Dionysius

Dionysius is known only as a correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 450), and the five surviving letters to him place him in the Pelusium and eastern Nile Delta milieu of early-to-mid 5th-century Egypt. The address lines style him variously as a scholasticus (advocate/lawyer) and elsewhere as a presbyter, and the letters show a man with worldly and political ambitions: Isidore warns him not to throw himself into the "sea of cares" of political affairs, where he would assuredly win distinction, and rebukes him for cultivating a false reputation and prizing the outward "leaves" of virtue rather than its fruit. The tenor throughout is that of an admonishing spiritual director correcting an able but self-regarding junior, instructing him on the golden rule, true humility, and the difference between what is pleasant and what is profitable. Beyond what these letters reveal, he is otherwise unattested.