The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narrative... more The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narratives about Christian holy men and women from Late Antiquity to Byzantium. Rather than focusing on the relationship between story and reality, it asks what literary choices authors made in depicting their heroes and heroines: how they positioned the narrator, how they responded to existing texts, how they utilised or transcended genre conventions for their own purposes, and how they sought to relate to their audiences. The literary focus of the chapters assembled here showcases the diversity of hagiographical texts written in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, as well as pointing out the ongoing conversations that connect them. By asking these questions of this diverse group of texts, it illuminates the literary development of hagiography in the late antique, Byzantine, and medieval periods.
Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, an... more Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, and recent decades have seen a surge in scholarly discussion of its significance and performance. Yet the partial nature of the surviving evidence means that our understanding of its workings is dominated by one man, whose texts are the only examples to have survived in complete form since antiquity: Cicero.
This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.
This volume offers a full analysis of one of the more intriguing works by a figure who is central... more This volume offers a full analysis of one of the more intriguing works by a figure who is central to our understanding of Late Antiquity and early Christianity: the translator, exegete, and controversialist Jerome (c.347-419/20AD). The neglected text of the Vita Malchi - or, to use Jerome's title, the Captive Monk - recounts the experiences of Malchus, a monk abducted by nomadic Saracens on the Eastern fringe of the fourth-century Roman Empire, in what today is the border region between southern Turkey and Syria. Most of this short, vivid, and fast-paced narrative is recounted by Malchus in the first person.
The volume's introduction provides background information on the author, Jerome, and the historical and linguistic context of the Life, as well as detailed discussion of the work's style and its reception of earlier Christian and classical literature, ranging from its relationship with comedy, epic, and the ancient novel to the Apocryphal Apostolic Acts and martyr narratives. An exposition of the manuscript evidence is then followed by a new edition of the Latin text with an English translation, and a comprehensive commentary. The commentary explores the complex intertextuality of the work and provides readers with an understanding of its background, originality, and significance; it elucidates not only literary and philological questions but also points of ethnography and topography, and intellectual and social history.
This two-day conference seeks to re-investigate the relationship between narrative and argument i... more This two-day conference seeks to re-investigate the relationship between narrative and argument in ancient literature (broadly defined). Amidst strong trends in both rhetorical and narratological analysis, observations about the interplay between narratological structures and rhetorical methods of persuasion have tended to be at the margins of classical scholarship; but there are indications of a shift towards the foreground. For example, recent scholarship on Archaic and Classical Greek Lyric and Drama explores the discourse of ideology through the analysis of literary mechanisms and language shaping the political dimensions of the various genres. Another example of a recent shift is in the field of hagiography, where literary aspects are increasingly investigated in the context of the texts' assumed ideology, resulting in some interesting insights into the unexpected complexities of the relationship between what the texts appear to want to the readers to do or believe, and the narrative strategies employed in these texts. To explore and consolidate these trends, our conference brings together scholars interested in the interaction of political, literary, narratological, and cultural analysis of ancient literature to retrace the narrative mechanisms and discourses shaping the (im)balance between ideology, argument, and narration in ancient texts.
Early Latin: Constructs, Diversity, Reception, eds. J. N. Adams, Anna Chahoud, and Giuseppe Pezzini, Cambridge: CUP, 2023
This chapter focuses on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchu... more This chapter focuses on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchus, as well as the speeches quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with a view to understanding their composition and intended effects. Repetition provides a systematic framework for many of the traditional rhetorical figures, such as anaphora, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, antithesis and polyptoton (see D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969; cf. J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996). Using repetition as a lens allows analysis not only of longer extracts but also of very short fragments. These patterns are used to test the thesis that Roman oratory continued to respond to the ancient Latin form of the carmen even while being influenced by Greek rhetorical ideas (cf. on this point E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose, Columbus 2011). The transmission of the fragments under consideration is itself heavily influenced by the rhetorical and grammatical tradition, and my discussion accordingly takes account of the screening effects which this transmission has on the evidence.
Hagiography is a problematic yet widely used term with varying connotations; it resists narrow de... more Hagiography is a problematic yet widely used term with varying connotations; it resists narrow definition. Outside the hagiographa of the Hebrew Bible (i.e., the books other than the Law and the Prophets), the concept is based on a core of Christian Greek and Latin works, from the 2nd to 5th century ce, which range from martyr accounts to monastic and episcopal biographies. A significant factor motivating their composition and reception is the cult of saints. Biblical heroes, especially Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself are the primary models, but non-Christian literary traditions, especially biographical and novelistic, are also important influences.
