1. The structuring of the anthology

We begin with some general but necessary remarks on the structuring of the Palatine Anthology. The Palatine Anthology survives in a single manuscript, discovered in the Palatine Library in Heidelberg in 1606 – and it has been an influence on the history of modern Western literature ever since.Footnote ² It consists of fifteen books of epigrams which are anthologised from sources that stretch from the beginnings of Greek epigrammatic literature in the sixth century BCE to examples from as late as the ninth or tenth century CE.Footnote ³ There have been two main strands of work dedicated to it by classical scholars in recent decades. The first, best evidenced by the outstanding studies of Alan Cameron and Marc Lauxtermann, has attempted to explain the process whereby the manuscript was assembled as an anthology. The second, articulated in a growing body of sophisticated criticism, has investigated particular groups of epigrams, especially from the Hellenistic era, exploring their thematic, stylistic and generic attributes.Footnote ⁴ The two areas come together in those studies that have attempted to reconstruct and analyse the poetry books which are both a marked sign of Hellenistic literary culture, and of particular importance for the development of Latin literature.Footnote ⁵ One regrettable consequence of these trajectories of scholarly activity, however, is that it is extremely rare for scholars to consider the books of the Palatine Anthology as books, to consider the ordering of the books as a sequence, and, above all, to consider the whole anthology as an example of Byzantine literature. This article will show why such praxis has damagingly distorted the understanding of this major work.

We will look in particular at book 8 which has suffered more than any other from the critical blinkers of generations of scholars fixated on the glory that was classical Greece and/or the literary brilliance that was Hellenistic culture. As we will see, because these poems are by a Christian theologian from the fourth century, because they were added to the manuscript in the later tenth century, and because it is always already known that Gregory's poetry is bad, this book has been passed over in almost complete silence by scholars, even scholars of Gregory – and of Gregory's poetry at that.Footnote ⁶ Our aim here is not just to offer a reading of Gregory's sepulchral epigrams as a book and as a book in its context of the Palatine Anthology, crucial though such re-evaluations are, but also to recalibrate critical practice with regard to the Palatine Anthology, a work of such signal importance for understanding the Greek literary tradition. How the Palatine Anthology has been (mis)treated is, we argue, a paradigm for the deepest complexities of how we are to comprehend literary history and the aesthetics of late antiquity.

It is agreed by scholars that the manuscript we call the Palatine Anthology was put together in Byzantium in the tenth century, and probably complete by the middle of the century. There are four scribal hands in what is a work of over 700 manuscript pages. It is also agreed that the Palatine Anthology is based closely on an anthology put together by Cephalas around the beginning the tenth century; and Alan Cameron (Reference Cameron1993) has made a strong case that its compiler was one Constantinus of Rhodes (of whom Cameron has a very low opinion). It is also agreed that books 4–7 and 9–14 were certainly part of Cephalas’ anthology, though it is impossible to tell for sure if any local inclusions or exclusions were made by the later compiler. It is what follows from such solid scholarship that is so surprising. In 1966, in their first joint account of these issues, Alan Cameron and Averil Cameron dismissed books 1–3 as not in Cephalas and therefore of no interest.Footnote ⁷ Alan Cameron's magnum opus on the subject, The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes, follows this logic through. There is no discussion of books 1–3 in his voluminous and otherwise exhaustive study. More polemical still is his treatment of book 4. Book 4 is made up of the proems to the anthologies of Meleager, Philip and Agathias, three of the great earlier collections on which this manuscript draws. It is an anthology of beginnings of anthologies, thus locating Cephalas’ own anthology within a long literary tradition and focusing attention on the programmatic self-assertion of that tradition, always most intensely on display in opening lines, and so allowing for a marked contrast and comparison between the styles, approaches and positions of his three most salient predecessors.Footnote ⁸ It is accepted, even by Cameron, that book 4 was part of Cephalas’ anthology – but Cameron finds its inclusion not to his taste. It is, he declares therefore, ‘not part of Cephalas’ anthology proper’ and ‘not a formal part of the anthology’.Footnote ⁹ Consequently, he offers no discussion of it and, for him, the Anthology starts with book 5. It is unclear what can be meant by ‘formally’ or ‘proper’ here – how a book can be part of an anthology, but not ‘formally’ so, is baffling, and Cameron offers no further argumentation – but we suggest that this critical dismissal may be a sign of a deep-seated theoretical perspective. For Cameron, although he knows full well that there are several famous books of epigrams in both the Greek and the Latin literary tradition, is nonetheless committed to seeing each epigram as a poem in itself: ‘There is no ancient form’, he writes programmatically, ‘of which it can be said with less plausibility that it was written for the book.’Footnote ¹⁰ Book 4 is obviously constructed as a (new) book with its collection of proems, and, what is more, each proem emphasises that it too self-consciously introduced a book as a constructed artefact. For Cameron, book 4 stands against his idea of how to read epigrams. Perhaps that is why he thinks it should not be part of the formal structure of the Palatine Anthology.

