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    Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome
    Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome
    Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome
    Ebook1,120 pages17 hours

    Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome

    By Susanna Elm

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    About this ebook

    This groundbreaking study brings into dialogue for the first time the writings of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman Emperor, and his most outspoken critic, Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, a central figure of Christianity. Susanna Elm compares these two men not to draw out the obvious contrast between the Church and the Emperor’s neo-Paganism, but rather to find their common intellectual and social grounding. Her insightful analysis, supplemented by her magisterial command of sources, demonstrates the ways in which both men were part of the same dialectical whole. Elm recasts both Julian and Gregory as men entirely of their times, showing how the Roman Empire in fact provided Christianity with the ideological and social matrix without which its longevity and dynamism would have been inconceivable.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateApr 10, 2012
    ISBN9780520951655
    Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome
    Author

    Susanna Elm

    Susanna Elm is Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity.

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      An amazing book! Informative, really uses the primary sources well and shows a great grasp on the secondary literature.

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    Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church - Susanna Elm

    Introduction

    Occorre diffidare del quasi-uguale … del praticamente identico, del pressapoco, dell’oppure.… Le differenze possone. essere piccole, ma portare a conseguenze radicalmente diverse.

    —PRIMO LEVI, IL SISTEMA PERIODICO

    If we have treated this subject with a few words, it is to illustrate the difficulty involved in attempting to find the word that has the power to restore the entire world and to illuminate it with the light of knowledge.¹

    —GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, ORATION 2.39

    This is a book about two powerful, enduring, and competing visions of universalism in the fourth century: Christianity and the Roman Empire. Yet, I will argue that these visions were in fact one, since Christianity was essentially Roman. Christianity’s universalism lasted because it was, from the beginning, deeply enmeshed in the foundational ideologies granting Rome’s supremacy. In the crucial fourth century of imperial patronage and religious conflict, Christian universalism was even more profoundly influenced by those ancient Roman ideological foundations. The book demonstrates these claims through the figures of one of Rome’s ancient foundations’ defenders, the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate, and of one of Julian’s Christian attackers, Gregory of Nazianzus. Focusing on these protagonists and their vision of (Greek) Rome, the book engages these questions: What made Christianity last? How did it adapt to continuously changing external circumstances while retaining a core message? I will argue that the Roman Empire provided Christianity the ideological and social matrix without which its longevity and dynamism would have been inconceivable. This matrix was Rome’s universalism. By what means was that universalism expressed, and how did Christian Romans adapt it? How did Greek Roman Christians integrate Christian normaltive writings of Gospel and salvation into the matrix that Rome provided? What aspects did Christians retain, which ones jettison, and why? Only by observing this process in the literary duels between Julian and Gregory may we see the adaptation and transformation of traditional Roman themes in Christian self-definition, theology, and political theory.

    UNIVERSALISM AND GOVERNANCE

    Roman universalism, Romanitas properly understood, has many facets, not least the proper hierarchical arrangement of the various ethnicities Rome encompassed. What mixture of Greekness, or Hellenism, and Romanness best expressed Rome’s supremacy? Even more crucial, what constellation of (ethnically connoted)divinities had caused Rome’s greatness and was thus the guarantor of its security, prosperity, and permanence? After Constantine had granted Christianity the status of a legal religion, such questions were far from resolved. The gods of the Greeks and the Romans preserved their influence and power for many who belonged to the empire’s elite. Yet, for those who were Christian it was not certain how the Christian God should be understood and how the God as Trinity would safeguard the power of the Romans. All agreed that Rome’s power was divine in origin and that appropriate comprehension of the divine was essential to governing Rome’s Oikoumen . Under intense debate in the fourth century was the nature of that divinity. Since to misread the divine will could spell disaster for all, even small theological differences could have significant impact, if misunderstood by those who ruled the empire, the emperor and the elites. These rulers ensured the continued protection of the divine at the root of Rome’s power, because all had been originally created and instituted by that divinity, from each individual human being to the manner in which (just) wars should be fought and cities governed, buildings and temples built or destroyed, public festivals enacted, emperors honored, laid to rest, and divinized.

    Thus, because of the cosmic dimension of Rome’s universal power, and hence the necessity to comprehend the divine will precisely, it is not surprising that much of the discussions among those engaged in leading the empire in the fourth century, especially in the Greek-speaking part of the realm, focused on normative, if not socially canonical, texts by Plato and Aristotle on proper rule in its relation to the divine. Here, the philosopher as leader played a central role. How and in what manner should the emperor rule as philosopher?What philosophical life, in what composition of active engagement and retreat devoted to contemplation of the normative texts, could best ascertain the good rule of the realm and thus the salvation of all its inhabitants? Debates concerning the true philosophical life were in essence debates about the correct governance of the Roman Empire, the equivalent of the known world. Especially because by the time of Julian and Gregory Rome’s allegiance to the divine that had caused and guaranteed its greatness had recently shifted—from the gods of the Greeks and the Romans, as expressed by the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Gauls, or Hebrews, to the Trinity—the true philosopher’s privileged access to the divine was of particularly vital importance. Only a true philosopher, whether as emperor or as an emperor’s advisor, could achieve the purity necessary to comprehend the divine to the degree possible for humans. Only such a figure could mediate appropriately between the divine and the rest of mankind, and therefore only he, either as emperor, public official, or advisor to those in office, could guide all in the manner appropriate to guarantee Rome’s continued well-being.² An increasing number of the elite men engaged in discussing the correct philosophical life, either as public officials or as advisors to public officials, including the emperor, were Christian: men better known as bishops (or presbyters and priests).³ Thus, this is also a book about the role and function of the bishop in the later Roman Empire.

    JULIAN THE EMPEROR AND GREGORY THE THEOLOGIAN

    Two elite men are central to my argument, Flavius Claudius Iulianus, emperor from 361 to 363, the last scion of the second Flavian dynasty, who entered history as Julian the Apostate, and Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop of Constantinople from 380 to 381, better known by his honorific, the Theologian. I have chosen these men because they stand as paradigmatic for their generation and their time, and for the empire of the Romans (h arch t n Rh mai n) after the Tetrarchs and before Theodosius I, a world in the process of adjusting to the shift in its religious affiliation. These men also stand as paradigmatic for the way in which modern scholars conceptualize and discuss this period: pagan versus Christian.⁴

    Julian the Apostate is familiar to many. From the moment of his death, on a Persian battlefield, in 363, to today there has been hardly a year when he was not the subject of a written work in one genre or another.⁵ As I have shown elsewhere, the extensive scholarly focus on his role as emperor and as pagan has made him in to an ambivalent figure.⁶ Because he was an emperor, modern scholars of ancient history study him for the manner in which he governed, but because he was first Christian and then pagan, he was anomalous among Roman emperors of the fourth century, so that not even the manner in which he governed is seen as representative of later Roman imperial governance.⁷ Though he may be attractive for ancient historians as emperor, Julian’s religious affiliation makes him an outsider; he is studied as entirely sui generis. Not even his extensive writings, more than we possess of any other Roman emperor, have received the in-depth scholarly analysis one would expect, in part because they discuss topics often not considered the purview of modern ancient historians: that is, philosophy and religion. For most modern historians Julian the emperor is, thus, not a person representative of his status and time, while modern scholars of church history and even more so theology consider him, as emperor and pagan, of little relevance to the history of Christianity.