Review of K. Degen, Der Gemeinsinn der Märtyrer. Die Darstellung gemeinwohlorientierten Handelns ... more Review of K. Degen, Der Gemeinsinn der Märtyrer. Die Darstellung gemeinwohlorientierten Handelns in den frühchristlichen Martyriumsberichten. Potsdamer Altertumswissen-schaftliche Beiträge, 64. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2018.
Narratologie und Intertextualität Zugänge zu spätantiken Text-Welten, herausgegeben von Christoph Brunhorn, Peter Gemeinhardt und Maria Munkholt Christensen, 2020
This paper looks at the function of the narrator in Jerome's Life of Hilarion in order to determi... more This paper looks at the function of the narrator in Jerome's Life of Hilarion in order to determine how this narratological entity affects the ideological heft of the text. I identify three main angles of perspective used by the narrator that can be described linguistically and argue that the sophisticated ways in which they are used indicates a subtle and complex strategy on the part of their author.
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood, 2020
Among the arguments emerging from this volume is the cardinal position of Jerome in the developme... more Among the arguments emerging from this volume is the cardinal position of Jerome in the development of hagiography in general and for ascetic biography in particular. His imaginative responses to the Life of Antony set the tone for later adaptations, and their popularity is attested in the vast number of surviving manuscripts. Varied as his three Lives of Holy Men are in structure and content, close reading reveals some shared patterns of composition. This chapter identifies one such pattern and discusses its implications for the literary shaping of these hagiographical narratives. It focuses on the scenes of supplication which are found at pivotal points in all of the Lives: that is to say, on an intense request at a moment of crisis, articulated in a sequence of actions which combine movement and speech. My discussion has three aims: firstly, to bring out the intertextual relations between the three works; second, to investigate the links of this pattern with earlier texts; and, thirdly (and most importantly), to consider the motivation for using supplication as a literary structure, and to explore what it can tell us about Jerome’s construction of sainthood.
Learning Cities in Late Antiquity: The Local Dimension of Education, ed. Jan Stenger, 2019
This chapter proposes a new reading of Jerome’s Letter 107, which is addressed to the aristocrati... more This chapter proposes a new reading of Jerome’s Letter 107, which is addressed to the aristocratic Christian matron Laeta and offers advice on how to bring up her daughter. It argues that the educational prescriptions of this letter are not an end in themselves but a pretext for imagining the triumph of Christian asceticism, practised at the borders of the Empire, over the pagan elites associated with the urban fabric of Rome. The uploaded document contains the uncorrected proofs.
In Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen, Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Techn... more In Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen, Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization, pp. 117-132. The uploaded document contains the uncorrected proofs.
This article analyses the narratorial attitudes of Jerome's fictional Lives of Paul 'the first he... more This article analyses the narratorial attitudes of Jerome's fictional Lives of Paul 'the first hermit' and Malchus 'the captive monk'. These works are among the first Latin examples of Christian monastic biography, or 'hagiography'. Using the narratological categories of distance (mimetic versus diegetic) and focalisation, the article seeks to determine to what extent these texts exhibit the biased and uncritical presentation which current usage considers to be typical of hagiographical discourse. Close readings of selected passages suggest that Jerome's narrators are flexible in their attitudes and do not impose a single, ideologically consistent, interpretation of the events narrated.
Jerome’s familiarity with, and use of, the comedies of Terence and Plautus are well documented. A... more Jerome’s familiarity with, and use of, the comedies of Terence and Plautus are well documented. As a source of archaising language, Roman comedy was highly prized during the second sophistic period: the use of comic language may be traced through Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium into Fronto and Apuleius. Regine May has demonstrated how Apuleius goes beyond mere antiquarianism in appropriating comic content along with comic language in his comic novel, the Metamorphoses. A related argument can be made concerning Jerome’s shortest and most novelistic saint’s life, the Vita Malchi. The language of this work echoes all sorts of genres, including epic, history, scholastic oratory, and comedy. I shall attempt to relate the comic linguistic elements to the interpretation of the actions depicted and demonstrate that humour, or comedy, is a valid key (although by no means the only one) for interpreting this edifying tale. As in other narrative prose genres, comic stock characters and plot elements are exploited to create expectations. Examples are the dour and inflexible versus the loving idealised father figure; the impetuous youth; the unscrupulous adulteress; and the officious, self-important fellow slave. These familiar stereotypes provide a measure of orientation in a new and as yet experimental fusion of genres; but, like Lucius in Apuleius, Malchus as the narrating character can also be read as undermining himself to some extent. The comic intertext therefore cautions the reader against taking Malchus’ pious protestations at face value: his pompousness and his moral fallibility require emotional distancing just as his vicissitudes call for empathy. This combined mechanism ultimately deepens the impact of the moral message of the Vita.
