The Asketikon of St Basil the Great

The Asketikon of St Basil the Great comprises a new English translation and studies which re-examine the emergence of monasticism in Asia Minor. The Regula Basilii, translated by Rufinus from Basil's Small Asketikon, is closely compared with the Greek text of the longer edition, as a means totracing the development of ideas. Silvas concludes that the antecedents of the monastic community of the Great Asketikon are best sought not in some kind of sub-orthodox modus vivendi of male and female ascetics living together and increasingly curbed by an emerging neo-Nicene orthodoxy lessfavourable to women ('homoiousian asceticism'), but in the local domestic ascetic movement in Anatolia as typified in the developments at Annisa under the leadership of Makrina.

Anna M. Silvas is Australian Research Council Fellow, Department of Classics, History, and Religion, University of New England, Australia.