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Saint Anthony: Why Thousands Followed Him to the Desert

October 16, 2026 · Runtime 15:27 · Watch on YouTube

In the fourth century, thousands of Egyptians left the green valley of the Nile to live in rock and sand, and the man they followed was Anthony. Everything we know of his life comes from one book, written by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who knew him. We read it in Greek, translated the key passages ourselves, and set it beside the documents of Roman Egypt: a tax edict, a village papyrus from 324, and the travellers who tried to count the monks.

Transcript

One man, and a desert that became a city 0:00

Saint Anthony walked into the desert of Egypt alone, and thousands followed one man there. His first biographer described what they built in a single Greek word. The desert became a city.

Why would anyone leave the green valley of the Nile for rock and sand? We translated the passages in this episode ourselves, from the Greek text of his life. The standard English version, from 1892, turns that word into colonised. The Greek says more, and so does the rest of the story.

Roman Egypt and the strip of green 0:34

Egypt in the third century was a Roman province, and it lived on a single strip of green. The Nile floods, the fields drink, and where the water stops, the desert begins, often within sight of the river.

Anthony was born in a village in Middle Egypt, around the middle of that century. A later historian, Sozomen, names the village as Coma. Everything we know of his life comes from one book, written by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, who knew him.

Athanasius wrote it soon after Anthony's death, for monks living outside Egypt, who had asked him how Anthony lived. He tells them why he is writing. For monks, he says, the life of Anthony is a sufficient model of discipline.

The boy who would not learn letters 1:21

The book begins with a family. His parents were Egyptian Christians, of good family and with considerable wealth. As a boy, Athanasius says, Anthony could not bear to learn letters, because he did not want to mix with other boys. Remember that detail. It comes back.

When he was about eighteen or twenty, his parents died, and he was left with the house, the land, and one little sister. Less than six months later, he walked into church as the Gospel was being read, and heard the words the Lord said to the rich man.

If you want to be perfect, go, sell everything you have, and give to the poor, and come, follow me, and you will have treasure in heaven. Anthony, Athanasius writes, took it as if the passage had been read for him alone.

Three hundred arourae 2:12

He went out and gave his family land to the villagers. The Greek counts it as three hundred arourae, good and very fertile land. He sold the rest of what he owned, gave the money to the poor, and kept a little for his sister.

Soon he gave that away too. He placed his sister with a community of women he knew and trusted, to be brought up among them. And then he did not go to the desert. Not yet.

He was not the first monk 2:41

This is the first place where the legend and the source part ways. The legend makes Anthony the first monk. Athanasius does not. He says that there were not yet many monasteries in Egypt, and that no monk knew the far desert. Those who wanted that life practised it alone, near their own village.

In the next village, he says, there was an old man who had lived alone since his youth. Anthony saw him and imitated him. What was new about Anthony was not solitude. It was distance.

The tombs and the night 3:16

The first step was small. He went out to the tombs at some distance from his village, shut himself into one of them, and had a friend bring him bread from time to time.

Here the book becomes the part everyone remembers. One night, Athanasius writes, the place was suddenly full of shapes. Lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions and wolves, each moving after its own nature. His friend found him the next day lying on the ground as if dead.

Bosch, Schongauer and Callot 3:50

For a thousand years, artists took these pages and ran with them. Martin Schongauer engraved Anthony carried into the air by demons, in the fifteenth century. Hieronymus Bosch filled a whole triptych with them.

Jacques Callot etched the scene twice, in about 1617 and again in 1635, and turned a cave in Egypt into a theatre of monsters. The Greek text is simpler. It is a young man alone in a tomb, and the animals of the desert night.

Twenty years in a fort 4:22

He was about thirty-five when he went further. He crossed the river to the mountain on the other side, and found an abandoned fort, so long deserted that it was full of creeping things. There was water inside. He walled up the entrance, with bread enough for six months, and stayed in, alone.

From then on, bread was let down to him from above, twice a year. Friends who came to the wall heard a crowd of voices inside, shouting at him to leave their desert. They thought men were fighting him. Then they heard him singing psalms.

The reading: chapter 14 in full 4:58

Then comes the chapter this whole episode is about. Here is chapter fourteen of the Life of Anthony, in full, in our translation from the Greek.

For nearly twenty years he went on like this, training himself alone, neither going out, nor often seen by anyone. After this, many longed to imitate his discipline, and his friends came and broke down the door by force. And Anthony came out, as if from some inner sanctuary, initiated into mysteries and carried by God. It was the first time he had been seen outside the fort by those who came to him.

When they saw him, they were amazed. His body had the same condition as before. It had not grown fat, as from lack of exercise, nor withered, as from fasting and fighting with demons. He was just as they had known him before he withdrew. And the state of his soul was clean. It was not shrunken, as if by grief, nor loosened by pleasure, nor held by laughter or by gloom.

