Chapter XXVII.
What the two Abbots Pæsius and John said of the
fruits of their zeal.
When
the aged John, who
was superior of a large monastery and of a quantity of brethren, had
come to visit the aged Pæsius, who was living in a vast desert,
and had been asked of him as of a very old friend, what he had done in
all the forty years in which he had been separated from him and had
scarcely ever been disturbed in his solitude by the brethren:
“Never,” said he, “has the sun seen me eating,”
“nor me angry,” said the other.
867
867
There is a
Pæsius mentioned by Palladius in the Lausiac History, but it is
not clear whether he is the same man whom Cassian mentions. John is a
different person from the one already mentioned in Book IV. xxiii. He
is mentioned again below in xl., and the Nineteenth Conference is
assigned to him.