Browsing by Subject "Classical literature"

This dissertation examines how the Roman historian Tacitus’ political thought in his minor works (the Dialogus, the Germania, and the Agricola) departs from the political thought of his Republic-era predecessors. Tacitus wrote during the Principate, when Rome was organized under the power of a single man. Nevertheless, the dominant approach to thinking about political life was still Republicanism, a constellation of concepts formed when Rome was a Republic. In his minor works, Tacitus argues that Republicanism lacks the complexity to understand different iterations of single-man rule as well as its relationship with surrounding institutions and culture. Each of the minor works explores a different shortcoming of Republicanism. The Dialogus investigates how oratory was weakened in the Principate. The Germania observes how, contrary to a tenet of Republicanism, monarchy does not ipso facto preclude libertas. And the Agricola examines how certain political regimes can alter the individual. Rather than adhering to the traditional approach of viewing these writings as independent works, this dissertation argues that they form a coherent project in which Tacitus moves beyond Republicanism and argues that a new framework is needed to understand a political system as dynamic as the Principate.

"Citizen Canine" explores the sacrificial underpinnings of politics via a critique of the boundary between human and animal in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. I argue that the concept "animal" serves a functional rather than descriptive role: it is born of a sacrificial worldview that sees violence as a necessary foundation for human life, and which therefore tries to localize and contain this violence as much as possible through a system of sacrifice. I begin the dissertation with Martha Nussbaum's recent work on the "frontiers of justice," but argue that she is insufficiently attentive to the roles that animality and the rhetoric of sacrifice play in her discourse. I then examine the concept of sacrifice more thematically - using Jacques Derrida and Rene Girard among others - which justifies the move back to the Greeks to understand the specific manner in which sacrifice, human, and animal are intertwined at a crucial moment in Western history. In the Greeks we see an inception of this sacrificial concept of the political, and the movement from Homer to Aeschylus to Plato presents us with three successive attempts to understand and control cosmic violence through a sacrificial order. I contend that a similar logic continues to inform the exclusions (native/foreigner, masculine/feminine, human/nature) that mark the borders of the contemporary political community - hence my dissertation is directed both at the specific animal/human dichotomy as well as the larger question of how political identity is generated by the production, sacrifice and exclusion of marginalized communities.

Modern scholars cannot agree how extant fragments of thought attributed to Leucippus and Democritus integrate (or do not) to form a coherent perspective on the ancient Greek world. While a certain degree of uncertainty is unavoidable, given the nature of the evidence available and the fact that Democritus wrote many different works (including at least one in which he deliberately argued against positions that he defended elsewhere), this study demonstrates that we know enough to take a more integrative view of the early atomists (and of Democritus in particular) than is usually taken. In the case of Democritus, this study shows that it makes good sense to read what remains of his works (physical, biological, and ethical) under the presumption that he assumes a single basic outlook on the world, a coherent perspective that informed every position taken by the atomist philosopher.

Chapter 1 provides an in-depth portrait of the historical and philosophical context in which early atomism was born. As part of this portrait, it offers thumbnail sketches of the doctrines attributed to a representative catalogue of pre-Socratic philosophers to whom published work is attributed (Anaximander, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Philolaus). It demonstrates how each philosopher presumes that his theory offers a universal outlook on human reality, a perspective on the universe which purposely encompasses (and builds into a single theoretical framework) physics and biology and practical ethics.

Chapter 2 introduces the early atomists as respondents to the pre-Socratic movement before them (a movement which this study refers to as the Critical Tradition). It presents evidence for an integrated reading of early atomist fragments, a reading that construes the Leucippus and Democritus as men of their time (working with and responding to the positions taken by their predecessors in the Critical Tradition).

Chapter 3 shows how Democritus' ethics arise naturally from his physics via an historical process of development. Like his predecessors in the Critical Tradition and many of his contemporaries, the atomist deliberately imagines nature (physics) providing the raw material from which culture (ethics) naturally and inevitably rises.

Chapter 4 offers an original reading of extant ethical fragments of Democritus, showing how the atomist uses his unique outlook on the world to develop a practical approach to living well.