    Gregory of Nazianzus also occupies an ambivalent position as object of much scholarly interest yet also an outsider, for different reasons. Born, in 329 or 330, into the Greek-speaking provincial elite, he became known, with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, as one of the three Cappadocian Fathers of the Church. He was the principal architect of Neo-Nicene orthodoxy, and his formulation of the nature of the Trinity, "to preserve God as in essence one [homoousios] and to profess three persons [hypostaseis], each with its own characteristics," became the official expression of orthodoxy in the Nicene creed for generations.⁸ Gregory’s impact as a theological thinker was such that in 451 the council of Chalcedon honored him officially as the Theologian, a title previously bestowed only on John the Evangelist. Scripture serves as a good barometer of Gregory’s influence. Throughout the Byzantine realm, the scriptures were the only writings published more widely than those of Gregory, whose immense oeuvre soon became part of the school curriculum.⁹ Gregory’s impact is not limited to the Greek-speaking world of the Roman East and its successor, medieval Rus. His Orations formed part of Ambrose of Milan’s library, were translated into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia, read by Augustine, and taken to heart by Gregory the Great.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, it was Gregory the Theologian who wrote Julian the emperor into Julian the Apostate.

    Paradoxically, however, Gregory of Nazianzus’s rhetorical mastery and his fluency as a theologian contributed to his marginal position in scholarly and historiographic traditions emerging out of the Latin West. Though Gregory holds a firm place among French, Italian, and German theologians and Patristic scholars (though slightly less so among church historians), he has until recently been relatively neglected in the English-speaking world, and often treated as an adjunct to the more widely known Basil of Caesarea.¹¹ Despite the current renaissance of scholarship concerning Gregory, the basic assumptions regarding him have changed less than one might imagine.¹² This Gregory is passionately devoted to withdrawal, retreat, and retirement, so much so that he was incapable of operating successfully in the real world. In Raymond van Dam’s words, Gregory, whom contemporaries and subsequent readers admired for the fluency of his theological treatises about the nature of the Trinity…, ‘stuttered’ as he remembered and recorded memories about himself.¹³

    For most scholars, Gregory of Nazianzus was an abject ecclesiastical failure as reluctant priest and lackluster adjunct bishop to his father, the bishop of Nazianzus. After his ordination as bishop of Sasima he refused to assume his duties and disappeared for three years to Seleucia, emerging as the leader of the Nicene (that is, orthodox) congregation at Constantinople in 379. Less than a year later, the new emperor, Theodosius I, within three days of his arrival, made him bishop of the capital city. A mere nine months later, however, Gregory, while presiding over the first ecumenical council in 381, resigned and retired to his country estate, forced out by rival bishops from Alexandria and Antioch.¹⁴ French and Italian scholars attribute such fits and starts to Gregory’s sensitive soul as romantique avant la lettre. English scholars see an indecisive, pusillanimous, labile man.¹⁵ As a consequence, scholars concerned with the role and function of the bishop in late antiquity rarely consider Gregory’s writings for their purposes. Unlike, say, Basil of Caesarea, he is not seen as a representative of the office.

    Such near-canonical characterizations of Gregory as gifted theologian but weak man and disastrous bishop piqued my curiosity. Would Theodosius I—the emperor, who by law mandated katholikos (universal) Christianity as the religio of all Romans at a time of high tension—have made bishop of Constantinople, the New Rome, a man so weak, insecure, and indecisive? Could a man who stuttered about his private life, overwhelmed by his desire for retreat and abhorrence of public office—and that is how he characterized himself in his writings—become and remain the foremost Christian authority for centuries? Gregory’s pronouncements on what he did and did not consider orthodox gained him the bishop’s see of Constantinople over and against intense competition from others poised to occupy that position, and his speeches on the topic informed Theodosius’s imperial legislation on heresy.¹⁶ What does that much influence on a ruling emperor by a soul so malleable, romantic, and entirely apolitical say about the relation of power and authority, the nature of orthodoxy and heresy in late antiquity? What does it tell us about the empire of the Romans and Christianity? Perhaps that it was no wonder that it declined and fell so speedily?¹⁷

    GREGORY AND THE BISHOPS

    If we are to assume that a Roman emperor selected his top personnel, how plausible is it that Theodosius chose as bishop of the New Rome such a loser, devoid of what one would call today a sense of political power?¹⁸ My answer is that Gregory was no such man. This a priori assessment required a different perspective on Gregory’s writings.¹⁹ If his self-presentation—as a man caught between his desire to live the true philosophical life and his assumption of the very public office that ostensibly repelled him—did not prevent him from being called to the capital and gaining imperial attention and approval, then this true philosophical life must be investigated in a context other than that proposed by most scholars of Christianity.

    For if, as scholars have argued, late-antique bishops professed a troubled, ambivalent relation to public power, bound to their cities and sees, but derived their true legitimacy from the spiritual authority gained in the monastic life, then why, like Gregory, were so many of these monk-bishops at or near the centers of power?²⁰ Did bishops—as most modern studies of the office of the bishop argue, critiqued in Claudia Rapp’s seminal work Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity—become

    increasingly involved in nonreligious responsibilities and duties, which then had to be aligned with their spiritual and ascetic virtues as private persons, virtues considered to be the true source of their authority and derived from the New Testament?²¹

    My first encounter with Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 2, On the Priesthood, suggested different causal sequences.²² The men who led the church both before and after Constantine derived their authority from their social position, as members of the provincial elites. Members of that group, made homogeneous through shared education, or paideia, were groomed for positions of power and authority: that is, for the activities Peter Norton described as non-religious.²³ Rather than reconciling nonreligious functions with a prior (private) spiritual and ascetic dimension that had emerged out of the New Testament, Gregory’s work suggests that elite men born to rule the empire integrated their understanding of scripture into the matrix of their world, which was shaped by the classic discourse of political power that formed the ideological, divinely authorized foundation of Rome’s supremacy.²⁴

