Syncletica of Alexandria

Syncletica of Alexandria was a Christian saint, ascetic, anchorite and Desert Mother from Roman Egypt in the fourth century, living from about 320 to 400. She is the subject of the Life of Syncletica, a Greek hagiography attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria though not published until decades after his death, and she is the source of twenty eight of the sayings collected in the Apophthegmata Patrum. She died at the age of eighty after a three year illness. Despite her own resistance, girls and young women were drawn to her teaching and chose to live near her in the desert; her sayings were full of biblical quotations, allusions and metaphors, especially images of sailing, the sea, domestic chores and women's work, and unlike the teaching of many male ascetics of her time, treated ordinary domestic labor as a way of expressing the ascetic's own spiritual growth.