The anthology of the elder Seneca (c. 55 BC - c. 39 AD) contains quotations from approximately 120 speakers who flourished during the early Empire. The predominant tendency in modern scholarship has been to marginalize these speakers and the practice they represent (declamation): they are regarded as a linguistic and literary monolith, and their literary productions while recognized as influential are treated as discrete from those of other, "serious" authors. The present dissertation challenges this viewpoint by focusing on the following questions: To what extent can a speaker quoted in Seneca's anthology be said to have a distinct and unique literary identity? What is the relationship of a speaker, as represented by his quotations, relative to canonical texts?

Since most of the quoted speakers are found exclusively in the anthology, the study first examines the nature of Seneca's work and, more specifically, how the quotations of the anthology are organized. It is discovered that the sequence in which excerpts appear in a quotation do not follow a consistent, meaningful pattern, such as the order in which they might have occurred in a speech. Instead, excerpts exhibit a strong lateral organization: excerpts from one speaker show a close engagement with excerpts in spatially distant quotations from other speakers. A fundamental organizing principle consists in the convergence of excerpts around a limited number of specific points for each declamatory theme.

The remainder, and bulk, of the dissertation is a close analysis of the quotations of two speakers: Arellius Fuscus and Papirius Fabianus. The distinct identities of these speakers emerge from comparisons of excerpts in their quotations with the often studiedly similar excerpts from other speakers and from passages in other texts. Fabianus' literary identity takes shape in a language designed to construct the persona of a philosopher-preacher. The identity of Fuscus resides in idiosyncratic sentence architecture, in a preference for Presentational sentences, and in methodically innovative diction. Further substantiating Fuscus' identity is evidence that he assimilated the language of authors, such as Cicero and Vergil, and established compositional patterns that became authoritative for later authors, such as Ovid, the younger Seneca, and Lucan.

This dissertation investigates ancient language ideologies constructed by Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries CE, a loosely-connected movement now generally referred to the Second Sophistic. It focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian “barbarian” writer of satire and parody in Greek, and especially on his works that engage with language-oriented topics of contemporary relevance to his era. The term “language ideologies”, as it is used in studies of sociolinguistics, refers to beliefs and practices about language as they function within the social context of a particular culture or set of cultures; prescriptive grammar, for example, is a broad and rather common example. The surge in Greek (and some Latin) literary output in the Second Sophistic led many writers, with Lucian an especially noteworthy example, to express a variety of ideologies regarding the form and use of language. A number of authors, including Lucian, practiced Atticism, the belief that the best literature wouldn be made possible by reviving the Attic dialect of Classical Athens, language of Plato and Aristophanes. Others, however, disagree with the narrow and perhaps pretentious version of Greek this ideology produced; intriguingly Lucian was a member of this group as well. This study examines Lucian’s complex and contradictory attitudes towards linguistic practices, focusing the works of his that address Atticism and other linguistic topics—such as the degree to which mastery of a language and its culture will allow one to identify with that culture. Here, too, Lucian portrays the relationship between linguistic practice and cultural identity in several different ways. Investigations into the linguistic views of other authors of the period help answer the question of which contemporary ideologies Lucian may be drawing on for his satire. The dissertation concludes that the detailed, specific humor of Lucian’s linguistic satire is tied into his overall project of creating a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and linguistic position for the self-representation of his disparate personae.

This study analyzes marginalized voices and nontraditional pathways of higher education in the late Roman Empire and diversifies our notion of who was part of “the” educated elite in ancient higher education. I focus on upper-class learners who did not have access to the family’s wealth or faced difficulty with pursuing the discussed traditional paths of schooling designed for young men from wealthy families. The discussed marginalized voices include fatherless students, women, late learners, autodidacts, and disabled students. Since most sources on Roman education were authored by elite men who mention marginalized voices in passing, I piece together the experiences of nontraditional learners and marginalized members of Roman education from an array of literary and epigraphic sources, including letters from teachers to students and families, church historians and Christians commenting on women, orations, tomb stones and legal documents. Most sources discussed are dated to the fourth century C.E., highlighting a period in which girls and women from the upper-class gained a voice in ascetic communities, as educational leaders and philanthropes and in which educational mobility across the Roman Empire flourished. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capital, I analyze how diverse family and educational backgrounds impacted the educational paths of students, discuss the student voices often overlooked in scholarship and bring attention to the challenges that nontraditional and marginalized students have experienced in higher education.

