PALLADIUS, Bishop of Helenopolis. - Born in Galatia, he lived as a disciple of Evagrius Ponticus in Egypt and Palestine and became bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia.
A fervent partisan of John Chrysostom, he was exiled; he died before the Council of Ephesus (431) as bishop of Aspona in Galatia. Around 419 he wrote the so-called Historia Lausiaca, an important collection of lives of ascetics. He is also the author of a Dialogus de vita s. Iohannis Chrysostomi, in defense of the great preacher.
Bibliography4 works
BIBL.: edd. C. Butler, The Lausiac History of P., I, Cambridge 1898. II, ibid. 1904 (critical edition); Fed. by A. Lucor, Paris 1912, also contains a French translation. Ed. of the Dialogus by C. Norton, Cambridge 1928. On the life of P., see in the first place Ed. Schwartz, in Zeitschrift für neutest. Wissenschaft, 36 (1937), p. 161 ff. On the Historia Lausiaca, see St. Linner, Syntaktische und lexikol. Studien zur Hist. L. des P., Uppsala 1943. On the sources see the articles by R. Draguez indicated in B. Altaner, Patrologie, 2nd ed., Freiburg 1950, p. 189. On the ascetic and religious ideas. R. Reitzenstein, Historia monachorum und Historia Lausiaca, Göttingen 1916, which also deals with the much debated question of the relations between the Historia Lausiaca and the Historia monachorum of Rufinus (?); see also W. Bousset, Apophthegmata Studien, Tübingen 1923. To A. P. is also attributed, at least the first part, of a little book on the Indians and the Brahmans, ed. C. Müller, in F. Dübner, Opera Arriani, Paris 1846, p. 102 ff. On this writing see A. Kurfess, Palladios, in Pauly-Wissowa, XVIII, III (1949), p. 204 ff.; S. Siegmund, Die Überlieferung der griech. christl. Literatur in der lateinischen Kirche, Munich 1949, p. 124 ff.
Erik Peterson