Sts. Isaac, Dalmatus and Faustus

Isaac was a monk of the East who came to Constantinople in the reign of Valens, when the Arians held the churches and the Orthodox were shut out of them. As the emperor rode out against the Goths in 378, Isaac took hold of his bridle in the road and told him to give the churches back to the Orthodox and he would prosper, and that if he would not, he would not return. Valens had him thrown into a pit and rode on to Adrianople, where the army was destroyed and he died in a burning farmhouse.

Isaac was released, and under Theodosius he was honored and settled outside the walls, where a monastery gathered around him. He was present at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381.

Dalmatus was an officer of the imperial guard under Theodosius. He left the service with his son Faustus, gave what he had to the poor, and entered Isaac's house, and succeeded him as its abbot. He kept a strict enclosure and left it once in forty eight years, in 431, when the Council of Ephesus had condemned Nestorius and the news was being suppressed at Constantinople. Dalmatus walked out of his monastery at the head of the monks of the city, went through the streets to the palace, and forced the matter into the open.

The monastery kept his name for centuries afterward as the Dalmatian, and the Church keeps all three on the third of August.