‘Chronology was one starting-point of Bede's historiography; hagiography, the literary expression of the cult of the saints, was the second.’ Arguments about the date of Easter or the age of the world were topics which exercised the minds of scholars, but which were of small consequence to an illiterate population scarcely removed from paganism. The Life of the saint, on the other hand, offered a medium through which a strong appeal could be addressed to the unlettered, an appeal whose strength was very greatly increased if the subject of the Life was a man who had lived locally and whose deeds were still fresh in living memory. It was Athanasius who set the pattern for western hagiography in his Life of St Antony, an Egyptian who was born in the third century into a wealthy Christian family, but who renounced all his worldly wealth in order to devote himself to a life of asceticism in the desert, and so came to be represented by his biographer as the ideal monk. The work quickly achieved great popularity and was known both to St Jerome and to St Augustine of Hippo. Written originally in Greek, it was translated into Latin by Evagrius.