As Henry Chadwick remarked in his edition of the Greek text back in 1959, the collection known as the Sentences of Sextus has the potential to ‘play a central role in the debate on the continuity and discontinuity between the moral thought of the early church and that of paganism’. It is, however, not until the publication of P.'s discussion about the relations between the text as edited by Chadwick and its parallels among a variety of pagan texts that these potentials of the text have been displayed in detail. Freed from Chadwick's concern for the originality and superiority of Christianity, P. sets out to study analogies and differences between Sextus' ideals and those of his sources, that is to assess the subtle transformation of contemporary moral philosophy by a Christian philosopher. Through a detailed analysis of selected passages with a focus on ascetic themes P. uses the text to shed light on the origins of Christian asceticism. Instead of falling back on old dichotomies between Christian and pagan and discussions on ‘influence’, the book constitutes an important step forward respecting the creative mind of a late-antique Christian compiler re-using older material in shaping a new collection of ethical teaching.

Before entering into the detailed discussion of crucial passages, P. presents in his first chapter a thorough investigation into the role played by the collection and its ethical teaching in early Christian writings on asceticism. The fact that the collection was known and widely used in early monastic circles has been noted before, but for the first time P. gives a detailed analysis of the diffusion, beginning with Origen and continuing in a variety of monastic sources including Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Latin. Perhaps the most striking result of this detailed survey is that although the users were divided on the issue of whether the compiler of the collection was a Christian or a pagan, they all agreed in regarding the collection as useful and problematic at the same time. Although not explicitly stated by P. this is, according to my mind, one of the most interesting outcomes of his study and noteworthy in view of the prevalent simplistic tendency to think that ancient readers were unable to make good use of writings that in addition to what was valued also contained material they opposed.

Chapters 2–4 contain detailed discussion of some selected passages where the text in Sextus' collection has very close parallels in the preserved witnesses of the tradition he used. In Chapter 2 P. shows how the use of material from the New Testament leads to a more negative view on sexuality and procreation. Chapter 3, according to my mind the most innovative, looks at how the radical opposition to wealth in the text is the result of a cross-fertilisation of the philosophical sources, with their emphasis on autarchy, and the gospel traditions about renunciation and freedom, made possible by deep similarities. Chapter 4 deals with silence as an ascetic virtue. Here P. brings in an important aspect, namely the role that depictions of ideal philosophers played in creating models for Christian life.

Although enlightening, the detailed comparison of the different versions of the sayings and the explanations of the precise wording in the Sextus collection is at times too mechanical. P. sometimes reveals an unnecessary urge to find every sentence in Sextus' sources and, in my view, sometimes also operates with a too reductionist view of how sayings were transmitted. The fluidity of sayings traditions and our limited number of manuscripts ought to make us more cautious in defining precisely how the collector worked, and how the traditions used were made accessible to him.

The topic of Chapter 5, disengagement from social life, brings P. to the point where he sees the most fundamental shift in attitude between the philosophical tradition used and the outlook of the Sextus collection. In contrast to the importance of social themes in pagan collections of sayings, the sayings of Sextus envisage a strong detachment from social life similar only to what is found in Philo's De vita contemplativa. P.'s suggestion that we find here an important step towards the development of the monastic ideal of xeniteia is noteworthy.

Unlike earlier scholars who have written about interpolations or syncretistic blurring of distinctions between Christian and pagan ideals, P. rightly sees the text in Sextus' collection as the result of a creative use and a specific interpretation that reshapes the meaning to a new context. By studying in detail the differences between the text in Sextus and that of its Pythagorean parallels P. is able to see the rationale behind the revisions made and situate these in early Christian ascetic traditions. He is also able to show that, in contradiction to many earlier interpreters, the Sentences of Sextus represent a radicalisation of the ascetic teachings in the sources used to shape the collection. The result is that the Sentences do not primarily represent a Stoic or neo-Pythagorean influence on Christianity, but a Christian radicalisation of pagan material. I am, however, less confident than P. that we can pin down the revision to the creative efforts of an individual, conveniently called Sextus, who ‘meticulously selected and reworked’ maxims. Like other collections of sayings this one may well have developed gradually and be the result of a number of revisions.

As P. rightly points out in his conclusions, the importance of the Sentences for the history of early Christian asceticism goes in two directions. On the one hand Sextus adds to the recent scholarly acknowledgement that an ascetic reading of the New Testament is not a fourth-century invention, but rooted in very early usage of the texts. On the other hand the use of the collection in monastic circles testifies to a continuity between Greek moral philosophical traditions and monastic philosophy. Not only the Sentences of Sextus, but in particular P.'s fine study, are crucial reading for anyone interested in the emergence of Christian moral philosophy as well as the monastic tradition.