Tim Vivian continues to merit his reputation as a guide for those interested (both personally and academically) in the monastic worlds of late antiquity. In this volume, Vivian offers an introduction, translation, and annotation of the fifth-century (?) ascetic, Hyperechios’s, Exhortation to the Monks. Hyprechios’s Exhortation, produced perhaps in Egypt and perhaps in Palestine, is a short, pithy, and poetic discourse on ascetic virtues, arranged alphabetically in Greek, a stylized, literary product which, as Vivian notes, promoted its own memorization via its parenetic and protreptic form (9–13).

Vivian offers an elegant English translation of Hyperechios’s work, followed by the Greek text (borrowed from PG 79: 1471–1490), which, however, remains in need of a fully edited and critical edition. While the translation and Greek text take up some thirty pages, Vivian’s introduction to Hyperechios, his world, and the ideologies and stratagems of early Christian asceticism take up a substantial sixty-three pages. In these, Vivian maintains a kaleidoscopic dialogue with fifteen hundred years of theologians, poets, activists, and novelists, weaving Hyperechios and his Exhortation into a wider story about what is good, true, and beautiful in the world (and, indeed, what is not). Those familiar with Vivian’s decades of work will recognize this willingness to blend the past and the present.

Vivian’s effort concludes with an insightful glossary, over fifty pages of notes, a select bibliography, and indices. Those interested in meeting Hyperechios for the first time should do so here.