Lieve Van Hoof

Greek rhetoric and the Later Roman Empire: the 'Bubble' of the 'Third Sophistic'

Longtemps negligee, la rhetorique tardo-antique fait maintenant l’objet d’un nombre croissant d’etudes. Pour mieux marquer cette revalorisation, on a introduit la denomination de “Troisieme Sophist...

Philo of Carpasia : ecclesiastical history (CPG 7512)

This article offers the first edition of the fragments of the lost Church History of a certain Philo. We argue that it is, most likely, a 4th-century work by the homonymous bishop of Carpasia, on the island of Cyprus. The two extant fragments both derive from works ascribed to Anastasius of Sinai (7th century), of which at least one, so we demonstrate, must be ascribed to Anastasius of Antioch (second half of the 6th century). The fragments report anecdotes about the persecutions of Diocletian, and we suggest that they should be understood against the background of discussions about episcopal authority current in the last quarter of the 4th century. If these anecdotes have no historical value, the Church History of Philo is important for our understanding of the genre of ecclesiastical history: Philo was one of the earliest successors of Eusebius but clearly did not consider his own work as a continuation of the latter. In fact, only in the 5th century, after Rufinus’ Latin translation and continuation of...

Literature and Society in the Fourth Century AD

Challenging ideas about the declining social role and impact of literature in Late Antiquity, Literature and Society in the Fourth Century AD demonstrates how Greek and Latin literature of the fourth century AD continued to play an important role in public performance and debate, the creation of reality, and self-presentation.

1 The Social Role and Place of Literature in the Fourth Century ad

This chapter focuses on one specific issue, namely the social role of literature and explores how literature functioned within fourth-century society. First, the question of the social function of literature cuts across some of the traditional oppositions with which scholarship has tended to approach late antique literature. Without wishing to claim that it does justice to every piece of scholarship, the chapter suggests that three main narratives influence studies of literature in Late Antiquity. The first is the narrative of Christianization and resistance to it. The second narrative focuses on the continuity and transformation of classical literary traditions. Thirdly, scholarship on late antique literature has a marked preference for what are, in modern eyes, the most obvious literary texts, namely poetry. The major poets, such as Claudian, Prudentius, Ausonius, and Rutilius Namatianus have received detailed literary studies, whereas texts in prose are often left to historians. Keywords: antique literature; Christianization; fourth-century society