This life in itself was no new departure. Again and again in the course of history, a recoil from civilisation led men to seek enlightenment in remoteness, simplicity and solitude. Elijah the Tishbite, with rough mantle and flowing locks; John the Baptist, who lived on locusts and wild honey; the Essenes in Palestine, and the Therapeutæ near Alexandria, were one and all actuated by the belief that a higher life is possible here below, provided that the amenities and the comforts of this world count as nothing. The hermits who came to dwell in Sinai, settled in the mountains of the south where many natural springs rendered possible the cultivation of vegetables and fruit, their staple articles of diet. Here they were outside the sphere of Roman influence. The extent of this influence can be gauged by the _Table Peutinger_. On this Table two roads, the one coming from Syria, the other from Egypt, lead to _Pharan_ in Sinai proper. The road from Egypt passed _Arsinoë_, _Clesma_, _Lacus Mar_, and a station, the name of which is obliterated, but which Weill reads as Medeia. From this it was 80 miles to Pharan. The road from Syria, starting from Jerusalem, passed _Oboda_, _Lyssa_, _Cypsana_, _Rasa_, _Ad Dianam_ (later Ghadiana), i.e. _Aila_, from where it was 60 miles to _Pharan_. Pharan was no doubt the κωμὴ, _i.e._ village Pharan of Ptolemy, the later seat of the episcopate. This was, therefore, the southernmost point of Roman administration in the peninsula. It was beyond this, among the mountains of the south and on the coast near Tur, that the hermits settled by preference. The inhabitants of the peninsula at this period were called Ishmaelites or Saracens. The origin of the word Saracen has been much discussed. Ptolemy, the geographer, located Sarakene on the borders of Egypt, and the Sarakeni east of the Gulf of Akaba.[138] According to Eucherius († _c._ 449), the Arabs and the Agarenes in his time were called Saracens.[139] But the historian Sozomenus († 443) held that the Ishmaelites deliberately called themselves Saracens in allusion to Sarah, because they resented the association with Hagar.[140] Sprenger connected the word with _saraka_, Arabic for robber; the present view is that it signifies easterner. The Saracens are mentioned in a letter which Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote about the year 250, in which he mentioned that the Christians fled to the desert to escape persecution. “Many were seized in the Arabian mountains by the heathen Saracens and carried off into captivity.”[141] By the Arabian mountain he probably meant the hills between the Nile valley and the Red Sea, but he may be referring to Sinai. An early hermit of Sinai was St. Onophrius, whom Nectarius, in his _Epitome of Holy History_, numbered among the founders of ascetic life.[142] Onophrius dwelt in a grotto in the Wadi Leyan, south of the Gebel Musa, which was visited during the Middle Ages by pilgrims and is still pointed out to travellers.[143]