As for book 1, Marc Lauxtermann has looked at the number of lines and organisation of the books in most detail, and he has concluded that this book certainly came at the start of Cephalas’ anthology.Footnote ¹¹ Cameron offers no argument for its exclusion. It has the same style of prose epigraph as other accepted books, and is clearly designed to open a collection. Book 2 Lauxtermann also thinks to have been in Cephalas, though perhaps not as the second book. Whether Lauxtermann is right or not, a strong case can be made that the organisation of books that we now have is itself designed and significant. Book 1 is headed by a prose proem which announces that the work will ‘start with pious and godly Christian epigrams even if that annoys the pagans’ (τὰ τῶν χριστιανῶν προτετάχθω εὐσεβῆ τε καὶ θεῖα ἐπιγράμματα κἂν οἱ Ἕλληνες ἀπαρέσκωνται). It should not be forgotten, in the context of the cultural politics of the tenth century, that it is highly pointed that a collection of epigrams replete with material from the pagan past should thus start – programmatically, as it were – with a collection that is announced as firmly Christian. It specifies that our reading is to take shape within a potential opposition of Christian and non-Christian comprehension.

This opposition is structurally expressed by the juxtaposition of book 1 with the following two books. Book 1 dramatises a Christian viewing of the monuments of a Christian society through a series of ecphrastic epigrams; books 2 and 3 dramatise a traditional Greek ‘pagan’ ecphrastic tour of the monuments of Hellenic culture. Book 1 has 123 poems, some apparently to act as dedications or celebratory plaques on church walls (as some no doubt did).Footnote ¹² So, there are six poems on the church of St Euphemia (AP 1.12–7), a building restored by Anicia Juliana (it was built by her grandmother and adorned further by her parents). One reads simply enough, ‘I had a delightful beauty before; but now to my former beauty I have acquired greater splendour’ (AP 1.13). The thrust of the poem is memorial and praise: there is no dramatisation of the viewing subject, no suggestion of the witty change of perception typical of earlier ecphrastic epigrams,Footnote ¹³ no homiletic of Christian self-understanding.

So, a host of epigrams seem to do little more than assert a biblical narrative – as if they were to be attached as a titulus to an image (and, again, some will have had exactly this role).Footnote ¹⁴ A poem on the baptism of Jesus (AP 1.47) states: ‘From the immortal father came the mighty Spirit (pneuma), when the son was baptised in the waters of Jordan.’ Or a distich on Lazarus reflects, ‘Christ said, come here, and Lazarus left the underworld, with the breath of salvation in his dry nostrils’ (AP 1.49). These poems – and there are many of them – read like instruments of religious contemplation, and indeed often turn into prayers: ‘O passion (pathos), O cross, the blood that drives away sufferings/passions (patheōn), wash all wickedness from my soul’ (AP 1.54).Footnote ¹⁵ The familiar connection between the suffering of Jesus – his passion – and the sufferings or passions of humans is expressed neatly enough, but this is a cliché of Christian worship. The viewing subject of Hellenistic epigram has become here the Christian contemplating subject in prayer. As Nilus Scholasticus’ epigram programmatically asserts of a picture of an archangel (AP 1.33), ‘the image raises us up to the spiritual recollection of divine matters’.