When he saw the crowd, he was not disturbed. When so many greeted him, he was not elated. He was entirely even, as one governed by reason, standing in his natural state. Through him the Lord healed many of those present who suffered in their bodies, and freed others from evil spirits. And the Lord gave Anthony grace in speaking.

So he comforted many who were grieving, and brought others who were quarrelling back into friendship, telling everyone to prefer nothing in the world to the love of Christ. He urged them to remember the good things to come, and the love of God toward us, who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all. And he persuaded many to choose the solitary life.

And so, from then on, there were monasteries even in the mountains, and the desert was made a city by monks, who had left their own homes, and enrolled themselves for citizenship in heaven.

Made a city: epolisthe 7:00

Made a city. In Greek it is one verb, epolisthe, from polis, the city. The English of 1892 says colonised, which is not wrong. But Athanasius chose the word for a city, and finished the sentence with the word for citizenship. A desert of citizens, enrolled somewhere else.

So why did they come? Athanasius gives one answer, and it is Anthony. But the documents of Roman Egypt, and the dates around his life, show that the story is bigger than one man.

First answer: the end of the martyrs 7:35

Start with the dates. In 303 the emperors began the last and worst persecution of the Christians. When the martyrs were taken to Alexandria under Maximinus, Anthony left his cell and followed them. He wanted to die as a martyr, Athanasius says, but he would not hand himself over. He served the confessors in the mines and in the prisons instead.

The persecution ended, and he was never arrested. He went back to his cell, and there, in the Greek, he was a martyr every day in his conscience, fighting the contests of faith. With the arenas closed, the desert became the new place to give a whole life.

Second answer: the word for escape 8:17

The second answer is in a word. What Anthony did is called anachoresis, withdrawal. It gave English the word anchorite. But in Roman Egypt, long before any monk, that word already had another meaning.

Around the year 155, a Roman prefect's edict dealt with people who had fled their villages because they could not pay their taxes, or carry the compulsory public services. Withdrawal was what a farmer did when the tax collector came. Some historians suspect the monks drew, at least partly, on that old habit of escape. It is a hypothesis, not a finding.

But Athanasius himself makes the link sound natural. Describing the monks' settlements, he writes that there was no one there doing wrong, and no one wronged, and no complaint of the tax collector.

A monk in a papyrus from 324 9:10

And the word monk appears in a document before it appears in his book. On the sixth of June, 324, a farmer in the village of Karanis filed a complaint. He had been beaten in a quarrel over a cow, and two men saved him. The petition names them. Antoninus, a deacon, and Isaac, a monk.

The papyrus is now at Columbia University in New York. It is the oldest known use of the word monachos in the papyri, more than thirty years before Athanasius wrote. Monks were already part of village life, close enough to break up a fight.

Counting the monks 9:50

By the end of the century, visitors were counting them. Palladius, who lived among the monks, says about five thousand men lived on the mountain of Nitria, and two thousand around Alexandria. He puts the communities that followed the rule of Pachomius at seven thousand.

These are travellers' numbers, not a census, and they do not agree. For the same communities, John Cassian says more than five thousand, and Jerome says fifty thousand. Divide them however you like. It is still a city.

Pachomius and the rule 10:25

Pachomius matters, because he solved the problem Anthony created. Not everyone could live alone in a fort. Pachomius gathered monks into communities with a rule, a wall, shared work and shared meals, and he died in 346, ten years before Anthony.

The inner mountain 10:44

Anthony kept moving away from the crowds his fame created. He joined a band of Saracens travelling east, walked with them three days and three nights, and came to a very high mountain, with a clear spring at its foot.

This is his inner mountain, near the Red Sea. He found a small piece of ground and tilled it, so that the people who brought him bread would not have to. Later he grew a few vegetables, so that anyone who made the hard journey to see him would find something to eat.

The place was never abandoned. The editor of the 1892 English edition notes that an old monastery still preserves his name there. These photographs were taken around 1930, of the monastery on the Red Sea mountain, with its garden still green inside the walls.

He came down from the mountain to Alexandria at least once more, to speak against the Arians, who taught that the Son of God was a creature. Athanasius says that in a few days, as many people became Christians as one would see in a year.

Even the emperor Constantine and his sons wrote to him, as to a father. The monks were impressed. Anthony was not. Do not be amazed if an emperor writes to us, he told them, for he is a man. Be amazed instead that God wrote the law for us.

The letters of an unlettered man 12:07

Now the detail from his childhood comes back. The book says Anthony could not bear to learn letters. But seven letters in his name survive.

In 1990, the Swedish scholar Samuel Rubenson argued that they are genuine. They show a man who shared the Platonic view of the soul and depended on Origen, the great teacher of Alexandria. Not every scholar agrees. But the unlettered hermit may also have been a teacher who wrote.

Two sheepskins and a hidden grave 12:39

At the end, he told his disciples he was nearly a hundred and five years old. He asked them not to let anyone carry his body into Egypt, where the dead were kept in houses. Bury me yourselves, he said, and hide me, so that no one knows the place but you.