    As a consequence, such elite persons as Christian leaders—that is, bishops and presbyters—were at or near centers of power because they wished to be there. As the chapters that follow show, they were frequently on the move from see to see, eager to be as close as possible to the imperial court and those associated with it. The desire for such closeness shaped the lives of many of the late-antique bishops whom we know sufficiently well to grasp their movements and interests—those bishops who wrote or were written about (and hence belonged to the social elites)—even though their rhetoric persistently and pervasively extolled ascetic retreat and contemplation.²⁵

    Once we establish as the methodological starting point Gregory’s role as a member of the provincial-Greek Roman elite on the make—and not as Gregory the Theologian, bishop, and saint—we see that his asceticism in fact establishes his authenticity and authority in the competition to outdo his peers and opponents, who also advocated a life of retreat and involvement. Both Gregory’s peers and his principal audience were the local elite, including the new service aristocracy that was then spreading throughout the empire. These men became prosperous serving in the military or civilian imperial bureaucracy and increased their wealth by acquiring large landed estates and running them for profit. They helped fuel the economic growth and urban expansion of the East in the fourth century. These novi homines, new men, many of whom sat in the new Constantinopolitan senate, were scions of the native municipal elites, like Gregory and his brother, Caesarius (one of Julian’s physicians), or they took over the social roles previously held by the municipal elite to become the new ruling class. Most were Christian, and for their benefit Gregory formulated the Christian rules for public conduct and the affairs of the politeia.²⁶ In so doing, he also defined what it meant to be a bishop: to lead the true philosophical life of active involvement in the affairs of the politeia for the benefit of the Oikoumen of the Romans now Christian.

    That Gregory managed to write himself into the capital, where he was noticed by the emperor’s advisors and eventually by the emperor, means that he used all the rhetorical means available to elite men of his time to attain prestige through his writings. His impact was so enormous not because he differed from his peers but because he was better than most at writing himself prestige.²⁷ What then to make of his statements of perpetual tension between his desire for contemplation and the loathsome duty to assume office and to act? When read in their immediate elite context rather than in a literary genealogy that connects them back to Origen, Clement, and Philo, Gregory’s writings do not reveal the psyche of a troubled man torn between contemplative retreat and public office, and in conflict with his father.²⁸ Taking Gregory’s highly praised rhetorical mastery seriously shows that in adopting that persona, Gregory evoked all the elite’s notions of prized and shared stability as normative ideals, and fashioned himself a life that embodied and presented authority, even power, beyond what he was entitled to by birth: the true philosophical life. Gregory persuaded his audience with lasting effect. His concept of the true philosophical life is the blueprint of episcopal leadership for the orthodox bishop, suggesting that our modern conceptions of power and authority, specifically ecclesiastical power and authority, narrow unduly our perception of what ecclesiastical authority might have looked like then.²⁹

    JULIAN AND GREGORY IN CONTEXT

    To arrive at such a reading of Gregory’s writings required placing them and Gregory rigorously into the contemporary context and to write what I call a micro-social history of ideas.³⁰ This context included men such as Themistius, Libanius, Eunomius, Aetius, Basil, Caesarius, Eustathius, and, last but not least, Gregory’s father and men of his generation. The years when Gregory emerged on the scene as presbyter and advisor to his father, the bishop of Nazianzus, were, however, dominated by the figure of the emperor Julian. Yet, modern scholars have never brought into dialogue the writings of Julian and of Gregory, divided by their prima facie historiographic identities as pagan Roman emperor and Christian theologian.

    Both men belonged to the first generation born in a Roman Empire in which Christianity was legal, supported and even sponsored by the imperial court. Both were deeply engaged in the dynamic process of formulating the consequences of that recent shift in religious affiliation in theory and in practice, fully aware of the actions of their elders (such as the elder Gregory and the emperor Constantius), during whose lifetime Christianity had become legalized. Both understood that to formulate the meaning of being a Roman Greek and a Christian required what each despised in his opponents: innovation.³¹ Both engaged in an intense search for the right words as consequential acts with the power to order their world and to restore to order what they thought had gone amiss.³² Both men belonged to the governing elites of the Roman Empire, one the nephew of the emperor Constantine the Great, the other a scion of the first family of a provincial town on the route linking Constantinople and Antioch. One eventually became sole emperor; the other, bishop of Constantinople. Each held his position for a brief time, Julian twenty-two months and Gregory a mere nine; but the impact of both, especially on posterity, stands in inverse proportion to their short sojourns on the summits of their careers.

    When Julian and Gregory are read together, the extent to which Gregory laid the foundations of his intellectual oeuvre in direct counterpoint to Julian’s writings and actions becomes apparent. Nothing less than the vision of Rome—how the empire should be led—was at stake. That vision included good governance as the right way to deduce the divine through analysis of its mediation between its transcendent self and its material creation, the cosmos and man, to permit those in leadership positions to safeguard the Oikoumen of the Romans by guiding it back to the divine: that was the supreme duty of God’s first slave, the emperor as philosopher and priest, and that of his philosopher-priests as advisors (bishops and presbyters, if the emperor was Christian).

    Julian and Gregory both claimed to have been divinely chosen philosophers, endowed with the mandate to mediate between the divine and mankind for the common good and the salvation of all in their keep, the Oikoumen of the Romans. Both argued that their gods represented the true universality of Rome. To honor their gods in the right way was thus the only means for all to achieve salvation, and hence the sole guarantor of the imperium of the Romans. For one of them, the gods of the Greeks and the Romans embodied the correct mixture of both Greekness (Hell nismos) and Romanitas, which had made Rome great and kept it that way; whereas for the other, the power of the Romans had grown together with belief in Christ. In the event, Gregory saw Julian’s death as a clear sign of who was right. Yet, the differences between Julian and Gregory were small, though significant. Because Julian claimed, by imperial letter, that Christians had voluntarily abandoned the universality of Greek Rome for the limited and exclusionary God of the Galileans, Gregory was forced to refute the emperor on all counts. That refutation made Gregory into the Theologian, the Father of the Church. Thus God, in his inexplicable wisdom, made Julian too a Father of the Church.

    Focusing on what unites rather than divides Julian the emperor and Gregory the Theologian reveals that the boundary between pagan and Christian was so porous that these terms lose their analytical value. Gregory, paradigmatic of his elite contemporaries, was not alone in wishing to influence those in power. Others, pagans as well as Christians, had the same wish. After all, when Constantine made Christianity legal, very little differentiated Christian intellectuals from their non-Christian intellectual neighbors; what separated them were nuances. Constantine’s edict, however, made Christianity an option for the men who governed, and that changed the equation. As more elite intellectuals became Christian, they had to transform Christianity into a religion for rulers. Here, the shared heritage comes into play.

