Tomas Hagg (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520223882
- eISBN:
- 9780520925052
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520223882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The two centuries between A.D. 250 and A.D. 450 witnessed the creation of a distinctive Christian Greek culture in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. This book focuses on the transition from ...
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The two centuries between A.D. 250 and A.D. 450 witnessed the creation of a distinctive Christian Greek culture in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. This book focuses on the transition from ancient to Christian Hellenism as it was expressed in the biographical and panegyric literature of the period. The chapters show how literary genres focusing on individual lives help to reveal this historical process. The contributors are leading scholars who bring several disciplines to bear on these texts: they include historians, theologians, classicists, and historians of religion. This book presents much new research and helps show Late Antiquity not only as an important transitional period but also as an era with an identity of its own. Among the figures the biographical texts bring to life are Antony the Great, the charismatic desert father, and Basil of Caesarea, the influential church politician. Collectively the chapters go beyond discussion of particular texts to consider such general topics as strategies of rhetoric and representation, the place of classical Greek culture in both pagan and Christian education, and what is meant by philosophy as a way of life.Less
The two centuries between A.D. 250 and A.D. 450 witnessed the creation of a distinctive Christian Greek culture in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. This book focuses on the transition from ancient to Christian Hellenism as it was expressed in the biographical and panegyric literature of the period. The chapters show how literary genres focusing on individual lives help to reveal this historical process. The contributors are leading scholars who bring several disciplines to bear on these texts: they include historians, theologians, classicists, and historians of religion. This book presents much new research and helps show Late Antiquity not only as an important transitional period but also as an era with an identity of its own. Among the figures the biographical texts bring to life are Antony the Great, the charismatic desert father, and Basil of Caesarea, the influential church politician. Collectively the chapters go beyond discussion of particular texts to consider such general topics as strategies of rhetoric and representation, the place of classical Greek culture in both pagan and Christian education, and what is meant by philosophy as a way of life.
