The life of St Hilarion the Great
Hearing reports of the angelic life led by Anthony the Great in the Egyptian desert, he sought him out and spent about two months under his direct guidance before returning to his own country to find both his parents already dead. He gave away the inheritance they left him and withdrew into the wilderness near Maiuma, on the coast close to Gaza, living there in the same manner of solitude and fasting he had learned from Anthony, though almost alone in it, since nothing like organized monastic life yet existed in that part of the world. Disciples gathered around him regardless, drawn by reports of his holiness and of a gift for healing and clairvoyance that grew alongside his reputation, and in time he came to be remembered as the man who carried the desert's ascetic life from Egypt into Palestine, much as Anthony had begun it there. Late in life, seeking greater solitude from the crowds his own fame had drawn, he left for Sicily, then Dalmatia, and finally Cyprus, where he reposed around 371. His life was written soon afterward by Jerome, whose account remains the chief source for these events.
