The monks of Mt Athos were a very representative sample of the Byzantine community. Among them were illiterate farmers, educated aristocrats, and of course scholars, who read privately in their cells or in the library, but who also wrote letters, comments, or factual notes in the margins of books, or authored works of their own. The library of the Monastery was constantly enriched with works which interested this scholarly group of readers, including synchronous and ancient authors, which did not have the necessary religious content. St Theodoros, the renowned Prior of the Stadios Monastery in Konstantinople in the 9th century, writes that on the days when there was no important manual work to be done, he struck the semantron to call the monks to the library to select books to read. In more recent times, the continuously higher level of education of the monks made private study a common practice, which each monk fits into his daily programme along with his other duties.