The Laws is generally regarded as Plato’s attempt to engage with the practical realities of political life, as opposed to the more idealistic, or utopian, vision of the Republic. Yet modern scholars have often felt disquieted at the central role of religion in the Laws’ second-best city and regime. There are essentially the two dominant interpretations on offer today: either religion supports a repressive theocracy, which controls every aspect of the citizens’ lives to such an extent that even philosophy itself is discouraged, or religion is an example of the kind of noble lie, which the philosopher must deceive the citizens into believing—viz., that a god, not a man, is the author of the regime’s laws. I argue that neither of these interpretations do justice to the dialogue’s intricately dramatic structure, and therefore to Plato’s treatment of civil religion. What I propose is a third position in which Plato both takes seriously the social and political utility of religion, and views theology as a legitimate, and even necessary, subject of philosophical inquiry without going so far as to advocate theocracy as the second best form of regime.

I conclude that a proper focus on the dialogue form, combined with a careful historical analysis of Plato’s use of social and political institutions, reveals an innovative yet traditional form of civil religion, purified of the harmful influence of the poets, based on the authority of the oracle at Delphi, and grounded on a philosophical conception of god as the eternal source of order, wisdom, and all that is good. Through a union of traditional Delphic theology and Platonic natural theology, Plato gives the city of the Laws a common cult acceptable to philosopher and non-philosopher alike, and thus, not only bridges the gap between religion and philosophy, but also creates a sense of community, political identity, and social harmony—the prerequisites for political order and stability. The political theology of the Laws, therefore, provides a rational defense of the rule of law (νόμος) re-conceived as the application of divine Reason (νοῦς) to human affairs.

In my dissertation, I trace the depiction of the tyrant-figure in fifth-century Athenian tragedy, and how this figure reflects Athenian changing self-identity over the course of the fifth century. Given the crucial function of tragedy in both Athenian civic display and introspection, the figure of the tyrant was deeply encoded in the matrix of tragedy. The “tyrant” was the most significant referent in the Athenian political imagination, the threatening Other that helped shape Athenian self-identity by inversely defining what values the city should hold.

I consider tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, considering the socio- political context for each playwright’s staging of tyranny. I begin with a reading of Aeschylus’ Persians, which stages the Greek victory at Salamis from the Persian point of view. By situating the drama in a foreign court, the tragedy foregrounds the non-democratic aspects of Persian monarchy and society, defining the anti-democratic aspects of the Great King’s court to better articulate Athenain democratic values. The Prometheus Bound, similarly distanced from contemporary Athens, takes place under the tyranny of Zeus; by portraying the god as the worst possible instantiation of a hubristic, violent human ruler, Aeschylus performs a reductio ad absurdum of tyrannical ideology that would seek to portray the human tyrant as divine.

In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, by contrast, tyrants embody the ideological strain of the exercise of power that Athens experienced at the head of the Delian League. Both tragedies portray tyrants who, with praiseworthy motives (and even, at times, with reasonable, democratic rhetoric), struggle under a burden of governance that they cannot sustain. Unlike the Aeschylean Xerxes or Zeus, who are distant, barely-seen figures that loom over their respective tragedies, Oedipus and Creon are the focal-points of their dramas. The tragedies exploit the tension between the Athenian political conception of tyranny, as a totally negative phenomenon opposed to equality and democratic freedom, and an earlier, Panhellenic (insofar as it did not originate in any one polis) conception that casts tyranny in a more equivocal light, as something worthy both of fear and of jealous awe. Invoking both views together, these tragedies problematize the straightforward depiction of tyranny as something wholly good or bad.

Writing in the last decades of the fifth century, during which time Athenian democ- racy grew increasingly embattled and unpredictable, Euripides’ tragedies collapss the tyranny/democracy dichotomy entirely. In the Suppliant Women, Theseus, a monarch, is cast as the robust defender of Athenian democracy, the overseer of a system in which logically he would have no place. While this contradiction is inherent of a traditional formulation of Theseus, the tragedy highlights the incongruity of the situation by imbuing the king’s dialogue with strikingly modern rhetoric, and making him proficient in contemporary sophistic modes of argumentation. Inversely, Euripides repeatedly employs the motif of the “tyrant mob”; in Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis, the tyrannical power of a quasi-democratic body exerts a terrible influence on events, unyielding to both logic and justice. The weaknesses of democracy, the poisonous power of persuasion and the unthinking nature of collective action, are portrayed as the inseparable flip side of its virtues: mass participation and equality of speech.

