Maximus and Domatius

Maximus and Domatius were two Roman nobles who embraced the monastic life in the fourth century. They are honoured as saints in the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Syriac Orthodox Church, and are mentioned in some traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Their ascetic life and their bond with Saint Macarius the Great gave an early impulse to Christian monasticism in Egypt.

They were the sons of a Christian Roman governor, called Walendianus in the source. Wishing for a deeper spiritual life, they asked their father to send them to Nicaea, to pray at the site of the first Council. He agreed and gave them an escort, which the brothers sent back on arrival, in order to begin a life of solitude and prayer. There they met a monk named Hanna, who guided them to Syria, where they were disciples of a monk named Aghabus. Before his death Aghabus is said to have had a vision that sent them to Egypt, to Saint Macarius, in the desert of Scetis.

At that time the emperor Theodosius I was trying to make Maximus patriarch of Constantinople, but the brothers rejected worldly honour and fled to Egypt. Macarius welcomed them warmly and helped them build a modest cell. They lived in silence and solitude, in prayer and manual work, meeting only Macarius to receive Holy Communion. Macarius later testified that one night, watching them from afar, he saw them shining with divine light and guarded by an angel with a fiery sword, and he cried out: "Pray for me, holy ones."

Maximus was the first to fall gravely ill. On his deathbed he prayed for divine light and strength, and it is said that a vision of saints, among them John the Baptist and the emperor Constantine, appeared before he died, on 14 Tobi. Domatius, crushed with grief, prayed for the same fate and died three days later, on 17 Tobi. Macarius, drawing near their cave, suddenly said: "Domatius has departed", having seen his soul carried up to heaven. Macarius buried them in their own cell and later built a church on the spot, the first church in the desert of Scetis. The two brothers are held to be the first monks to die in that wilderness.

The Coptic Church remembers them on 14 and 17 Tobi, and the Syriac Orthodox Church on 9 January. Some Byzantine sources briefly mention a monk Maximos connected with Scetis, but it is not always clear whether he is the same Maximus.