Die Sextussprüche und ihre Verwandten

In antiquity and the Middle Ages, collections of sayings were a popular form of everyday literature. As texts, they did not claim any high literary standard. That does not mean, however, that their content was always easy to understand. They often deal with densely written insights and admonitions which presuppose far more than they say. That opens up a wide field of interpretation and re-reading, which took place in the open form of the collection, above all through the proliferation, reduction or the regrouping of the material. The sayings attributed to the philosopher Sextus present a remarkable example of a revised Christian collection of Imperial Era sayings. They possess Pythagorean precursors and continued to have an effect in Christian monasticism via Evagrius of Pontus. This volume traces these lines of development.