Abstract
The chapter deals with reading of some dicta of abba Sisoes from the collection of Apophthegmata Patrum. The texts are related to the spiritual life of the first hermits and contains more spiritual advice and rules of eremitic living than biographic or hagiographic data.
Therefore it is right to emphasize their instructive spiritual sense; and so the paper attempts to interpret the chosen dicta of the hermit in term of the educational and normative part they played allegedly in the original eremitic communities. Nevertheless, the connection of the spiritual interpretative viewpoint and the choice of the dicta of only one person conjoin two different perspectives, which were also pursued by the ancient compilers when composing their apophthegmata collections.
The alphabetical collections stressed the rather biographical character of the texts while the systematical ones rather the instructive feature of them. The connection of both perspectives is correct and is conducive to a reading which fits better into the original function of the texts.