    Arguments over who truly owned logoi, the heritage of Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, and so on (that is, Hellenism), were central for Julian and Gregory as well as for all the others fighting over that vision as the paramount source of ascetic and spiritual authority, the primary font of the true philosophical life. This was the matrix to which scripture was added (by almost all participants) to formulate what became, through Gregory’s writings, the intellectual foundation of the Byzantine world, including Nicene orthodoxy.³³ Because this was the common matrix, divisions and alliances formed over the right and wrong ways to apply, for example, Aristotelian language theory and logic rather than along pagan versus Christian lines. These right and wrong ways of using the technical apparatus of advanced paideia also, I argue, marked the difference between orthodox and heretical. Gregory thus used against (the heretic) Eunomius the very arguments that he had used to cast the deceased emperor as the Apostate: neither Julian nor Eunomius comprehended grammar and rhetoric—never mind Aristotelian logic—the right way.

    Closeness to Julian, or to Constantius, and then later on to Jovian, Procopius, and Valens, was not primarily a matter of religious affiliation either, for all these emperors sponsored Eunomius, and especially Caesarius, Gregory’s brother and one of Julian’s physicians, and like Themistius, a successful new man. The degree to which those engaged in these arguments presented their expertise, how much they persuaded their peers and managed to write themselves close to the emperors and their advisors, in turn, determined who and therefore what would be considered right (orthodox) teaching. The emperor and his advisors determined what Christian doctrinal formulation (or what form of paganism, in Julian’s case) won at any given moment, and the thinking of the emperor and his advisors changed. Emperors reacted to what their advisors declared were correct deductions of the divine and its will, and their reaction, often expressed in edicts, affirmed the selected pronouncement as right (orthos).

    Placing Gregory and Julian into their shared context therefore required a tightened focus and, at the same time, an opening of the perspective. Thus, what follows is about Julian as much as it is about Gregory (albeit Julian as seen from Gregory’s perspective). I present a close reading of Julian’s writings and of those Gregory composed during and immediately after the emperor’s reign, his first six orations, to show how these writings were in dialogue.³⁴ Gregory formulated his theological writings in direct response to the writings and actions of Julian, engaging in the process not only Julian and his friends and advisors, high-ranking public officials as philosophers and rhetoricians, including the Christian Eunomius, but also those against whom Julian set himself, most important among them Constantius and his (pagan) philosopher Themistius.³⁵ All these men engaged the earlier debates about the correct interpretation of the divine will (in part known as Christological debates) that were reflected in the writings of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Eusebius of Caesarea, and others. All used the same methods—those of paideia, the normative foundation of Greek Rome’s supremacy, as epitomized in the writings of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Dio Chrysostom, and the scriptures—to achieve excellence and to claim a level playing field, even with emperors, and to define their own positions over and against their friends’ and competitors’.³⁶

    Bringing together these two men and their writings dramatically crystallized scholarly approaches to pagan Rome and its Christian successor. Scholars writing on Julian do not read Gregory’s writings—as a Christian theologian and a failed bishop he is assumed to have little to say about how later Roman emperors ruled and managed their courts. Julian’s philosophical works have received far less attention than one would expect given the enormous scholarly interest in him. Nevertheless, it is here that the emperor theorized the implications of his role as the philosopher, priest, and emperor: how he should lead the true philosophical life that would enable him to lead the realm as mandated by the gods.³⁷ Similarly, though Gregory of Nazianzus continues to receive a great deal of attention from theologians, and increasingly also from church historians and historians interested in the social history of the later Roman Empire, they do not consider relevant the life and work of Julian, the apostate emperor. This attitude reflects a general (though diminishing) tendency to limit the impact of classical philosophy and rhetoric on Gregory to questions of form rather than content, ignoring Julian’s potential effect on the contours of Gregory’s evolving concepts, philosophical, theological, and nonreligious. Social and church historians know of Julian’s impact on Gregory’s life but are unaware of his effect on Gregory’s theology, perhaps for reasons similar to those that keep historians from considering Julian’s philosophical writings.³⁸ Yet, both men shared far more than divided them, even if their small differences were at the same time highly significant.

    Bringing Julian and Gregory into close dialogue has, I hope, accented another key point. Although I have attempted to decipher and present the debated themes and concepts as codes rich with intertextual allusions, notions of decorum, and the subtleties of social stratification, I know that I have missed a great deal. I might be able to point back to Plato, Aristotle, Dio Chrysostom, and other authors of the Second Sophistic, or to imperial notions of the Tetrarchs, even to Trajan, Aurelian, and Augustus, for some of the ideas, themes, and messages in play, but I have often felt tone-deaf among the ancient persons who were able not only to differentiate between, say, Bach and Chopin, but to point to the conductor, soloists, and recording date; I imagine that paideia functioned that way, so that it was enough to hear a bar to identify a work, its composer, and all the nuances that distinguish the interpreters. In my translation, above all of Gregory’s work, I therefore took pains to stress his classical heritage: that is, I consciously sought to retranslate him from a Christian saint back into a classical philosopher, by translating key words that both he and Julian use the same way. For example, I render to koinon or ta koina as realm or commonwealth, and not, when Gregory uses it, as congregation. That way (and by citing a fair amount of Greek technical terminology) I hope to underscore the enormous sophistication with which all these men (pagan, Christian, orthodox, heretical) used the instrumentarium of paideia to make their points, some subtle and others less so.³⁹ As a side effect I hope to remove Constantius, Julian, Gregory, Eunomius, Themistius, Libanius, and others from their corsets—heretical Arian Christian emperor; idiosyncratic pagan revivalist emperor; sensitive apolitical Christian ascetic and monk theologian; heretic; pagan philosopher; and rhetorician—and bring them to life as persons entirely of their own time, improvising on a common theme.

    1. Levi, Sistema, Potassio, 63, Gr. Naz. Or. 2.39, ε ρε ν τινα τ ν π ντας καταρτ σαι δυν μενον λ γον και λαμπρ ναι τω φωτι της γν σεως.

    2. Philosophers, a specific group among the elite, were considered by birth, education, and personal charisma particularly close to the divine, and because these men were able to elaborate what the divine intended an emperor to do, good emperors consulted them as advisors, as Dominic O’Meara has shown in Platonopolis. Hahn, Philosoph.

    3. Rapp, Holy Bishops, 26, 44–45, shows that the sources rarely differentiate between priest and bishop.

    4. By using two persons as a case study, my book belongs to a recent historiographic trend reinserting individual agency back into a more structural analysis.

    5. Rosen’s last chapter in Julian discusses Julian’s reception in the West until the present. Julian’s reception in the Byzantine and Russian East remains a desideratum (though Rosen mentions V. Mayakovsky).

    6. S. Elm, Hellenism.

    7. See Schmidt-Hofner’s excellent analysis of scholarly approaches to late Roman imperial governance, Reagieren, 80–102.

    8. Gr. Naz. Or. 2.36.

    9. Forty-four orations in all rhetorical genres, from apologiae to panegyrics; 249 letters; and about 19, 000 lines of poetry in all meters.

