[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Lecture: October 18, 2017

[Dimitri H. Gondicas]

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies



Lecture


Christmas in Constantinople:
Gregory of Nazianzus and the Performance of Theoria in Late Antiquity



Byron MacDougall

byrondm at princeton.edu<mailto:byrondm at princeton.edu>
Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow, Hellenic Studies



Respondent:  Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Classics



The orations of Gregory of Nazianzus on the major feasts of the Christian calendar ranked among the most popular and most widely translated works of literature in the Byzantine world. However, before being canonized as Saint Gregory the Theologian, Gregory was an Athenian-trained teacher of Classical Greek literature and as such learned to produce orations for public festivals within the ripe literary tradition of epideictic rhetoric. During his short tenure as Bishop of Constantinople (379-381), he produced a series of orations for Christian festivals that represent a crucial point in the reception and transformation of rhetorical theory, Platonism, and Imperial Greek oratory. In his oration for the Feast of the Nativity, Gregory draws on a tradition stretching from Plato's Phaedrus to the Second Sophistic to offer a rhetorical performance of theoria, the philosopher's contemplation of the divine.



Byron MacDougall specializes in Greek literature of the Late Antique and Byzantine periods. Between studying Classics at Harvard (B.A., 2007) and Brown (Ph.D., 2015), he was a secondary school Greek and Latin teacher. He has held research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks and at the University of Vienna, and his publications include studies on the Cappadocian Fathers, the Ancient Greek and Latin novels, and the reception of Plato from the Second Sophistic to Byzantium.



Wednesday, October 18, 2017

4:30 p.m.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103




Cosponsored by the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity

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