Saint Syncletica of Alexandria

Syncletica of Alexandria (Ancient Greek: Συγκλητική, romanized: Synkletikḗ) was a Christian saint, ascetic, anchorite, and Desert Mother from Roman Egypt in the 4th century AD. She is the subject of The Life of Syncletica, a Greek hagiography purportedly by Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) but not published until 450; and the Alphabetical and Systematic Apophthegmata (probably compiled in the 6th century), which included 28 of her sayings and teachings. She died at the age of 80, after a three-year-long illness from mouth cancer. Girls and young women, despite Syncletica's resistance, were drawn to her and to her teachings, and chose to live near her in the desert. Her teachings and sayings were full of Biblical quotes, allusions, and metaphors, especially about sailing, the sea, domestic chores, and female tasks. Unlike male ascetics of the time, domesticity for Syncletica was connected with spirituality and "richly capable of expressing the ascetic's spiritual growth". Her teachings "promote spiritual life as a dynamic, embodied reality and they do this in a way that unusually appropriates women's bodies and women's work as useful means by which one might think about and speak of spiritual life". Syncletica, who lived during the 4th century, was born in Macedonia into a noble and wealthy family that might have been sailors, owners of a sailing business, and part of the Greco-Roman ruling class. She had a sister, who was blind, and two brothers who died early. The family moved to Alexandria and after her parents died, she cut her hair, gave away her fortune to the poor, and lived in a cell outside the city with her sister. She has been called "an upper-class girl who does not care about her body". Syncletica resolved to live openly as an ascetic, despite her parents' objections, cutting her hair as a symbol of her recognition that she was a new person.