    10. S. Elm, Hellenism, 493–94.

    11. McGuckin, St. Gregory; Holman, The Hungry; Van Dam, Kingdom; idem, Families; idem, Becoming Christian; Gautier, Retraite; Daley, Gregory, 1–61; Sterk, Renouncing the World, 119–40.

    12. Lugaresi’s and especially McLynn’s important work on Gregory, now collected in Christian Politics, set a different agenda.

    13. Van Dam, Self-Representation, 140.

    14. McLynn, "’Genere Hispanus’"; Villegas, Gregorio.

    15. McGuckin, St. Gregory, 34. For Daley, Gregory, 2, Gregory is oversensitive, self-pitying, demanding, dark in his views of humanity. Daley characterizes the contradictions in Gregory’s self-presentation as those of a pacific loner ill-suited to the conflicts of public administration while active as bishop. Van Dam, Families, 6, 46, and 93, attributes Gregory’s stuttering to his image of himself primarily as a son, whose one true love had always been his mother.

    16. McLynn, Moments.

    17. The topic has been injected with new vigor by Liebeschuetz, Ward Perkins, Heather, and others, reacting against scholarship that, in their view, overemphasizes continuity given the dramatic changes that affected Rome’s West in the fourth and early fifth century. Though the Mediterranean world by 750 had undergone profound changes, the fourth-century East was transformed, and did not decline; Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 10–13.

    18. The role of merit in late-antique imperial patronage networks and in the choice of high administrators remains debated: Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire.

    19. In what follows I use Gregory’s writings primarily as edited in the Sources Chrétiennes series, based on Tomas Sinko’s editorial principles. New editions may alter specifics of the texts. Gregory edited and revised his works in the 380s in Nazianzus. Contrary to McGuckin, and to Beeley, Gregory, I do not seek to identify what parts of the orations Gregory may have altered in the 380s; the manuscripts give no indications of his editorial hand. Daley, Gregory, 259–63, lists editions, ancient commentaries and Lives, and the most recent English translations. Unless otherwise specified, all translations in the following are mine.

    20. As Sterk shows in Renouncing the World, the figure of the monk-bishop is a later evolution. Most studies of the late Roman imperial court and its administration exclude bishops, despite Drake’s Constantine and the work of T. D. Barnes, in particular his Athanasius; Schmidt-Hofner, Reagieren, 80–102.

    21. Norton, Episcopal Elections, 8; Rapp, Holy Bishops, 3–22, criticizes scholars’ separation of religious and secular in discussing episcopal leadership; at 24–33 she observes that a bishop’s personal virtues, important before Constantine, remained so.

    22. Oration 2, composed in 362/3, is the earliest theoretical reflection on the topic. Ps.–Maximus the Confessor’s loci communes most frequently cite Or. 2, even though it does not belong to the so-called liturgical sequence that became the most widely circulated of Gregory’s orations. For Beeley, Gregory, 237, Or. 2 is the fountainhead of pastoral reflection in both Eastern and Western Christendom. It is required reading for aspiring Russian Orthodox priests; S. Elm, Diagnostic Gaze, 86, 99; Maslov, "Oikei sis," 38.

    23. Norton, Episcopal Elections, 8. Brown’s discussion of paideia in Power and Persuasion remains unsurpassed. For a detailed analysis of scholarly notions of private and public episcopal authority, Sessa, Formation.

    24. Lizzi Testa, Potere, and Leyser, Authority, are foundational for the evolution of the role of the bishop.

    25. I use elites because most of the men I discuss did not belong to the aristocracy, a term more apt for Western senatorial families: Salzman, Making of a Christian Aristocracy; S. Elm, Programmatic Life.Members of the clergy came from a variety of social strata, but the majority of those present in the historical record (including inscriptions) belonged to the elite, including the elite’s lower end. Inscriptions show a degree of upward social mobility, but in the main the move was lateral: those who joined the clergy often acquired an ecclesiastic position—measured more by influence than as part of a cursus honorum—of a social status similar to what they already held, though some advanced higher as clerics than they otherwise might have. Here, the clergy parallels the upward mobility of other branches in the imperial administration. Geographic differences need to be taken into account. For Italy, Sotinel,Recruitement; for Asia Minor, S. Hübner, Klerus, an analysis based on a small sample of inscriptions; Haensch, R mische Amtsinhaber; idem, Inscriptions; idem, Rolle.

    26. Sarris, Rehabilitating the Great Estate; Banaji, Agrarian Change, 20–22; Heather, New Men.

    27. I have profited enormously from Sailor, Writing, 6–50.

    28. Because this has been excellently done by others, I purposely do not emphasize Gregory’s intertextual place in relation to Philo, Clement, Origen, and Gregory the Wonder-worker, nor do I compare him explicitly to Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. Though those authors undoubtedly influenced Gregory, this influence has dominated scholarly analysis to the exclusion of most else (e.g., Beeley, McGuckin, Spidlik, Plangieux).

    29. See also S. Elm, ‘Pierced by Bronze Needles,’ Asket, The Dog That Did Not Bark, and Diagnostic Gaze.

    30. Recent research demonstrates the degree to which episcopal authority is locally defined. Differences between the city of Rome and Italy, Alexandria and Egypt, Antioch and its hinterland are significant, as is the geographic origin, educational background, and social position of the officeholder, who created authority in accordance with his world, as Brown observed in Authority. Conversely, comparisons between, say, Paulinus of Nola and John Chrysostom highlight the shared cultural notions of paideia.

    31. Innovation (καινοτομ α, lit. cutting freshly into something) was fraught with tensions in a society as devoted to harmony, order, stability, and tradition as the Roman Empire. Though innovation could restore order and stability when correct, it more often caused disorder, instability, and civil war—and in such cases represented a misreading of the divine will, supremely expressed through order, stability, harmony, and unity.

    32. Gregory uses καταρτ ζειν, to order or to restore or to form: LSJ s.v.

    33. Greek Christians thus did not conquer, adopt, or appropriate logoi and paideia (that is, Hellenism or pagan culture), because one does not adopt, conquer, or appropriate what one possesses by birth, education, and divine design. Averil Cameron’s desiderata in Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 120–41, remain, calling for different scholarly approaches to discuss the relation of Christian author to classical culture. Kaldellis, Hellenism.

    34. I do not argue that Julian responded to Gregory directly. I do argue, however, that the emperor was familiar with current theological debates and those associated with them, and that he intervened in these debates. Gregory, in turn, need not have read the emperor’s works; he knew them well enough to construct his Julian.

    35. Gregory’s political, philosophical, and theological writings are one and the same.

    36. Because I foreground Gregory’s relation to his contemporaries and their shared classical matrix, I highlight scriptural passages in his work only as required by the context.