A short string of poems then each announces the practice of typological reading, another connective technique typical of late antique Christian hermeneutics (AP 1.59; see also 60–2, 66, 70, cf. 75):

A picture – or perhaps simply the story – of Moses and Pharaoh's daughter are declared to be a type (protypos) of the Logos. A traditional Christian reading is directly expressed under the exegetical model of typology (and we will return to typology when we focus on Gregory). Here the reader is represented as one of ‘the pious’, a self-fulfilling complicity. Others are excluded (‘the pious only’).Footnote ¹⁶ Far from the revelatory novelty of Hellenistic epigram's poetics of the aperçu, this epigram reveals what is known to those who know.

These poems of the first book of the anthology, with perhaps the exception of the longest poem in the collection, the praise of Anicia Juliana's restoration of the church of St Polyeuctus, have been largely ignored or dismissed by classical scholars.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet what this collection reveals is a different range of expectation for its projected viewing subject. A Christian homily is the familiar, announced and all-embracing message of the poetry. With much less self-conscious engagement with the classical tradition, there is no longer the epigrammatic zeal for the sudden revelation of what only the epigrammatist could have you see, and much less flaunting of sophia as the performance of a man of paideia. These are poems which are attached to discrete and specific topoi – both physical places, images, and the literary commonplaces of scripture. Some are juxtaposed because they are related to the same building or religious figure. But despite – or because of – such localised and evident interconnectedness, the potential of discrete reading is always structurally available: an anthology can be dipped into … But this tension between the discrete moment and the overarching vision goes to the heart not just of a Christian view of the world but also of a specifically Christian form of literary engagement with the tradition of Greek and Roman antiquity. ‘To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower’ is to recognise a network of necessary interconnections in God's order of the world and the providence that is the history of the world, even if such a pattern remains opaque to mere human perception.Footnote ¹⁸ Such a religious conception will see in each and every epigram a sign of the totality that is the divine structure of things. To read a collection of Christian epigrams, thus, is both to appreciate the discrete moments of Christian reflection and to see in and through such moments signs of the totality that is the Christian knowledge of the order of things. This book, in short, reveals not so much a systematically ordered sequence, as a collection which embodies epigram as Christian vision, and Christian vision as epigram (or at least, capable of being vibrantly articulated in this form): a Christian way of viewing the world.

Book 2 of the Palatine Anthology performs the contrast between Christian and non-Christian reading announced in the epigraph to book 1. It offers a set of poems that are announced to be a coherent collection by virtue of being a sequence of descriptions of a set of statues all exhibited in the same gymnasium, and all written by the same man, Christodorus of Egypt – whose name at least suggests he comes from a Christian environment: this is a Christian version of the Hellenic past, packaging classical culture from within and for a Christian empire.Footnote ¹⁹ Book 2 is an integrated book. That these descriptions of discrete objects are usually numbered in modern editions as a single long poem reflects the manuscript, which writes book 2 as a single poem, with only some capital letters to mark the change of subject. But more importantly, the single numbering reflects the visualised structural coherence of the lines. These poems construct not just a tour of an exhibition space but a journey through the tradition of non-Christian Greco-Roman culture. It interweaves, from the start, figures from epic and other poetry with culture heroes. The first poem is on Deiphobus, husband of Helen of Troy; the second poem is a diptych of Aeschines the orator and Aristotle the philosopher, a contrast between persuasion and wisdom, sophistry and philosophy, central vectors of the self-description of Hellenism's educated society. The statues include the great poets, of course, and great prophets, along with the divinities of the Greek pantheon, especially Aphrodite, more than once, and Apollo, the god of poetic inspiration. As one would expect from the obsession with the past familiar from so-called Second Sophistic self-constructions of Hellenism, the historical figures are all bar one taken from archaic or classical Greece (and the mythic figures closely related to archaic and classical versions). Four Romans are allowed entry. Julius Caesar and Pompey, far apart in the collection, represent the power of the Empire at its most conflictual. Virgil ends the sequence. The fourth, more surprisingly, is Apuleius, born in what is now Algeria, around the coast from Egypt. As so often in Greek writing from the Roman Empire, the cultural assertiveness of Greekness ignores, refuses to recognise, or downplays and distorts, Roman achievements in a constructed genealogy of Greek purity and even supremacy: seventy-six Greek figures are singled out, and only four Romans, in this display of culture's value. Asserting social authority by silencing or disavowing the dominant Roman structures of power was always a productive strategy of cultural resistance in the Empire, which here has become an aesthetic expectation, a literary inheritance.

