Melas

Melas was a fourth-century bishop of Rhinocorura (also spelled Rhinocolura), a coastal city on the traditional frontier of Egypt and Palestine, identified with modern El-Arish in the northern Sinai. The chief ancient witness to his life is the Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, a fifth-century continuator of church history writing in Constantinople, who ranks Melas among the most celebrated orthodox bishops of Egypt in the reign of the emperor Valens (364–378). Classical geographers explained the city’s name by a legend that Persian invaders had cut off the noses of its people; in late antiquity the see belonged to the Egyptian ecclesiastical sphere, in the civil province of Augustamnica. No contemporary document records Melas’s birthplace, parentage, or the year of his birth or death.

He is remembered above all for his conduct during the Arian campaign against Nicene clergy that followed the installation of Lucius as bishop of Alexandria around 373. Sozomen states that Melas and his brother Solon, who was also a bishop, were seized by imperial officers. The soldiers sent to arrest Melas found him living in extreme poverty, occupied in the manual labor typical of Egyptian ascetics, weaving mats or baskets from palm fiber and wearing poor clothing, so that they did not recognize him as the bishop. He received them as guests, washed their feet, and set food before them. Only after they had eaten did he disclose his identity. The officers, according to the historian, were so moved by his humility that they wept and wished to spare him, but Melas insisted on submitting to the emperor’s order and went with them into custody.

The sources do not name Solon’s see, nor do they say where Melas was confined or where he died and was buried. He belongs to the generation of Egyptian monk-bishops who joined episcopal office to the desert ascetic tradition associated with the heirs of Antony and Pachomius: Sozomen’s portrait is of a prelate who supported himself by his own hands and practiced the hospitality and meekness of the monastic life. No writings by Melas survive, and he does not occupy a large place in the Coptic synaxaria beside the great Alexandrian popes or the fathers of Scetis and Nitria.

Later Latin martyrologies, drawing on the Greek ecclesiastical historians, entered him among the saints. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 16 January as bishop of Rhinocolura, distinguished for holiness in the time of Valens. Beyond that notice and Sozomen’s anecdote, verifiable biographical detail is scarce. His historical importance is that of a local Egyptian bishop whose personal austerity and composure under Arian persecution were thought worth recording by a historian a generation later, and who was thereafter honored in the Western martyrological tradition as a confessor of the Nicene faith.