Review of O. Zwierlein, ed., Die Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi et Pionii und das Corpus Poly... more Review of O. Zwierlein, ed., Die Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi et Pionii und das Corpus Polycarpianum. Band 1: Editiones criticae. Band 2: Textgeschichte und Rekonstruktion. Polykarp, Ignatius und der Redaktor Ps.-Pionius
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narrative... more The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood throws fresh light on narratives about Christian holy men and women from Late Antiquity to Byzantium. Rather than focusing on the relationship between story and reality, it asks what literary choices authors made in depicting their heroes and heroines: how they positioned the narrator, how they responded to existing texts, how they utilised or transcended genre conventions for their own purposes, and how they sought to relate to their audiences. The literary focus of the chapters assembled here showcases the diversity of hagiographical texts written in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, as well as pointing out the ongoing conversations that connect them. By asking these questions of this diverse group of texts, it illuminates the literary development of hagiography in the late antique, Byzantine, and medieval periods.
Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, an... more Public speech was a key aspect of politics in Republican Rome, both in theory and in practice, and recent decades have seen a surge in scholarly discussion of its significance and performance. Yet the partial nature of the surviving evidence means that our understanding of its workings is dominated by one man, whose texts are the only examples to have survived in complete form since antiquity: Cicero.
This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.
This volume offers a full analysis of one of the more intriguing works by a figure who is central... more This volume offers a full analysis of one of the more intriguing works by a figure who is central to our understanding of Late Antiquity and early Christianity: the translator, exegete, and controversialist Jerome (c.347-419/20AD). The neglected text of the Vita Malchi - or, to use Jerome's title, the Captive Monk - recounts the experiences of Malchus, a monk abducted by nomadic Saracens on the Eastern fringe of the fourth-century Roman Empire, in what today is the border region between southern Turkey and Syria. Most of this short, vivid, and fast-paced narrative is recounted by Malchus in the first person.
The volume's introduction provides background information on the author, Jerome, and the historical and linguistic context of the Life, as well as detailed discussion of the work's style and its reception of earlier Christian and classical literature, ranging from its relationship with comedy, epic, and the ancient novel to the Apocryphal Apostolic Acts and martyr narratives. An exposition of the manuscript evidence is then followed by a new edition of the Latin text with an English translation, and a comprehensive commentary. The commentary explores the complex intertextuality of the work and provides readers with an understanding of its background, originality, and significance; it elucidates not only literary and philological questions but also points of ethnography and topography, and intellectual and social history.
This two-day conference seeks to re-investigate the relationship between narrative and argument i... more This two-day conference seeks to re-investigate the relationship between narrative and argument in ancient literature (broadly defined). Amidst strong trends in both rhetorical and narratological analysis, observations about the interplay between narratological structures and rhetorical methods of persuasion have tended to be at the margins of classical scholarship; but there are indications of a shift towards the foreground. For example, recent scholarship on Archaic and Classical Greek Lyric and Drama explores the discourse of ideology through the analysis of literary mechanisms and language shaping the political dimensions of the various genres. Another example of a recent shift is in the field of hagiography, where literary aspects are increasingly investigated in the context of the texts' assumed ideology, resulting in some interesting insights into the unexpected complexities of the relationship between what the texts appear to want to the readers to do or believe, and the narrative strategies employed in these texts. To explore and consolidate these trends, our conference brings together scholars interested in the interaction of political, literary, narratological, and cultural analysis of ancient literature to retrace the narrative mechanisms and discourses shaping the (im)balance between ideology, argument, and narration in ancient texts.
