Cyrus

Cyrus is known only as a recurring correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 450), to whom Isidore addressed at least ten surviving letters within the early-to-mid-5th-century milieu of Pelusium and the eastern Nile Delta. The addresses attached to these letters are not uniform: he is called variously a presbyter, a scholasticus (an advocate or man of legal learning), and "the younger, a monk," which may reflect either changes in his standing over time or more than one man of the name; in one letter Isidore notes that Cyrus did not trust the Scriptures but professed to follow Demosthenes wholeheartedly, fitting the picture of a literate, rhetorically trained man whom Isidore was drawing toward Christian discipline. Isidore writes to him chiefly as a spiritual and exegetical instructor, expounding the canon of Scripture, the interpretation of the Exodus narrative, priestly humility, control of the tongue, and divine power perfected in weakness, and at one point reassures him about a bishop Eusebius whom Isidore casts as a wrongdoer. Beyond these letters Cyrus is otherwise unattested, and the specifics of his career, dates, and identity cannot be established.