Thessalius

Thessalius is known only as a correspondent of Nilus of Ancyra (d. c. 430), who addresses him both as a deacon and as a 'fellow-laborer' (symponos) in five surviving letters. Nilus writes to him largely in a corrective and admonitory vein: urging him to prove his pursuit of the good through deeds and not words alone (147), to give freely to the needy rather than grasping after mammon (605), and pointedly rebuking him for defrauding and oppressing others by force while supposing he was keeping the Lord's commandments and performing charity (606) - a reproach that addresses him as 'Your Splendor,' implying he held some position of office or worldly power. One letter welcomes his confession and humility and counsels him to become his own accuser in the manner of the penitent tax-collector (607). Beyond this portrait of a deacon under Nilus's ongoing spiritual and ethical correction in the early-5th-century Ancyra milieu, he is otherwise unattested.