Melito (Greek Melitōn, 'honey-sweet') was Bishop of Sardis — the great Lydian capital city of western Asia Minor — in the second half of the 2nd century. Eusebius (Church History 4.26) preserves the most substantial early account of him and gives a long list of his works (most of which are lost): On the Pasch, On the Devil, On Hospitality, On the Body, On the Soul, On the Lord's Day, On the Faith of Man, On the Birth of Christ, On the Prophecy, On Hospitality, The Key, On the Truth, On Baptism, and a substantial Apology addressed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Among his lost works the most important was his Eclogae — the first systematic Christian list of the canonical Old Testament books, the foundational text for the development of the Christian biblical canon. Melito had personally travelled to Palestine to verify the Hebrew canonical books in conversation with Jewish scholars, and reports having confirmed the standard canon (without the deuterocanonical books).
His one surviving work — the celebrated paschal homily Peri Pascha (On the Pasch) — was discovered in 1932 in a 4th-century papyrus manuscript and published in 1940 by Campbell Bonner. The work is the earliest extant Christian theological treatment of the Easter mystery, the foundational text of the Christian Old Testament-typological reading of the Exodus Passover as prefiguring Christ's Passion, and one of the great Greek-language theological poems of the entire patristic period. Its rhetorical-poetic structure (parallelism, anaphora, antithesis) makes it one of the most sophisticated 2nd-century Christian works in any language.