THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYexample is the sixth-century ascetic known as Symeon the Holy Fool, who
according to his seventh-century Life defi ed conventions to such an extent
that on one occasion at Emesa (Homs) he tried to take a bath in the women’s
baths, only to be roundly beaten and ejected by the indignant women bath-
ers.^75 Other forms of asceticism involved practical charity, as with Euphemia
and her daughter in Amida, and Euphemia’s sister Mary in Tella, recorded
by John of Ephesus, who spent their lives caring for the sick and needy, but
who were not afraid when they felt the need to embark on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem.
As with most historical phenomena, there are several convergent reasons
for the popularity and prevalence of such holy men and women in this period.
The classic discussion by Peter Brown, dating from 1971, suggested that they
should be seen, especially in Syria, in anthropological terms, as a type of rural
patron, defusing the tensions and diffi culties felt by the villagers.^76 Brown’s
article acted as an enormous stimulus, but it was quickly pointed out that
holy men were often to be found in or near cities, where they might attract
the attention of the wealthy elite, or even the emperors (the stylite Daniel is
such an example), and that functional explanations do not make clear how the
ascetics were seen by contemporaries or necessarily how they viewed them-
selves, nor do they give enough attention to the rhetorical dynamics of many
of the narratives on which we depend. There were in fact many different
sorts of holy men and women; they were by no means an exclusively rural
Figure 3.4 Pottery pilgrim token (eulogia) depicting St Symeon Stylites the Younger (late
sixth–seventh century) on his pillar at the Wondrous Mountain near Antioch. Together with
bottles (ampullae) containing holy oil, water or earth, such tokens were regularly taken home
as souvenirs from pilgrim shrines.