Abstract

In this study we focus on the phenomenon of anakhóresis in the context of Roman domination of Egypt, specifically related to the period of the episcopate of Athanasius in his chair in Alexandria. From that perspective, we analyze the very action of anakhoreîn carried by the bishop of Alexandria on his dangerously biographical way, in which he was exiled by the emperors and had to escape several times, the last three to the desert. Finally, taking up the notion of anakhoreîn, the departure to the desert, while monk‟s moving to a isolation from a cultural and coeval, milieu as a concept discursively constructed in the narrative of Vita Antonii, composed by Athanasius in the IVth century AD, resuming and revising Hadot's concepts of 'spiritual exercise' and Michel Foucault‟s 'practice of the self '.