Conclusions

Paulinus’ friendship with Rufinus developed after the latter’s return in 397 from a period spent first in Egypt and then at Melania the Elder’s double monastery at Jerusalem. Correspondence between the two survives from 406 and 407, and Paulinus also wrote to Sulpitius Severus about Rufinus in 403.62 Paulinus may have learned something about the superstars of Egyptian asceti­cism from Rufinus, whom we know translated the anonymous Greek History of the Monks into Latin in about 403^[639] This collection of ascetic lives shared many subjects with Palladius’ Lausiac History, such as Evagrius of Pontus ^[640] However, Paulinus’ contact with Rufinus all post-dates Hymn 26. To identify a potential channel for ascetic (and especially Evagrian) ideas about gluttony and demons that pre-dates this Hymn, we have to turn to Melania the Elder, a common friend of Rufinus, Paulinus and Palladius.

Melania was an important ascetic figure who left Rome and travelled in Egypt before founding a double monastic community at Jerusalem. She went back to Italy in about 400, when she visited Paulinus at Nola, but returned to Jerusalem at the end of her life, after Alaric's sack of Rome in 410.^[641] Paulinus, who was possibly a relative of Melania, admired her greatly; he devoted a substantial section of a letter to Sulpitius Severus to the praise of her ascetic virtues.^{[642] [643] Palladius also seems to have known Melania well, making reference to several stories about the Egyptian fathers told by her to him.67 Through Melania, Paulinus could have learnt about desert asceticism and the monastic life, and the teachings of figures like Evagrius of Pontus, whom Rufinus and Melania had received at Jerusalem, and who may have addressed a letter of ascetic advice to Melania[644] [645]}

Paulinus and Palladius shared some important ascetic models and preoccu­pations, and underlying both their stories are common interests in controlling human drives for sex and food, and in relating unnaturally distended appetites to the disruptive effect of demons. They also share important ideas about the appropriate limits to human, Christian, and ascetic appetites. Eating moder­ate quantities of appropriate kinds of food (not raw meat or excrement) in Greco-Roman antiquity served to demarcate human appetites and behaviours from those of beasts.6⁹ In the Christian ascetic sphere, moderation in diet was thought to preserve humans from demonic temptation, and excessive con­sumption could, as in these cases, be evidence that a human had been occu­pied by a demon. Paulinus' and Palladius' overeating demoniacs experienced the horrific distention of their human appetites by indwelling demons; they also seem to have become like beasts in the scale and quality of their appe­tite. These stories arguably helped readers to distinguish between the appetites appropriate to animals, humans, and demons. More importantly still, they dem­onstrated that there was something terrifyingly alien about excessive hun­ger, and that the ability to subsist on a moderate diet was desirable insofar as it indicated full humanity. Finally, although neither Paulinus nor Palladius explicitly invoke the idea of the demon of gluttony, something that is very vividly explored in Evagrian demonology, both stories surely reflect the wide­spread anxiety that human vices had demonic energy.