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.231 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.