He left almost nothing. One sheepskin to Athanasius, with the cloak the bishop had once given him new, and which had grown old with him. The other sheepskin to Serapion, another bishop. His hair shirt to the two who had cared for him.

He died in 356. And to this day, Athanasius writes, no one knows where he was buried, except those two.

Third answer: the book 13:23

The third answer is the book itself. Within about twenty years it was translated into Latin, by Evagrius of Antioch, and it began to travel through the West.

Augustine tells what one copy did. In Milan, in 386, a visitor named Ponticianus was amazed that Augustine had never heard of Anthony. He told a story. At Trier, on the Moselle, two imperial agents walking in the gardens by the city wall found a small house of monks, and in it, a little book containing the life of Anthony.

One of them began to read, and before he had finished, he decided to leave his post and serve God. His friend stayed with him. A desert in Egypt had reached a garden on the Moselle through a book.

That same day, in a garden in Milan, Augustine heard a voice saying, take up and read. He opened the letters of Paul. And in the Confessions he says why he trusted it. He had heard of Anthony, who walked into church during the reading of the Gospel, and took what was read as spoken to him.

Why they followed 14:31

So why did thousands follow one man into the desert? Because the arenas had closed, and the desert offered a new way to give a whole life. Because withdrawal was already an Egyptian habit, older than any monk. And because one bishop wrote a book that turned one man's road into a road anyone could follow.

Anthony did not invent the monk, and the book never says he did. What the book did was give the monk a story, and the story went everywhere. The desert was made a city. Then the city wrote it down.

Next: Saint Catherine's at Sinai 15:07

One of those desert cities is still standing, at the foot of Mount Sinai. The historian Procopius wrote that the emperor Justinian built a church there for the monks, and at the foot of the mountain a very strong fort. Next time, the monastery we now call Saint Catherine's, and why it was never destroyed.

Description and sources

Anthony did not invent the monk, and his biographer never says he did: an old man in the next village already lived alone. What was new was distance. He moved from the village to the tombs, then to an abandoned fort across the river, then to a mountain near the Red Sea, and the crowds kept following. Chapter 14 of the Life, read here in full, says the desert was made a city by monks; the standard English of 1892 says colonised. The episode gives three answers to why they came: the persecutions ended and the desert became the new martyrdom; withdrawal, anachoresis, was already what an Egyptian farmer did when the tax collector came (a hypothesis, said as one); and the book itself travelled, to a garden in Trier and to Augustine in Milan in 386.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Athanasius, Vita Antonii, Greek text in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca vol. 26 (Paris, 1857), cols. 835-976. https://archive.org/details/patrologiae_cursus_completus_gr_vol_026
Athanasius, Life of Antony, tr. H. Ellershaw, ed. A. Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. IV (1892), pp. 195-221. https://archive.org/details/niceneandpostnic04unknuoft
Augustine, Confessions VIII.6 and VIII.12, tr. E. B. Pusey (1838).
Palladius, The Lausiac History, tr. W. K. Lowther Clarke (1918), ch. VII and XXXII.
P.Col. VII 171 (Karanis, 6 June 324), Columbia University Papyrus Collection, inv. 187.
BGU II 372, prefect's edict on fugitives from the villages (c. 154-158).
S. Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Origenist Theology, Monastic Tradition and the Making of a Saint (Lund, 1990); reviewed by D. E. Christie, Journal of Early Christian Studies 3.4 (1995).
Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History I.13.
Procopius, Buildings V.viii, tr. A. Stewart, Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society (1888).

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

Fra Angelico, Saint Anthony Abbot Shunning the Mass of Gold, c. 1435-40. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | Public domain
Life of Antony, tr. H. Ellershaw, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2nd series vol. IV, 1892, p. 200. Internet Archive (2 images) | public domain
J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca vol. 26, cols. 863-864, Paris 1857. Internet Archive (2 images) | public domain
Abraham Ortelius, Aegyptus Antiqua, 1584. Boston Public Library, Digital Commonwealth | Public domain
Life of Antony, tr. H. Ellershaw, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 2nd series vol. IV, 1892, p. 196. Internet Archive | public domain
Master of the Osservanza, Saint Anthony Distributing His Wealth to the Poor, c. 1430-35. National Gallery of Art, Washington | CC0
Master of the Osservanza, Saint Anthony Leaving His Monastery, c. 1430-35. National Gallery of Art, Washington | CC0

... and 22 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Ancient Paths Faith reads the Christian contemplative tradition, East and West, from the primary source: the life, the rule, the letter, the codex.

About the material. Paintings, prints and photographs: National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, British Library, Dumbarton Oaks and other public collections, all public domain or CC0, credited on screen. Film: Banks of the Nile, Kinemacolor by Charles Urban, 1911, and the International Space Station over Egypt, NASA, 2011, both public domain. Book pages: Internet Archive scans of public-domain editions. Quotations from the Life of Anthony are our own translation from the Greek. Every diagram is drawn in code from the sources listed. Nothing in this video is AI-generated imagery.

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