Behind all three tragedians, the archaic moral conception of the tyrant stands as a model and foil. The traditional traits of tyranny are either reinforced or subverted, embodied in Zeus or given a new ideological charge by their application to collectives. v The figure of the tyrant (both in its political and moral conceptions) is an ideological reference point whose trajectory mirrors that of Athenian democracy itself, from a system predicated on opposition to sole rule and with mechanisms to prevent the consolidation of power, to the means by which, by the end of the Peloponnesian War, single individuals wielded undue influence over a polis that itself ruled a significant portion of the Greek world.

This dissertation addresses the problem of the concluding passage of Lucretius’ didactic poem De Rerum Natura, which famously consists of a vivid and evocative account of the Plague of Athens of 430 BCE that ends abruptly and without explanation, with no indication what lessons in Epicurean philosophy the reader is meant to learn from it. While many scholars have suggested a variety of explanations for this ending, this dissertation approaches the text from a narratological angle to examine Lucretius on the basis of first and second readings. This perspective, I conclude, offers two important insights. Foremost, it reveals that the poem’s abrupt ending recontextualizes the rest of the poem, where the content of its narrative reframes the reader’s understanding of earlier passages upon a second reading, confronting them with evidence of their past misconceptions. Further, a second reading of the poem with the context of the Plague offers the reader new insight into the nature of Epicurean communities and addresses the problems of proper attachment and detachment regarding the suffering of others in a hedonist system of philosophy. In short, while the first reader may conclude that Epicureanism is predicated on isolation and ignoring the suffering of others, the Plague reveals to the second reader that the opposite is true, and that Epicureanism is instead founded upon concern and care for the other members of one’s community. Over the course of this dissertation, I apply a close reading of the Plague to earlier sections of the poem, revealing how its content and context reshapes the lessons offered by Lucretius’ poem into something new. I ultimately conclude that the final lesson contained within the poem is in essence an evangelical call to action, where the newly converted reader concludes that he has an obligation to spread the gospel of Epicurus to his friends and family, becoming a teacher to others just as Lucretius has been a teacher to him.

This dissertation situates the synoptic gospels in the context of first and second century pluriform literary traditions. The treatment of Mark by the authors of Matthew and Luke is far from typical of contemporary historical writings. The conservatism of the latter evangelists with the wording and scope of their literary sources resembles, rather, a compositional procedure associated with technical literature. Independent religious experts appropriated this convention of re-writing from rival teachers as an appropriate method for demonstrating their mastery of received knowledge while, simultaneously, revising that disciplinary tradition. The synoptic gospels were, therefore, understood as discrete books by identifiable authors composed on the same substrate of content, called a hypothesis. Two second century Christian teachers illustrate the origin of synoptic-type gospels in the educational marketplace of Greek-speaking cities. Both Marcion and Tatian were independent Christian teachers in major urban areas. Both composed new gospels according to the conservative conventions evinced in the synoptic gospels.

There is a modern scholarly consensus that Sophocles’ popularity was so great in antiquity that criticism surrounding him was overwhelmingly positive but vague and without depth; he was, in their view, almost “beyond criticism” among ancient audiences. Such a view seems, prima facie, unlikely, but the evidence commonly consulted by scholars tends to uphold this argument. This dissertation argues that there was, in fact, a fervent debate over the quality of Sophocles’ poetry in the centuries after his death. While most evidence for this struggle is lost, thus leading to the modern consensus, the works of ancient scholarship contain remnants of it. By analyzing the vocabulary and rhetorical strategies of scholarly works like the scholia and ancient Life of Sophocles, this dissertation illuminates a contentious yet hitherto underexplored debate over the preeminence of Sophocles. It also articulates how different scholarly campus competed with one another over how to engage with their inheritance, the literature of Classical Greece, as it compares the efforts of the scholars who worked on Sophocles with those to other ancient authors. Reading these neglected streams of evidence alongside more traditional evidence (such as the testimony of Aristotle or other critics) exposes a latent heterogeneity within the reception of Sophocles and Greek literature more broadly.