Book 2 of the Palatine Anthology offers, in other words, an intriguing picture of the seriality of tradition in a serial line of statues, which are both discretely described and linked together as a single poem. An image of the pagan cultural order of things, after the Christian. Both put together within the Byzantine Christian empire. If Roman collections demonstrate ‘a masterful exhibition of the Roman power to appropriate and re-appropriate images and objects, to weave them into successive narratives of conquest and culture’Footnote ²⁰ – a ‘tradition of ekphrastic “gallery tours”’Footnote ²¹ – and if Posidippus’ lithika ‘exemplify the territorial and cultural aspirations of the Ptolemies’,Footnote ²² this collection, repackaged for the Byzantine city, is the poetic equivalent of the city's urban redesign through collections of statues whereby ‘the sculptured patrimony of antiquity was marshaled to create a civic identity for the city’, where the ‘evocative power of spolia gave visual life not only to the longing for mastery, but also its realization’, a way ‘to evoke the glory of the Hellenic past and celebrate its vitality in the Greco-Roman world’, which also, at least in the eyes of Eusebius, also ‘trumpeted the Christian triumph over Hellenic religious tradition’.Footnote ²³ Poetry collected and read like this structures the imaginary through its laden version of tradition. There is a long history of Byzantine writers using pagan statues to think through the relation between past and future.Footnote ²⁴ Book 2 is pointedly juxtaposed with book 1, whether the juxtaposition is made by Constantinus or by Cephalas.

Book 3 entwines only nineteen poems, each introduced with a prose redescription. As with book 2, these poems are pronounced to be the inscriptions of a single site, also asking to be read as a programme of images, which are, however, already reread by the later prose additions as a double collection, a double vision of what is on display.Footnote ²⁵ If book 3 was added to book 2, and the pair moved in Constantinus’ anthology, as Lauxtermann suggests, we see a major act of editing, bringing together two single sites of artistic production, which proclaim the tradition of Greek culture, to follow the first book with its Christian vision of things. The juxtaposition constructs a contrast between a traditional Greek and a Christian culture of viewing and a viewing of culture.

