In fifth-century Syria, a man climbed a 50-foot pillar and stood on a platform barely a square meter wide for decades, exposed to scorching summers and freezing winters. He went up there to escape the world, and accidentally became one of the most powerful figures in the Roman East.

This episode unpacks the strange paradox of Simeon Stylites, the shepherd's son whose extreme asceticism got him expelled from a monastery and eventually turned a stone column into a center of political and spiritual gravity. We weigh three early biographies against the historical record to separate documented endurance from pious legend.

• Why his monastery expelled him for being too extreme, and how a survival test on the pillar earned him permanent legitimacy
• The grueling physical reality of life on the column, including a spectator who count ...