Athanasios (correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium)

Athanasios is known only as a correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium, who addressed him at least eight surviving letters in the early-to-mid 5th-century Pelusium milieu of the eastern Nile Delta. The letters show him as a man of some standing surrounded by flatterers, whom Isidore alternately instructs on scripture (the speck and the beam, Jacob's wrestling, faith without works) and sharply rebukes for moral backsliding: Isidore openly recants his earlier praise after Athanasios "inclined toward the worse," warns him against flattery (citing Isocrates) and against being "swept away toward inglorious vice," and exhorts him toward self-control (sophrosyne). One letter also engages him on a local church dispute involving the clerics Eutonios and Eusebios. Nothing beyond these letters securely attests him, and he should not be confused with the famous archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria, who had died decades earlier; he is otherwise unattested.