Cursing, Control and Christianity: The Iambikê Idea in Late Antiquity

Cursing, Control and Christianity: The Iambikê Idea in Late AntiquitySyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/V63F8YL4/tei

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2024-08-15-04:00

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CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.Thomas RichardHawkinsCursing, Control and Christianity: The Iambikê Idea in Late Antiquityhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/V63F8YL4https://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/V63F8YL4https://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/V63F8YL42003My dissertation examines the influence of iambos, a genre of archaic Greek abusive poetry, on Greek literature of the late antique period. Recently, there has been a great deal of work done on iambos' influence on classical and Hellenistic Greek poets as well as a number of Latin poets, but late antiquity has not been included in this discussion of post-archaic iambic abuse. Yet from the high rhetoric of Lucian and Julian, to the Christian poetry of Gregory Nazianzen and the ascetic hagiography of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, we find a consistent thread of invective speech that overtly harks back to the archaic iambographers. How do we read the echoes of a ritual-based archaic genre in these disparate authors whose social context is determined by a Christianizing empire rather than a regional web of poleis? I show that the archaic genre functions to defend the local community against those who transgress communal norms and that these late authors seek to appropriate this aspect of iambos in defense of their own social agendas. From this analysis, we find that, contrary to the judgment of modern scholarship, iambos remained a vital literary impulse for many centuries beyond the archaic period. Chapter 1 deals with the archaic material and makes the argument that our understanding of iambos can be supplemented by reading it as the generic and functional opposite of epinikion praise. This leads to an evaluation of the iambic material in terms that render it exportable to later periods. Chapter 2 addresses the use of Archilochus as a named inspiration for abuse in Julian's Misopogon and Lucian's Pseudologistes, a text from the Second Sophistic which is included because of its striking similarities to Julian's work. Chapter 3 investigates the iambic models (both archaic and Hellenistic) for three of Gregory Nazianzen's invective poems in iambic trimeters. Chapter 4 suggests that Theodoret of Cyrrhus' Historia Religiosa, a collection of hagiographical sketches which has recently been found to contain an aggressive message to Theodoret's ecclesiastical audience, shows the influence of iambos in depicting scenes that are intentional distortions of historical events and involve abusive speech acts. Hawkins, Thomas Richard. “Cursing, Control and Christianity: The Iambikê Idea in Late Antiquity.” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2003. Thomas Richard Hawkins, Cursing, Control and Christianity: The Iambikê Idea in Late Antiquity” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2003).IV-VII CEJacob of NisibisTheodoret of CyrusV CEhagiographypolemic