Early Latin: Constructs, Diversity, Reception, eds. J. N. Adams, Anna Chahoud, and Giuseppe Pezzini, Cambridge: CUP, 2023
This chapter focuses on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchu... more This chapter focuses on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchus, as well as the speeches quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with a view to understanding their composition and intended effects. Repetition provides a systematic framework for many of the traditional rhetorical figures, such as anaphora, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, antithesis and polyptoton (see D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969; cf. J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996). Using repetition as a lens allows analysis not only of longer extracts but also of very short fragments. These patterns are used to test the thesis that Roman oratory continued to respond to the ancient Latin form of the carmen even while being influenced by Greek rhetorical ideas (cf. on this point E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose, Columbus 2011). The transmission of the fragments under consideration is itself heavily influenced by the rhetorical and grammatical tradition, and my discussion accordingly takes account of the screening effects which this transmission has on the evidence.
Hagiography is a problematic yet widely used term with varying connotations; it resists narrow de... more Hagiography is a problematic yet widely used term with varying connotations; it resists narrow definition. Outside the hagiographa of the Hebrew Bible (i.e., the books other than the Law and the Prophets), the concept is based on a core of Christian Greek and Latin works, from the 2nd to 5th century ce, which range from martyr accounts to monastic and episcopal biographies. A significant factor motivating their composition and reception is the cult of saints. Biblical heroes, especially Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself are the primary models, but non-Christian literary traditions, especially biographical and novelistic, are also important influences.
Review of K. Degen, Der Gemeinsinn der Märtyrer. Die Darstellung gemeinwohlorientierten Handelns ... more Review of K. Degen, Der Gemeinsinn der Märtyrer. Die Darstellung gemeinwohlorientierten Handelns in den frühchristlichen Martyriumsberichten. Potsdamer Altertumswissen-schaftliche Beiträge, 64. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2018.
Narratologie und Intertextualität Zugänge zu spätantiken Text-Welten, herausgegeben von Christoph Brunhorn, Peter Gemeinhardt und Maria Munkholt Christensen, 2020
This paper looks at the function of the narrator in Jerome's Life of Hilarion in order to determi... more This paper looks at the function of the narrator in Jerome's Life of Hilarion in order to determine how this narratological entity affects the ideological heft of the text. I identify three main angles of perspective used by the narrator that can be described linguistically and argue that the sophisticated ways in which they are used indicates a subtle and complex strategy on the part of their author.
The Hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood, 2020
Among the arguments emerging from this volume is the cardinal position of Jerome in the developme... more Among the arguments emerging from this volume is the cardinal position of Jerome in the development of hagiography in general and for ascetic biography in particular. His imaginative responses to the Life of Antony set the tone for later adaptations, and their popularity is attested in the vast number of surviving manuscripts. Varied as his three Lives of Holy Men are in structure and content, close reading reveals some shared patterns of composition. This chapter identifies one such pattern and discusses its implications for the literary shaping of these hagiographical narratives. It focuses on the scenes of supplication which are found at pivotal points in all of the Lives: that is to say, on an intense request at a moment of crisis, articulated in a sequence of actions which combine movement and speech. My discussion has three aims: firstly, to bring out the intertextual relations between the three works; second, to investigate the links of this pattern with earlier texts; and, thirdly (and most importantly), to consider the motivation for using supplication as a literary structure, and to explore what it can tell us about Jerome’s construction of sainthood.
Learning Cities in Late Antiquity: The Local Dimension of Education, ed. Jan Stenger, 2019
This chapter proposes a new reading of Jerome’s Letter 107, which is addressed to the aristocrati... more This chapter proposes a new reading of Jerome’s Letter 107, which is addressed to the aristocratic Christian matron Laeta and offers advice on how to bring up her daughter. It argues that the educational prescriptions of this letter are not an end in themselves but a pretext for imagining the triumph of Christian asceticism, practised at the borders of the Empire, over the pagan elites associated with the urban fabric of Rome. The uploaded document contains the uncorrected proofs.
In Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen, Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Techn... more In Koen De Temmerman and Kristoffel Demoen, Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization, pp. 117-132. The uploaded document contains the uncorrected proofs.
This article analyses the narratorial attitudes of Jerome's fictional Lives of Paul 'the first he... more This article analyses the narratorial attitudes of Jerome's fictional Lives of Paul 'the first hermit' and Malchus 'the captive monk'. These works are among the first Latin examples of Christian monastic biography, or 'hagiography'. Using the narratological categories of distance (mimetic versus diegetic) and focalisation, the article seeks to determine to what extent these texts exhibit the biased and uncritical presentation which current usage considers to be typical of hagiographical discourse. Close readings of selected passages suggest that Jerome's narrators are flexible in their attitudes and do not impose a single, ideologically consistent, interpretation of the events narrated.
