Athanasius’ Life of Antony

Abstract

Athanasius’ Life of Antony has been researched intensively by modern scholars, but one crucial facet of this text—its style—has yet to receive any focused treatment, an oversight which has resulted in an underappreciation, and uninformed negative assessments, of its overall stylistic merits. This article demonstrates that the Life in fact abounds in the kind of rhetorical ornamentation and accentual rhythm that are hallmarks of artistic late Greek prose, and these findings in turn shed new light on Athanasius’ virtuosity as a prose stylist.