STYLITES, or PILLAR SAINTS, an appellation given to a kind of solitaires who spent their lives on the tops of columns, to be, as they imagined, the better disposed for meditation, &c. See ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, n° 79. The extremity of these columns were only three feet in diameter, with a kind of rail or ledge about it, that reached almost to the girdle, somewhat resembling a pulpit. The faquirs, or devout people of the east, imitate this extraordinary kind of life even to this day.