An Excerpt from Damascius' Life of Isidore/The Philosophic History
translated from ancient Greek by Eric S. Fallick
Isidore made friends with this man who surpassed all people in piety and in a life of wholly loving wisdom, except for Isidore himself. And the man so greatly excelled in true way of life and speech that what is usually said in a proverb was fulfilled in deed by him: he lived hidden and unnoticed, so that I would expect none of the people then living, neither younger nor older, knew he was the sort of man I say. Nor would anyone else have known the kind of person this Sarapio was, nor would I myself know now, if the philosopher (i. e., Isidore) himself hadn't told me about him. For he said he couldn't ever persuade him to meet with another man; especially when he grew old, he no longer often came down from his own house, but he lived alone in a tiny house, having in reality taken up a solitary life, only having dealings with some of his neighbors for absolute necessities. He did, though, say that Sarapio was especially prayerful and in the manner of a common man wandered about to all the holy places when he was lead by the custom of a holiday, but mostly he spent the whole day at home living, not some human life, but one simply to be said to be divine, always recounting both aspirations and virtues in regard to himself or the Divine, but much more meditating in silence. Being devoted to the search for truth and contemplative by nature, he didn't think it worthwhile to waste time with the more technical details of philosophy, but stuck to more powerful and inspired understandings; on which account he possessed and read pretty much only the writings of Orpheus, always putting each arising question to Isidore, who was, so to speak, the utter tops in theological knowledge, and who was the only one he received and was acquainted with as a friend. And indeed it seemed to Isidore that he saw in Sarapio the life of the fabled Golden Age of Cronos. For he continuously did and said nothing else than collecting himself and always, as far as possible, concentrating on the inward and quite indivisible.
He thus very much looked down on money and property, so that he possessed nothing whatever besides two or three books, including also the poems of Orpheus. He thus very much looked down on the pleasures relating to the body, so that even from the first he indeed only provided the body with necessities, and was through his whole life undefiled by sexual pleasures. And he thus had no care for honor from people, so that not even his name was known in the city. Nor would it have been known afterward, if some god had not wished to favor humanity with an example of the life of the Golden Age of Cronos, in order that the story would not seem to be a myth, without history having been called to witness. For the so-called Cheiron stood rather at the boundary of the reigns of Cronos and Zeus, whence his double form. But this Sarapio known by the philosopher, let him have been recorded as of such a kind. He made Isidore his heir, not having any family, nor anyone else worthy to receive his property, by which I mean his two or three books.
Translation ©2003 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (period) com