This dissertation interrogates existing scholarly paradigms regarding aetiology in the Histories of Herodotus in order to open up new avenues to approach a complex and varied topic. Since aetiology has mostly been treated as the study of cause and effect in the Histories, this work expands the purview of aetiology to include Herodotus’ explanations of origins more generally. The overarching goal in examining the methodological principles of Herodotean aetiology is to show the extent to which they resonate across the Histories according to their initial development in the proem, especially in those places that seem to deviate from the work’s driving force (i.e. the Persian Wars). Though the focus is on correlating the principles espoused in the proem with their deployment in Herodotus’ ethnographies and other seemingly divergent portions of his work, the dissertation also demonstrates the influence of these principles on some of the more “historical” aspects of the Histories where the struggle between Greeks and barbarians is concerned. The upshot is to make a novel case not only for the programmatic significance of the proem, but also for the cohesion of Herodotean methodology from cover to cover, a perennial concern for scholars of Greek history and historiography.

Chapter One illustrates how the proem to the Histories (1.1.0-1.5.3) prefigures Herodotus’ engagement with aetiological discussions throughout the Histories. Chapter Two indicates how the reading of the proem laid out in Chapter One allows for Herodotus’ deployment of aetiology in the Egyptian logos (especially where the pharaoh Psammetichus’ investigation of the origins of Egyptian language, nature, and custom are concerned) to be viewed within the methodological continuum of the Histories at large. Chapter Three connects Herodotus’ programmatic interest in the origins of erga (i.e. “works” or “achievements” manifested as monuments and deeds of abstract and concrete sorts) with the patterns addressed in Chapters One and Two. Chapter Four examines aetiological narratives in the Scythian logos and argues through them that this logos is as integral to the Histories as the analogous Egyptian logos studied in Chapter Two. Chapter Five demonstrates how the aetiologies associated with the Greeks’ collaboration with the Persians (i.e. medism) in the lead-up to the battle of Thermopylae recapitulate programmatic patterns isolated in previous chapters and thereby extend the methodological continuum of the Histories beyond the “ethnographic” logoi to some of the most representative “historical” logoi of Herodotus’ work. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation and makes one final case for methodological cohesion by showing the inextricability of the end of the Histories from its beginning.

This dissertation identifies Cicero's Consolatio, Seneca's Ad Polybium de consolatione, and Boethius' De consolatione Philosophiae as self-consolations, in which these Roman authors employ philosophical argument and literary art, in order to provide a therapy for their own crippling experience of grief. This therapeutic discourse unfolds between two contradictory conditions, though, since the philosophers must possess the self-mastery and self-possession that qualifies the consoler to perform his task felicitously, and they must lack those very same qualifications, insofar as their experience of loss has exposed their dependence upon others and they thus require consolation. Foucault's theoretical treatment of ancient philosophical discourse is supplemented by Lacanian critical theory and the political theology of Giorgio Agamben to perform analyses of the consolatory texts and their political context. These analyses reveal that self-consolation overcomes the contradictory conditions that found this discourse through literary and rhetorical artifice. But this resolution then places the apparent completeness of the philosophical argument in doubt, as the consoled authors in each case finally call for a decisive action that would join philosophical reflection to the merely human world that philosophy would have these consolers leave behind. Each author's self-consolation therefore demonstrates a split allegiance to the Roman political community and to a Socratic philosophical heritage that advocates for withdrawal from politics.

