Antony of Egypt, born around 251 CE, is remembered by tradition as the figure whose example set the pattern that later Desert Fathers and Mothers followed, though solitary ascetics predated him and the movement was never centered on any single founder in the way later monastic orders would be. According to the Life of Antony, attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria and widely read across the Christian world within a generation of Antony's death, he sold his inheritance after hearing the gospel read in church, gave the proceeds to the poor, and withdrew progressively further into the Egyptian desert, first among other ascetics near his village and eventually into an abandoned fortress at the edge of settled land.
The movement that grew up around figures like Antony was never a single organized order. Some ascetics lived as hermits in near total isolation, visited occasionally by disciples seeking a word of counsel; others gathered in loose informal clusters, sharing a well or a stretch of desert while each kept a separate cell; and still others, following the somewhat later example of Pachomius, adopted a more structured communal life that anticipated the coenobitic monasticism of the centuries that followed. What united them was not organization but a shared discipline of withdrawal, manual labor, and unceasing prayer, pursued specifically at the edge of inhabited land rather than within it.