The life of St Dorotheos the Solitary of Egypt
Much of what is remembered of him comes from Palladius, who as a young man was sent to live under Dorotheos's direction for a time and later became bishop of Helenopolis and the author of a celebrated account of the desert fathers. Palladius describes an old man of extraordinary austerity: through the heat of the day he gathered stones by the seashore to build cells for hermits who could not build their own, finishing one each year, while at night he wove rope from palm leaves rather than sleep, saying that he disciplined his body so that it would not master him. He ate sparingly, drank little, and was said never to lie down deliberately to rest.
Dorotheos belongs to the generation of Egyptian desert fathers of the fourth century, and should not be confused with the later and more widely read Dorotheos of Gaza, a sixth-century monastic writer of a different time and place with whom he is sometimes conflated in reference works.