The Theognidea is the most significant work of archaic Greek elegy, but questions of its origins have long dominated its study. This dissertation reads the Theognidea as the product of widespread, rhetorically motivated sympotic performance and gives equal interpretive weight to each performance, whether it be the putative “original” or a reperformance. I find that many features that had been regarded as cruxes would have instead been assets for symposiasts hoping to repurpose the poetry. In the first chapter, I take up the problem of poem divisions. There is no authoritative scheme of poem divisions. Indeed, there are almost as many different schemes of poem division as there are versions of the texts, as I show in the results of a survey of the poem divisions made by 16 manuscripts, 21 editions, and two schemas proposed in a monograph. I argue that this variation is not a problem, but instead a reflection of the malleability of the text, a feature that would have been useful in sympotic reperformance. In the second chapter, I argue that the doublets are demonstrations of the adaptability of the poetry to new contexts, whether or not they are actual transcriptions of reperformance. I argue that the change in medium from dynamic, sympotic performance to fixed, page poetry has created interpretive problems which can be solved with the introduction of a born-digital edition of the collection. In the third chapter, I discuss the use of five value terms (agathos, esthlos, kalos, kakos, and deilos) which occur with notable frequency in the collection. I find that the status of “good” or “bad” described by these terms is a matter of discernment rather than the result of objectively identifiable indicators like birth or wealth; moreover, the status is regarded as impermanent. The frequent use and inconsistent application of these terms is a reflection of the fact that these terms were both valuable and contestable. In the fourth chapter I build upon the unsettled social picture of the third chapter with an examination of the use of friendship language in the Theognidea. I find that friendship is predominantly described on a one-on-one level and characterized by a lack of trust. If organized friend groups (hetaireiai) did exist, they do not seem to have held much sway over the interpersonal relationships of the symposiasts who performed this poetry. The final two chapters are concerned with how this new reading ought to affect our understanding of author and audience in the poetry. In the fifth chapter, I examine passages in which the speaker of the poetry makes claims to authorship. I find that these claims are consistent with the immediate rhetorical needs of the symposion and do not preclude reuse. I argue that Theognis, as identified in previous readings, is best understood as an implied author. I close with an examination of how the implied authors of the collection has been understood. In the sixth chapter, I describe the differences between the ancient and modern audiences of the poetry. I survey the extensive use of address in the collection to show that the audience is quite literally an element of the poetry, and I discuss how these vocatives could be used in reperformance. I conclude with a rumination on the role that modern readers play as audience members. I find that it is ultimately impossible for readers now to fully inhabit the role of audience envisioned when it was performed in the symposion.

Troy in America: Soldier Suicide in American War Literature attempts to illuminate how a war mentality forces an acceptance of mortality that not only brings out the irrationality of life itself, but also makes suicide more thinkable. This dissertation is therefore about the different reasons soldiers and veterans depicted in literature choose to die by suicide, but also those who consider it and choose not to. Troy in America draws on examples of suicide found in Ancient Greek literature to contextualize similar genres of suicide depicted in American war literature. Four Ancient Greek warriors suffer from different forms of suicidal behavior: Achilles’s grief, Odysseus’s despair, Ajax’s honor, and Philoctetes’s pain. Each hero’s suicidality is characterized by unique features that forms a discrete archetype that endures and informs characters found in literature about the American Civil War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The authors of the texts analyzed in Troy in America appear to be in substantial agreement that the experience of combat can be so troubling that, for some of its participants and veterans, suicide seems to be an answer. For many survivors, the end of war does not mark the end of their suffering. War removes its participants from society in an effort to preserve it. War thus becomes, in effect, a trip to the Underworld; a liminal experience where the social order becomes available for inspection. As a result, coming home can be as difficult emotionally as combat. After experiencing the irrationality of war and gaining insight into the irrationality of life, the warrior must change in order to return to society. But some do not change; instead, they choose to end their lives.

This dissertation investigates the political grammars of truth-telling employed by two sets of early Christian authors, the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa), who wrote in Greek, and Augustine of Hippo, who wrote in Latin. My aim is to describe the rules that these thinkers take to order relations implicated in the Christian’s acts of parrhêsia and confessio before other human persons and before the LORD. To this end, I employ methodology derived from ordinary language philosophy (OLP), which understands the meaning of a word to be constituted by its use within the form of life of a particular community.

In so doing, I argue against the conclusions of Michel Foucault on the politics of truth-telling in the early Christian tradition. Foucault depicts parrhêsia as an act of individual self-expression that belongs to an order of familiar, and fearless relations between the speaker and a God who holds no standards of judgment that the Christian does not always already meet. By contrast, he characterizes confessio as a form of cringing and self-doubting submission in fear that belongs to a hierarchical politics of discipline and punishment in which unnecessary distance is introduced to relations between the Christian and the LORD through the mediation of human authorities.

A far different picture emerges when we look at the grammars of parrhêsia and confessio as these terms were used by the Cappadocians and Augustine within their historical and cultural contexts – the forms of life of their linguistic communities – rather than interpreting them through the lens of our own post-Enlightenment languages and politics. The conceptual grammar of parrhêsia employed by both pagans and Christians required the speaker to calculate her ability to justify and demonstrate the acceptability of herself and her speech on criteria held by listeners, and to use non-verbal means of assuring that what she displayed and disclosed in speaking could meet these criteria. The grammar of confessio, as Augustine presents it, allows speech to serve as a medium through which the speaker can be made righteous and brought into right relationship with the LORD by dispositions of faith, humility, and ecstatic self-dispossession in the act of speaking.