Life of Malchus the Captive Monk

Contents

Translation in progress.

1. 1Jerome presents this short life as a practice piece before a planned history of the church from the apostles to his own day.
2. 2At Maronia near Antioch Jerome met the old monk Malchus and an aged woman living together, and asked their story.
3. 3Malchus tells how he fled marriage to become a monk at Chalcis, and later left the monastery against his abbot's pleading to claim his inheritance.
4. 4Malchus's caravan to Edessa is seized by Saracen raiders, and he and a woman are given to one master.
5. 5As a shepherd slave in the desert Malchus prays and sings psalms and finds again the monk he had nearly lost.
6. 6Forced by his master to take a fellow captive as wife, Malchus nearly kills himself, but she persuades him to live with her in a chaste marriage.
7. 7Watching ants cooperate, Malchus longs to return to the common life of the monastery.
8. 8Malchus and the woman flee by night and cross the river on inflated goatskins.
9. 9Pursued to a cave by their master and his slave, the fugitives are saved when a lioness kills both men and then leaves.
10. 10The pair escape to a Roman camp; Malchus returns to the monks and the woman to the virgins, and Jerome draws the lesson that chastity cannot be taken captive.