NITRIA

NITRIA. This desert depression some sixty miles south of Alexandria was where Macarius the Great (q.v.) came to live alone sometime in the 340s, followed shortly thereafter by other anchorites. This community, and nearby Scete, was the background for most of the stories and sayings of the Desert Fathers (q.v.) filling the different collections, beginning with Jerome’s and Rufinus’s accounts of their visits in the late 4th c., and continuing through Palladius’s Lausiac History and the alphabetical Gerontikon (or Apophthegmata Pateron) in the early 5th c. These texts, together with Athanasius’s Life of Antony, became the foundational books of Orthodox monasticism (qq.v.).