Balchus

Balchus is known only as the recipient of a short cluster of letters from the ascetic abbot Nilus of Ancyra (d. c. 430), addressed in one of them (letter 325) as "Balchus the Prefect" (eparch), which indicates he held a civil prefecture rather than clerical office. Nilus writes to him as a layman in need of spiritual reform: he warns him against entrusting divine teaching to men "absorbed in many cares and lovers of pleasure," rebukes him in striking terms for a soul "filled from floor to roof with dung" and rubble with no room for sacred instruction, and makes his further instruction conditional on Balchus first cleansing his heart. The remaining notes to him expound Pauline ideas of sin and law and distinguish genuine Christian self-control from pagan and Manichaean asceticism. Beyond these letters and the title of prefect attached to his name, Balchus is otherwise unattested; he should be understood as a figure of the early-5th-century Ancyra milieu in Galatia known to us solely through Nilus's correspondence.