    37. Modern scholars of philosophy largely disregard Julian’s philosophical writings as neither innovative nor systematic.

    38. Even Demoen, in Pagan and Biblical Exempla, argues that Gregory’s formation in paideia offered him only formal material that did not affect the content of his theology.

    39. Critical commentaries on Gregory’s orations, such as those on Orations 4 and 5 by Kurmann in Gregor and by Lugaresi in Gregory of Nazianzus, Contro Giuliano and Morte, remain desiderata.

    PART ONE

    1

    Nazianzus and the Eastern Empire, 330–361

    I have been beaten, and I recognize my defeat: I have surrendered to the Lord and have come to supplicate him (Gr. Naz. Or 2.1).¹ With these words Gregory the Younger of Nazianzus begins his second oration, delivered probably on Easter 363 and circulated soon thereafter. This oration represents the earliest systematic treatment of the Christian priesthood propagated by a member of the Greek-speaking Roman elite.² Gregory’s treatise on the nature of Christian leadership had a profound and lasting impact, for example on John Chrysostom, another member of that elite and bishop of Constantinople. Chrysostom’s work on the priesthood, based on Gregory’s, then influenced another bishop in an imperial residence, Ambrose of Milan, through whom it gained purchase in the West. Rufinus’s Latin translation of Gregory’s oration influenced Western writers directly, including Augustine and Jerome, who had heard Gregory speak in Constantinople, as well as Paulinus of Nola and Julian of Eclanum. Gregory the Great’s work on the priesthood also reflects his acquaintance with Gregory of Nazianzus’s, gained either during the former’s stay in Constantinople or through Rufinus’s translation. In sum, Gregory’s Oration 2, On the Priesthood, became immensely influential in the East and permeated the Western tradition. But in 363 this was all in the future.³

    When Gregory spoke the opening words (or words very similar to those he chose to preserve for posterity), he had just returned to his ancestral city of Nazianzus from a sojourn at Annesi, a small village in Pontus where the family of his friend Basil, later bishop of Caesarea, owned an estate.⁴ Ostensibly, his departure and return are the key themes of the second oration. Given its length, however-117 chapters—we can surmise that Gregory’s reasons for leaving and coming back were complex. Indeed, they range from his own affairs to those of the oikoumen of the Romans and to the very cosmos and its genesis. All these reasons, personal, local, and the global and cosmic, were seamlessly intertwined in Oration 2, the principal focus of Part II of this book. But not only in Oration 2. Gregory in all his writings from the early 360s—that is, his first six orations-formed a densely woven tapestry that included the same elements, from the personal to the cosmological. These orations were composed like an instrument with many different strings (to use his own intertextual metaphor), each one activated at appropriate moments but all sounding together in harmony as a comprehensive whole. As such these six orations contain the nucleus of Gregory’s interpretation of the nature of the divine; its relation to the sensible, material world; and the consequences of that relation for humans seeking to guide others toward the divine. In these orations Gregory delineates which persons had been divinely entrusted to lead mankind and how they ought to comport themselves to approach the divine so that they could lead others to it. In short, these orations are the foundational work that made Gregory the Theologian.

    Gregory formulated most of these concepts in Nazianzus, and they were in the first instance intended for a local audience. But Nazianzus was not an island. Gregory’s thoughts and positions engaged some of the most intense debates then gripping men of the Greek-speaking elites of the Eastern Roman Empire and reverberating among their Western contemporaries. These debates revolved around the nature of the divine and its interaction with the material world and humanity, crystallized in the way in which the divine was thought to speak to humans. How the divine and these interactions were understood affected the qualities considered necessary to lead the oikoumen and its inhabitants to salvation. To understand Gregory’s second oration and its impact we need to know first what the state of the debate was in the late 350s and early 360s. Who were Gregory’s contemporaries, and what were they debating in the 360s? How had these debates evolved in the preceding decade, and why did they matter? And who was Gregory of Nazianzus?

    NAZIANZUS AND GREGORY THE PERSONAL AND THE LOCAL

    I, Diocaesarea, am a small town. Gregory’s description, placed rhetorically into the mouth of his native city, was certainly accurate.⁵ Diocaesarea, Nazianzus in the native tongue, was a small town. In western Cappadocia, however, a small town was not necessarily insignificant. Diocaesarea, like Caesarea, Tyana, and Archelaïs, actually had municipal or city status, in a region exceptional for its lack of such cities.⁶ Diocaesarea-Nazianzus’s territory, the Tiberine, was considerable. It included Venasa, some fifty kilometers to the north; Karbala, about ten kilometers south; and Sasima, twenty-five kilometers east.⁷ Furthermore, it was located on one of the major west-east routes of the empire, linking the imperial residences Constantinople and Antioch, a route Ammianus described as the usus itineribus solitis.⁸ It passed from Antioch to Issus, Mopsuestia, and Tarsus, and then crossed the mountains at the Cilician Gates to descend to Tyana, passing via Sasima and Nazianzus to Ancyra and then Constantinople. In fact, the only mention of Nazianzus prior to Gregory’s occurred in two itineraries designating it in Latin either as a mansio Anathiango or as Nandianulus.⁹ Nazianzus was (or, rather, parts of it were) indeed a mansio (Greek mon ) or stathmos, a posting station between Archelaïs (Civitas Colonia) and the next mansio on the main highway between Constantinople and Antioch, the said Sasima, twenty-four Roman miles distant.¹⁰

    As a mansio, Nazianzus was equipped with inns offering meals and sleeping quarters; [a] change of clothing for the drivers and postilions; [a] change of animals [stabling as many as forty horses, mules, or both], carriages, and drivers … ; grooms… ; escorts for bringing back vehicles and teams to the previous station… ; porters … ; veterinarians … [and] cartwrights.¹¹ Mansiones had to accommodate ordinary travelers passing through, all those who held permission to use the cursus publicus, and the large imperial traveling parties.¹² Numerous inscriptions and literary sources attest to the effort and personnel an emperor required as he moved across his realm. During the late 350s and the early 360s, imperial travel between Constantinople and Antioch was especially frequent, because Antioch was the traditional staging place for Persian campaigns, and the size of the entourage only increased when the emperor was en route to a military campaign.¹³

    Thus, while neither a Caesarea nor an Archelaïs, Nazianzus was no isolated hamlet. A polis with a mansio on a major route traversed by the imperial court, numerous public officials, and other men of letters, Nazianzus had regular contact with the wider world.¹⁴ Although Gregory had reason to refer to Nazianzus-Diocaesarea as insignificant, such a characterization was also a well-known rhetorical topos. Authors who considered themselves members of a well-established provincial elite expressed pride in their ancestral cities in rhetorical formulations that, paradoxically, stressed their very insignificance. Thus Plutarch, Aelius Aristides, and Galen, like Gregory, frequently evoked the smallness of their native cities.¹⁵ The artfully constructed context, however, leaves no doubt that these writers, Gregory included, intended to contrast the insignificance of the city with the importance of the author who hailed from it and whose praise would immeasurably augment its prestige.¹⁶

