Pachomius the Great

Pachomius was born to pagan parents in the Egyptian Thebaid and conscripted as a young man into the Roman army. Deeply moved by the kindness of Christians who brought food to the recruits, he vowed to serve their God, and after his discharge was baptized and became the disciple of the hermit Palamon. Guided, according to his Life, by an angelic revelation, he founded at Tabennisi on the Nile the first cenobitic monastery, where monks lived a common life of prayer, labor, and obedience under a written rule, the first of its kind. The community grew into a federation of monasteries numbering thousands of monks and nuns by his death. His rule, translated by Jerome into Latin, influenced Basil the Great, Benedict, and all later monasticism, and he is honored with Antony as a father of the monastic life.