on simple reading, writing, and practical skills, such as the writing of letters.55 In late antique Egypt, true literature—that is, the use of language as an art—was with very few exceptions Greek literature.
Shenoute’s Coptic does have a unique flavor and deserves the philological and literary study that it has always received. But the real value of his writings lies less in their literary qualities than in their importance as a historical source.56 For even in their present fragmentary state, these texts are crucial evidence for the more prosaic aspects of the life of a holy man, that religious virtuoso who embodied the ultimate ideals of late antique society. Like few other sources, these documents allow us to follow an abbot’s activities “on the ground” and to set them against a concrete social, economic, and cultural context. An entire history of the relation of a major monastery to the society and economy of the Nile valley can thus be written from them.
Admittedly, if there is one aspect of late Roman religion for which we have plenty of evidence, it is certainly that of holy men. Yet holy men like Shenoute are usually written about by others; they rarely speak directly to us in their own words. The filter of hagiography tends to turn these holy men into stereotypes: they are too holy to be men at all. With Shenoute, in contrast, we have the unique opportunity of comparing and contrasting the devout portrait painted by his disciple and biographer Besa with the real, day-to-day abbot as he dealt with the issues of his time.57
These issues were neither particular to Egypt nor to Shenoute himself. They are, rather, crucial to the interpretation of late antiquity as a historical period and to the problem of the so-called end of the ancient world. Studying the public career of Shenoute involves dealing with some of the distinctive concerns of late antique society: rural patronage, religious violence, Christian and non-Christian systems of gift giving, and the changing relationships between city and countryside and between state and local society. This fundamental fact has been obscured by his monotonous rhetoric on behalf of the “poor,” which transforms these concerns and distorts them so as to fit them into a simplistic paradigm of social relations, the Christian “care of the poor,” in which he and his monastery claimed a primordial role.
Hence the title of this book. By claiming to act and speak on behalf of the “poor” even in the most unexpected contexts, Shenoute could always identify his own interests with those of society at large and thus legitimize his unwelcome emergence as a player in local politics. This constant appeal to poverty, both his own and that of the people he claimed to represent, sets Shenoute firmly in the context of contemporary late Roman politics. It is a somewhat paradoxical aspect of this period that the “audacity” and, in some cases, even the prosperity of new groups and institutions had come to be asserted and defended in terms of the need to protect an ill-defined, helpless, and passive poverty. Christian bishops all over the Roman Empire had been developing, from the middle of the fourth century onward, a distinctive
