Aphthonius

Aphthonius is known only as a recipient of letters from Nilus of Ancyra (d. c. 430), and the collection addresses him under varying honorifics that point to a man in or attached to the ascetic and ecclesiastical milieu of early-5th-century Galatia. Several letters answer him as "the Samaritan," engaging his argument against the resurrection of the body: he had pressed Nilus with the analogy that wheat ground to flour and sown never sprouts again, and that scattered human ash cannot be reconstituted, to which Nilus replies from Genesis that God who formed man from dust can raise him from ashes. Other letters address him as "the Deacon" (the honorific recorded in his epistolary address) and, repeatedly, as abbot or superior (kathegoumenos) of a monastery, where Nilus advises him on disordered brethren — monks misled by demonic counsel during illness, those who cling to a single book and neglect the fuller round of prayer and psalmody, and an ambitious second-in-rank who refuses to yield the office of precentor. He is otherwise unattested apart from this correspondence.