Basil came to the ascetic life from the top of provincial society. His family was wealthy and Christian, he was educated at Caesarea, Constantinople and Athens, and he was on the path to a career in rhetoric when he abandoned it, travelled to see the monastic settlements of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and withdrew to family land in Pontus. What he wrote afterwards is not a rule in the later Western sense of a legal code, but a body of answers to questions put by ascetics, transmitted as the Longer and Shorter Responses.
The argument running through them is that the solitary life is a mistake. Philip Rousseau's study emphasises how deliberately Basil made the case: a Christian is commanded to love a neighbour, to wash feet, to bear another's burdens, and a man alone in a cell has no neighbour to practise on. Withdrawal without community produces a person who cannot be corrected, whose gifts serve nobody, and who has no way of discovering his own faults. So the ascetic house Basil describes has a superior, a shared table, common property, set hours of prayer and manual work, and children being taught in it.
That preference for the common life became the ordinary shape of monasticism in the Greek and Slavonic churches, and it reached the West as well. The Rule of Saint Benedict closes by directing the reader who wants more than a beginner's guide to the writings of the fathers, and names the rule of our holy father Basil among them, so the two great organising documents of Eastern and Western monastic life are not independent of one another.