Anatolius

Anatolius is known only as a clerical correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 450), addressed in the letters as a deacon (the address honorific elsewhere gives "presbyter"). Most of Isidore's five surviving notes to him are sharp moral rebukes rather than friendly exchanges: Isidore warns him against keeping disreputable company that has provoked slander, against an anger he ranks as worse than blasphemy, against an "unbridled tongue" that pours forth abuse, and against the abuse of wine; only one letter offers a more neutral exegesis of Isaiah 26. The pattern suggests a junior cleric in Isidore's orbit whom the older churchman repeatedly tried to correct. Beyond these letters he is otherwise unattested, though as Isidore's correspondent he belongs to the milieu of Pelusium and the eastern Nile Delta in early-to-mid-5th-century Egypt.