The traditional story of the rise of monasticism as a fourth-century phenomenon associated par excellence with the Egyptian desert, is a Catholic legend, which, unlike many others, was reinforced, rather than questioned, by Protestant scholarship, happy to regard monasticism as a late, and therefore spurious, development. The literature falls into two categories: the literature of those monastic movements of the fourth century condemned as heretical; and literature that is eccentric to the geographical hegemony of Egypt in the traditional literature. The Life of St Antony, almost certainly by Athanasius of Alexandria, is the model, not only for all monastic Lives, but for the genre of the saint's Life itself. Instructional literature obviously includes monastic rules: those of Pachomius, Basil, Augustine, and, for Palestine, what can be discerned of the rules of Chariton and Gerasimus. The most important monastic literature of an instructional kind is the writings of Evagrius and John Cassian.