and the solitary life of the fourth century as a continued martyrdom, one might say, a new kind of martyrdom, which, that God might the more deign to lead their will to its end, they imposed upon themselves, and chose for themselves as a more perfect and secure way, by no means despising the secular life, a fact you should well note. B Yet it is explained only by that interior desire for holiness, which the fervent spirit works, and by the example proposed for imitation by the holy elders, that almost all of Egypt followed those seven into the desert, C and most willingly bore with them the harshest toils of life, so that after six or seven decades the vastest wildernesses were so filled with monasteries and holy men that, as it is said, "as many peoples as were held in the cities, almost as great a multitude of monks were held in the deserts." This is why Arsenius hastened from the palace to the horrible places of Scetis, why youths of tender age hastened from soft dwellings to labors they could hardly endure, why Mount Nitria abounded with five thousand, Scetis with a great number of monks, the Cells with countless cells, why the regions pertaining to Memphis and Babylon flowed with a huge multitude of monks, why most numerous monasteries were seen around the Nile, why Serapion ruled nearly ten thousand monks, why at Tabenna Pachomius kept a very large company of brothers under a rule, and why the city of Oxyrhynchus in the Thebaid was filled and surrounded inside and out by monks, its public buildings and also the temples of ancient superstition inhabited by monks...