    Indeed, Gregory expressed civic pride through such literary topoi naturally. His family belonged to Cappadocia’s landholding elite, and his father had been one of the most prominent citizens (a principalis or leading curialis) of Nazianzus, a rank to which his son could also lay claim.¹⁷ Born around 329 or 330, most likely at Arianzus, one of his family’s estates at Karbala located in the hills about ten kilometers south of Nazianzus, Gregory was the older son of Gregory the Elder and his wife Nonna’s three children, Gorgonia, Gregory, and Caesarius.¹⁸ Arianzus was also where he spent the years of his retirement after Constantinople.¹⁹ This and the family’s other estates contained vineyards, orchards, and flowering fields, and were pleasant and fertile despite occasional severe droughts.²⁰

    Caesarea and Athens

    To this Nazianzus Gregory returned in 363. It was not his first return. In 358 or 359 he had come home after nearly a decade spent in Athens in pursuit of higher education. Athens had not been the first stop on his educational journey. Gregory and his younger brother, Caesarius, like most of their social peers, were first trained in grammar at home by a paidag gos, Carterius, who also accompanied the brothers to the provincial capital, Caesarea, for further training in grammar and rhetoric, probably during the year 345/6.²¹ About a year later they proceeded to Caesarea Maritima, in Palestine. This city housed the remarkable library of Origen, continued by Pamphilus and Eusebius. John McGuckin proposed even that Gregory and his brother were sent there because it was the closest thing in the fourth century to a Christian university town.²²

    Indeed, Gregory’s stay at Caesarea in Palestine marks a decisive period in modern scholarly accounts of his Christianization. Because of the city’s excellent Christian library dating back to Origen, scholars have assumed that Gregory received here his first profound introduction to Origen’s thought and method as well as to the theological debates then surrounding them, and that the decisive influence of Origen on his later thought began with his sojourn in Caesarea. Scholars support this assumption by pointing to the so-called Philocalia, excerpts of Origen’s writings that Gregory supposedly made together with Basil in the late 350s or early 360s.²³ While Gregory probably had contact with the library and its Christian milieu, his scant remarks on his time in Caesarea praise only his pagan teacher Thespesius. Even though Gregory calls him a grammarian, Thespesius was a well-known rhetorician in the tradition of the Second Sophistic, who also counted among his students a certain Euzoius, who would renovate Eusebius’s library after he had succeeded Acacius as bishop of the city.²⁴ Gregory’s praise of Thespesius and Libanius’s complaint that Caesarea’s reputation as a center of rhetorical education rivaled Antioch’s suggest that this excellent education exercised at least as much pull as Origen’s library (which Gregory does not mention). Still, Gregory may have purchased the excerpts of Origin’s writings later known as the Philocalia while he was at Caesarea.

    But it is important to keep in mind that assumptions about Gregory’s immersion in an Origenist milieu at that time, however tempting they may be in explaining his education as Christian, are unverified, notwithstanding Origen’s notable influence on Gregory’s later oeuvre.²⁵ After about a year in Caesarea, toward the end of 348, Gregory and Caesarius moved on to Alexandria. Here, the brothers parted ways, Caesarius remaining in Alexandria to study medicine, and Gregory proceeding to Athens, evidently without having met either Didymus the Blind or Athanasius in Alexandria (i.e., again having established no demonstrable connections to the local Christian circles).²⁶

    Gregory arrived in Athens in 348 or 349 and remained there for nearly a decade. He did not fail to record in his later writings the imprint of Athens on his formation, though he said little or nothing of that of either Caesarea in Palestine or Alexandria. O Athens, the glory of Greece; O Athens, the golden city of learning! With these words he celebrated his own and Basil’s time in Athens many years later in his eulogy for the deceased bishop of Caesarea.²⁷ As Samuel Rubenson has noted, Gregory’s evocation of that city is the longest extant passage on contemporary Athens in the entire literature of the Patristic period, and certainly not by accident.²⁸ Gregory let no doubt that he enjoyed his stay at Athens thoroughly and that he embraced and was prepared to defend the passionate love of letters that he had deepened in the golden city of learning.²⁹ Among those who fostered his passion were the rhetoricians Himerius, as Socrates and Sozomen tell us, and Prohaeresius, as Gregory himself confirms in a later epigram.³⁰ Himerius, who came from Prusias, in Bithynia, was so famous for his harmoniously poetic style as to be compared to Aelius Aristides. The Armenian Prohaeresius, who had spent time in Cappadocian Caesarea prior to coming to Athens, was famous for his extemporaneous speeches and renowned as a mentor. He was a Christian and as such an exception in Athens and among Gregory’s teachers. A certain Priscus, a disciple of Iamblichus, also lectured there at that time, and Gregory may have heard him too.³¹ Although Gregory heaped lavish praise on Athens as a center of learning, he was, again, rather reticent about his Christian formation there. A single reference to our sacred buildings asserts a preference for these rather than the teachers outside (Gr. Naz. Or. 43.21). Things Christian were not on Gregory’s mind when he recalled his time at Athens, except for the preternaturally mature Basil (Or. 43.23).³² Basil arrived in Athens a few years after Gregory. The two men may have already known each other from Caesarea in Cappadocia, or they may have met in Athens as Cappadocians tending toward companions and teachers with connections to Cappadocia or at least Asia Minor. In any event, in Athens the two became all in all to each other, one soul in two bodies, sharing room, table, and all their days and nights (Or. 43.19).³³

    In Athens both men also made a momentous decision: to cultivate excellence or virtue (arete) with a twist. Philosophy was the object of our zeal, as Gregory would later say (Or. 43.19–20), though exactly what he meant by that will occupy us for much of the subsequent chapters. For now it suffices to note Gregory’s recollection that he and Basil had already in Athens attempted to combine the goal of philosophy with a Christian formation, basing their attempt solely on the scriptures and each other as inspiration and measuring rod (Gr. Naz. Or. 43.17–22). To have at hand a collection of excerpts from Origen’s writings on questions such as the nature of free will and the divine inspiration of the divine scripture, and how it is to be read and understood; and what is the reason for the obscurity in it, and for what is impossible in some cases when it is taken literally, or what is unreasonable, may well have been of great value in this endeavor, which would further support Neil McLynn’s suggestion that Gregory had purchased such a collection at Caesarea.³⁴ As he points out, the Philocalia, which throughout suggests an individual approaching the divine writings without reference to institutional settings such as a teacher or a community, would have been ideal for such enterprising students as Gregory and Basil.³⁵