This process of editing goes to the heart of the aesthetics of Byzantine culture. Another remarkable text from the tenth century will provide us with a relevant theoretical vocabulary and conceptualisation. The Excerpta Constantiniana is a 53-book collection of themed historical excerpts produced at the centre of the Byzantine court at the height of the renaissance of Hellenism.Footnote ²⁶ Its prose proem is, once again, instructive. This is a work, it announces, of designed selection (eklogē), but it is specifically not a ‘summary’ (sunopsis), but an act of ‘appropriation’ (oikeiōsis).Footnote ²⁷ It redistributes passages from historical works, separate from their original context, to suit the historical accounting of the court. It announces an aesthetics of form – how the text is put together – which, by virtue of its subject matter and patronage, is also a politics of form – a way of expressing the normative ideology of this view of the past and its historiography. What is more, this act of appropriation of the past is further introduced with a prefatory poem of praise for the emperor, which describes the work precisely in terms of an anthology: the editors have ‘plucked’ (drepsas) the literary works ‘like flowers’ (anthē) which were ‘flowering (anthountas), but not sending forth a fine-smelling grace’. Now thanks to Constantine's act of garlanding, the works will again be fragrant, and we should in turn garland Constantine.Footnote ²⁸ The idea of an anthology is thus linked directly to the politics and poetics of the official construction of history for the court. The combination of prose and poetic prefaces, the act of selection and designed reordering, imaged through the language of plucking flowers and making a garland, the self-conscious need to do so because of the historical complexity of the past and the contemporary relation to it, will all return as central issues with the Palatine Anthology. ‘Appropriation’ (oikeiōsis) may be taken as a technical term for this style of composition – and its aesthetics of selection and reordering by means of anthologised juxtapositions is made central to the work of paideia at the centre of Byzantine power. There is, as Paolo Odorico writes, a ‘cultura della silloge’ in the writing of this era.Footnote ²⁹ Beyond the aesthetics of spolia, which critics have recognised as central to late antiquity,Footnote ³⁰ the opening three books of the Anthology emphasise the politics of design in a varied and yet specific programme of memorialising the past.

We can draw two conclusions from this opening. First, there appears to be a designed selection and juxtaposition of material in the opening books of the Anthology. Book 1 constructs a Christian viewing subject in prayer and contemplation of the known Christian message; book 2 – composed it would appear as a book – along with the tiny book 3 epitomises the stance of a ‘pagan’ educated viewer: the educated man about town, revelling in the flair of insight, engaging with pagan tradition. Books 2 and 3 have been set in meaningful tension with book 1. This juxtaposition of normative systems of viewing establishes a model of Byzantine comprehension, articulated between its classicising past and its Christianising present. This relation is not a simple contrast of ‘before’ and ‘after’, but rather – as the fact that the poems of the three books are written and/or collected by Christians in Byzantium indicates – a dynamic and evolving engagement, a relation typical of the intricate interaction with the past evidenced by early Greek and Latin Christian writers, including, as we will see, Gregory of Nazianzus.Footnote ³¹ Second, critics have been too quick to ignore the opening books of the Anthology on the grounds that they may not have been in Cephalas’ anthology. Rather, between Cephalas’ anthology and the Palatine manuscript we should see a fundamental redrafting – reanthologisation – which is itself a sign of the dynamic tension between Christian and classicising affiliations. The organisation of the manuscript itself signifies as well as continues its cultural work.

2. Gregory of Nazianzus: the polemics of death and memorial

Before we turn to discussing how book 8 too is part of this semantics of organisation, we need to understand the figure of Gregory and the rhetoric of ‘his’ book of the Anthology. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of Gregory's career as a theologian and political leader;Footnote ³² nor is it suitable here to rehearse a survey of his huge output. But there are several elements of his career and writings that provide a necessary background to the sepulchral epigrams, and which will benefit from at least a summary account.

First of all, Gregory, like his friend Basil, wrote repeatedly and polemically about how Christians should relate to Greek literature, both in his prose and, more surprisingly, in his poetry more broadly, especially the poems to Nicobulus and his In suos uersus (even to write such poetry of literary criticism finds very few parallels in early Christian literature).Footnote ³³ Like Basil, he was very well read in the tradition of non-Christian writing, and strikingly privileges paideia, that essential value of the so-called Second Sophistic, for a Christian worshipper. On the one hand, he attacks the majority of Christians ‘who despise learning’ (paideusin diaptuein) and especially learning from non-Christian traditions (exōthen), as ‘treacherous and dangerous and keeping us far from God’.Footnote ³⁴ It is rather, Gregory asserts, ‘the first of good things’. There are many extreme examples of Christian faith, especially associated with the growing monastic and ascetic movements, which had no truck with scholarship itself, let alone pagan learning. What is more, even a Christian who was profoundly learned in traditional scholarship, such as Jerome, felt the need publicly to lambast himself, at least through his dreams, for being too Ciceronian. Nonetheless, Gregory is explicit in his commitment to paideia as a necessary and privileged sign of true Christian engagement. On the other hand, he lambasts the emperor Julian for attempting to prevent Christians from teaching pagan literature: ‘Whose property are the words of the Greek language? … O Philhellene, O Philologist, do you intend to debar us from speaking Greek?!’Footnote ³⁵ Gregory's commitment to paideia is fully part of a politics of culture – both a politics between Christians, and a politics between Christians and Julian and his supporters.Footnote ³⁶ Thus, when Gregory writes epigrams, he does so with a developed knowledge of an ancient Greek tradition, and with an expectation of a learned audience who will recognise and appreciate his contribution to such a tradition.Footnote ³⁷ This expectation marks not just the usual self-congratulatory gestures of imperial Greek pepaideumenoi (references to a shared ‘code’ of cultured references): it represents in itself a politicised position within an on-going theological, intellectual and social debate about the role of the non-Christian literary traditions of the past in Christianity.

