The Ibex and the Poisonous Roots

“There was also another anchorite with a famous name in those regions, a man who lived in the part of the desert around Syene. When he first went off into the wilderness, he meant to live on the roots of plants that the sand produces here and there, which have a very sweet and pleasant taste. But not knowing the nature of the plants, he often gathered deadly ones. And indeed it was not easy to tell the kinds of roots apart by taste alone, since all were equally sweet, but many of the less familiar kinds held a deadly poison inside them. So when the poison inside him tormented him after he ate them, and all his insides were racked with terrible pains, while frequent vomiting with excruciating agony was shattering the very stronghold of life, his stomach was completely worn out, and he was in utter terror of everything that had to be eaten to stay alive. When he had fasted like this for seven days and was almost at the point of death, a wild animal called an ibex came up to him. As the creature stood beside him, he offered it a bundle of plants he had gathered the day before but had not dared to touch. The beast pushed aside with its mouth those that were poisonous and picked out the ones it knew to be harmless. In this way that holy man, taught by its behavior what he should eat and what he should reject, escaped both the danger of dying of hunger and the danger of being poisoned by the plants. [a]

“But it would be tedious to tell all the things we have either known firsthand or heard from others about those who live in the desert. I spent a whole year and nearly seven months more in these solitudes, by deliberate choice, though more as an admirer of other men’s virtues than as one who tried to show for himself the extraordinary endurance they displayed. Most of the time I lived with the old man I mentioned, who had the well and the ox.