heard of a monk in a certain monastery who only ate one pound of bread each day, and he straightway broke his bread into pieces and cast it into a vessel with a narrow mouth, and he determined within himself that he would eat nothing that his hand could not draw up out of the vessel the first time [he put it in]. And time after time, he used to tell the story with a smile, and say, “When I put my hand down I could fill it readily, but I could not draw it up full because the mouth of the vessel was [too] narrow, and it would not let me take it out full.” Now he lived this hard life for three years, and ate [daily only] four or five ounces of bread; and of water also he only drank sufficient to enable him to eat his bread. Of oil [he took] only one flask each year, making use of it only on the great First Day of the Resurrection, and on the great day of Pentecost, and at the Nativity, and at the Epiphany, and when he received [the Mysteries] during the Forty Days’ Fast. I will tell also of the various other practices of his sad, hard life. He determined [once] to vanquish sleep, and it is related that he never entered under a roof for twenty days, and that he was burnt up by the exceedingly great heat of the sun at noonday during all this time, and that during the nights he was without rest. And he himself told us, “Had I not quickly gone in under a roof and slept, and rested myself the brains in my head would have dried up, and I should become like a drunk man. But,” he would say, “I have been conquered against my will, for although the nature of the body hath been overcome I have given it what it needeth.”
And again, once when he was sitting in his cell a gnat bit him in the leg and he suffered pain, and he crushed the gnat in his hand and killed it. Then straightway he despised himself because he had avenged himself upon the gnat, and he passed upon himself the sentence that he should go to the place which is called “Scete,” that is to say, the inner desert, and sit there naked for six months. For there were many great gnats (i.e., mosquitoes) there, and they were so savage that they could pierce the skins of pigs, and they resembled wasps; and his whole body was so eaten and swollen that a man would have thought that he had the hide of an elephant, and when he came [back] to his cell six months later they could only recognize from his voice that he was Macarius.
And again he desired greatly to go and see the garden of Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Egypt, because, as he himself told us, they had obtained power, and riches and dominion, and had built there a tomb, and had established there great works in marble; now their tomb was ornamented with many things, and they had also placed there gold and