Jerome’s familiarity with, and use of, the comedies of Terence and Plautus are well documented. A... more Jerome’s familiarity with, and use of, the comedies of Terence and Plautus are well documented. As a source of archaising language, Roman comedy was highly prized during the second sophistic period: the use of comic language may be traced through Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium into Fronto and Apuleius. Regine May has demonstrated how Apuleius goes beyond mere antiquarianism in appropriating comic content along with comic language in his comic novel, the Metamorphoses. A related argument can be made concerning Jerome’s shortest and most novelistic saint’s life, the Vita Malchi. The language of this work echoes all sorts of genres, including epic, history, scholastic oratory, and comedy. I shall attempt to relate the comic linguistic elements to the interpretation of the actions depicted and demonstrate that humour, or comedy, is a valid key (although by no means the only one) for interpreting this edifying tale. As in other narrative prose genres, comic stock characters and plot elements are exploited to create expectations. Examples are the dour and inflexible versus the loving idealised father figure; the impetuous youth; the unscrupulous adulteress; and the officious, self-important fellow slave. These familiar stereotypes provide a measure of orientation in a new and as yet experimental fusion of genres; but, like Lucius in Apuleius, Malchus as the narrating character can also be read as undermining himself to some extent. The comic intertext therefore cautions the reader against taking Malchus’ pious protestations at face value: his pompousness and his moral fallibility require emotional distancing just as his vicissitudes call for empathy. This combined mechanism ultimately deepens the impact of the moral message of the Vita.
Review of O. Zwierlein, ed., Die Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi et Pionii und das Corpus Poly... more Review of O. Zwierlein, ed., Die Urfassungen der Martyria Polycarpi et Pionii und das Corpus Polycarpianum. Band 1: Editiones criticae. Band 2: Textgeschichte und Rekonstruktion. Polykarp, Ignatius und der Redaktor Ps.-Pionius
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Books by Christa Gray
This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.
The volume's introduction provides background information on the author, Jerome, and the historical and linguistic context of the Life, as well as detailed discussion of the work's style and its reception of earlier Christian and classical literature, ranging from its relationship with comedy, epic, and the ancient novel to the Apocryphal Apostolic Acts and martyr narratives. An exposition of the manuscript evidence is then followed by a new edition of the Latin text with an English translation, and a comprehensive commentary. The commentary explores the complex intertextuality of the work and provides readers with an understanding of its background, originality, and significance; it elucidates not only literary and philological questions but also points of ethnography and topography, and intellectual and social history.
Papers by Christa Gray
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/2020RR11GrayonDegen.pdf
This collection of essays aims to broaden our conception of the oratory of the Roman Republic by exploring how it was practiced by individuals other than Cicero, whether major statesmen, jobbing lawyers, or, exceptionally, the wives of politicians. It focuses particularly on the surviving fragments of such oratory, with individual essays tackling the challenges posed both by the partial and often unreliable nature of the evidence about these other Roman orators-often known to us chiefly through the tendentious observations of Cicero himself-and the complex intersections of the written fragments and the oral phenomenon. Collectively, the essays are concerned with the methods by which we are able to reconstruct non-Ciceronian oratory and the exploration of new ways of interpreting this evidence to tell us about the content, context, and delivery of those speeches. They are arranged into two thematic Parts, the first addressing questions of reception, selection, and transmission, and the second those of reconstruction, contextualization, and interpretation: together they represent a comprehensive overview of the non-Ciceronian speeches that will be of use to all ancient historians, philologists, and literary classicists with an interest in the oratory of the Roman Republic.
The volume's introduction provides background information on the author, Jerome, and the historical and linguistic context of the Life, as well as detailed discussion of the work's style and its reception of earlier Christian and classical literature, ranging from its relationship with comedy, epic, and the ancient novel to the Apocryphal Apostolic Acts and martyr narratives. An exposition of the manuscript evidence is then followed by a new edition of the Latin text with an English translation, and a comprehensive commentary. The commentary explores the complex intertextuality of the work and provides readers with an understanding of its background, originality, and significance; it elucidates not only literary and philological questions but also points of ethnography and topography, and intellectual and social history.
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/2020RR11GrayonDegen.pdf