    Gregory and Basil were not alone in these experiments. Gregory’s connections to men such as Sophronius, eventually a magistrate (magister officiorum) at the court of Valens in Antioch and then prefect of Constantinople; Eustochius, a future professional rhetor at Caesarea; Hellenius, eventually equalizing the taxes at Nazianzus (as peraequator); Julian, another tax assessor responsible for Nazianzus and perhaps also praeses, or governor, of Phrygia; and Philagrius, a fellow student of Caesarius, all date back to his student days.³⁶ These friendships were forged, according to Gregory’s later reminiscences, in an atmosphere of intense rivalry and correspondingly tight-knit groups of like-minded students, a brotherhood based on common geographic origin and further enhanced by allegiance to specific teachers, often with the same regional background, who initiated their flock to the Muses (Or. 43.22).³⁷ Rivalries between such brotherhoods involved public displays of individual arete, which was understood as the capacity to endure blows, to devise appropriate rhetoric to accompany such skirmishes, and to maintain face on all occasions. For those who trained in Athens, such public displays gained from the opportunity there to reenact the famous bouts of a Demosthenes or Callimachus at the very site—a heady experience, no doubt, even for someone like Gregory, who had learned, as he later claimed (in the process of establishing once and for all his superiority while verbally beating his opponents to the ground), to sublimate his competitive streak through his desire for the philosophical life (Or. 43.20).³⁸ Competition in public and between close friends such as Gregory and Basil was an essential feature of rhetorical training; after all, those who received such an education had to learn how to confront as well as collaborate with each other, and with those ranking above and below them in the public forum of the empire and its administration.³⁹

    Indeed, while Gregory and Basil’s decision to search for ways to become more pleasing to God (to use words attributed to Libanius in his correspondence with Basil) did not represent a common path for young men of their background and education, both men began after Athens to do what Gregory’s friends did—to become professional rhetoricians, advocates, and public officials.⁴⁰ As Gregory’s later autobiographical writings and letters exchanged after Basil’s return to Cappadocia in the mid-350s and Gregory’s about three years later confirm, Gregory in fact engaged in the profession of rhetorician more decisively than Basil.⁴¹

    Although Gregory makes scant reference to how he spent his time upon returning to Nazianzus around 358, his letters and his autobiographical poem De vita sua reveal that he instructed students in the Attic training and had "shown off logoi" and danced for friends.⁴² There is little doubt among scholars that Gregory became a teacher of rhetoric. It is very probable, however, that he held that position longer than the few months or one year that have usually been assumed, at least until his ordination in late 361 or early 362 and potentially even to mid-363. Gregory’s social status and that of his family support this probability. As members of the curial class, Gregory and his father were affected by the complex and improvisational imperial legislation regulating curial exemptions and membership in the clergy.⁴³ As mentioned, Gregory the Elder had been among the principales, the leading curiales of his city, prior to becoming a bishop. He retained his properties and upon his ordination, at least according to a law issued in 349, his privileges and his fiscal responsibilities would have devolved upon his sons.⁴⁴ Caesarius, who had returned to Nazianzus at the same time as Gregory, took a highly popular route to escape these responsibilities: he moved up the social ladder and on to Constantinople and a position in the senate there (Gr. Naz. Or. 7.9). Gregory as an Athenstrained rhetor pursued another proven method to alleviate his and his family’s fiscal burdens: for any city would happily have granted relief from fiscal responsibilities in exchange for boasting such a figure among its citizens, as an enhancement of its status and as an exemplar of its connection to the wider world.⁴⁵

    Nazianzus in 358–361

    Fiscal and other obligations go a long way toward explaining Gregory’s moves in the late 350s and early 360s, as reflected in a famous exchange of letters between Gregory and Basil. I return to this exchange in Chapter 6 but sketch its general contours and their standard interpretation here. According to scholarly consensus, by the time Gregory returned to Cappadocia, around 358/9, Basil had already made a start on the philosophical life of retreat that both men envisioned at Athens. Prompted by the example of his younger brother Naucratius, who had just renounced his position as an advocate and rhetor, Basil moved to his country estate, Annesi, to dedicate himself to the pursuit of philosophy.⁴⁶ Almost immediately, he began to persuade or to pressure Gregory to join him in that pursuit, in accordance with their plans. Gregory, however, wavered (already in keeping with his scholarly depiction as a labile character), torn between his desire for retreat with Basil and the pressures that his father put on him to remain in the world. "I must confess it. I have gone back on my promise to be with you and live the philosophical life with you as I had promised as far back as our Athenian days…. One law has won out over another [nomou nomon nik santos], the one that prescribes care for one’s parents [over] that of loving friendship and togetherness."⁴⁷

    While these letters appear to corroborate the scholarly characterizations of the protagonists, with Basil steadfast and committed and Gregory wavering and tormented, in fact Gregory himself later chose and edited his own letters together with Basil’s responses, presumably to present to posterity a cameo of a forceful Basil and a deliberating (or wavering) Gregory, carefully examining his options and obligations as early as the late 350s and the beginning of the 360s. And he may well have had reasons for shaping his own historiographic persona as well as Basil’s in this manner.⁴⁸

    May we forgive each other, I who have been the victim of this beautiful tyranny …, and you who have exercised this beautiful tyranny upon me.⁴⁹ However attractive the idea of the retreat (apragmosyn ) in Pontus may have been, however sweet and powerful the bonds of friendship, Gregory, as his own preserved contemporary writings make clear, wanted it known that between 358 and 363 the duty to serve one’s parents was paramount.⁵⁰ He had in fact joined Basil at Annesi for a brief period before being called back by the laws circumscribing the duties toward his parents and his city, and the specific requirements that they placed on him at that moment. In the event, Basil’s philosophical sojourn at Annesi did not last long either. By late 359, Basil had left Annesi, first for Constantinople and then for Caesarea, and Gregory was in Nazianzus, teaching as a rhetorician and dancing his Attic training for his friends.⁵¹ To appreciate fully what this position and his duties to his father entailed, however, it is necessary to step back in time and outwards geographically, to retrace what other than curial obligations were at stake for Basil in Constantinople and for Gregory and his father in Nazianzus in the late 350s and early 360s: it is time to place the personal and the local into the wider context of the oikoumen .

    CONSTANTINOPLE: EMPEROR, COSMOPOLIS, AND COSMOS

    Constantius II as Sole Ruler, 353–358

    With the defeat and subsequent suicide of the usurper Magnentius at Mons Seleuci in the Alps in August 353, Constantius II, the son of the Divus Constantinus of iusta veneranda memoria, became the sole ruler of the empire, the first since 337. Constantius

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