Query: Why was this work considered to be important?
Context: His biography of Anthony the Great entitled Life of Antony(Βίος καὶ Πολιτεία Πατρὸς Ἀντωνίου, Vita Antonii) became his most widely-read work. Translated into several languages, it played an important role in the spreading of the ascetic ideal in Eastern and Western Christianity. Depicting Anthony as an illiterate and holy man who through his existence in a primordial landscape has an absolute connection to the divine truth, the biography also resembles the life of his biographer Athanasius.