Anatolius of Laodicea

Anatolius of Laodicea, also known as Anatolius of Alexandria, was a Christian bishop and scholar of the third century. He was born in Alexandria in Egypt; the year of his birth is not recorded in surviving sources. The church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, the principal ancient authority for his life, portrays him as a man of exceptional learning, distinguished in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, dialectics, physics, and rhetoric. So high was his reputation in the philosophical schools of Alexandria that he was judged worthy of the chair associated with the Aristotelian tradition in that city. He combined this secular erudition with Christian faith and was held in honor among the churches of Egypt and the East.

During a period of civil conflict in Alexandria in the 260s, the Bruchium (Brucheion) quarter of the city was besieged by Roman forces. Eusebius relates that Anatolius, who was then in the besieged district, negotiated with the Roman commander so that non-combatants—women, children, the aged, and the infirm—might be allowed to leave and thus escape starvation. He later helped others to withdraw as well. The episode, set against the unrest of the later years of the emperor Gallienus, shows both Anatolius’s standing in Alexandrian society and a pastoral concern that later tradition remembered as characteristic of him.

Anatolius was ordained bishop by Theotecnus of Caesarea in Palestine, who intended him as coadjutor and successor in that see. While traveling in Syria, however, he came to Laodicea (Laodicea ad Mare, on the Syrian coast). The local bishop, Eusebius of Laodicea—an Alexandrian by origin and a friend of Anatolius—had recently died. The clergy and people of Laodicea detained Anatolius and insisted that he become their bishop. He accepted the see and remained bishop of Laodicea for the rest of his life. Ancient accounts associate his presence in the region with the ecclesiastical controversies of the time, including the gatherings that dealt with Paul of Samosata at Antioch, though the precise sequence of events is not fully recoverable from Eusebius’s narrative.

As a writer, Anatolius is best known for a treatise on the dating of Easter, in which he set out a nineteen-year Paschal cycle. Eusebius quotes from this work, and a Latin version circulated in the West as a Paschal canon. The cycle was an important contribution to computus, the technical discipline by which Christian communities calculated the date of Easter. Anatolius also composed ten books of introductions to arithmetic, of which fragments survive in later mathematical compilations; they attest his engagement with the Greek mathematical tradition. He died at Laodicea, according to the traditional chronology, in 283. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 3 July, and he is venerated as a saint in both Latin and Eastern Christian calendars. Little is recorded of his later years as bishop, and no contemporary account of his burial survives.