Second, Gregory wrote a good deal of poetry that can be called ‘autobiographical’ – or, better, which acts as public statements of apology and self-description, including three long poems about his career and its travails. ‘He talks about himself a lot.’Footnote ³⁸ Gregory uses poetry as a Christian to produce an image of himself and what he stands for – and to enter into political debate within the church.Footnote ³⁹ This is not just a self-defence or intervention in church politics. These poems take shape within the growing tradition of ‘life writing’ that characterises the development of Christianity. At one level, the Gospels are taken up into the hagiographic tradition precisely as versions of the life of Christ, which makes the written lives of saints part of the interface of liturgy and history in the church's self-representation.Footnote ⁴⁰ At another level, what is to be understood by a Christian life – how to live – is articulated through privileged accounts of a life, as well as by homiletics. Augustine's Confessions is the most sophisticated example from the Latin West; but Gregory's poems proved instrumental in understanding the role of a bishop within the church. Gregory uses poetry to explore how a Christian life should be led.

Third, Gregory also wrote celebrated prose funeral orations, which became models for later generations.Footnote ⁴¹ He wrote both about his family, most notably his mother and sister, and about his friends in high places, most notably Basil – all figures who will feature strongly in the sepulchral epigrams. By taking up the earlier tradition of funerary eulogy and turning it to Christian practice, Gregory forges a link between his Christian community and the literary and cultural traditions of the region. But the funeral orations not only construct extended normative models of what a good life for a Christian should be, but also insist that the Christian's relation to death – the promise of the afterlife, the rewards of heaven – forms a fundamental distinction between Christianity and the practices of non-Christian cult. What death means and how a recognition of its significance changes a person's engagement with life make the literature of the rituals of death an essential homiletic affordance of Christianity. The literature of death is integral to Christianity. Gregory is central in its development.

Fourth, through these funeral orations and through his other written output, notably letters and, differently, sermons, Gregory constructs a vivid – and designedly persuasive – image of Christian community. This image has been described rather dismissively (if amusingly) as ‘wine-drinking property-owning ascetics’,Footnote ⁴² but this playful description of playfulness underplays the work Gregory undertakes. On the one hand, as with Libanius’ letters for a similar, more mixed, community, we can see a network of Christian elites in the making through the exchange of patronage, often troped as friendship, through shared problems, and collaborative festal activity.Footnote ⁴³ On the other, as Susannah Elm has sharply expressed, especially through the funeral orations, we can see how Gregory disseminates a vision of the new Christian philosophical family.Footnote ⁴⁴ Gregory gives himself a central role within such a family – within his family, with his own career as the central node – but also allows a recognition of the role of the female members of the family, and not just through the exemplarity of piety. As Virginia Burrus has pointed out, his memorial of his sister is the first life of a married woman who is not the mother of the writer, the first female subject of a life (even though Gregory also writes, with typical patriarchal disavowal, that in ‘praising my sister, I will be praising my own family’).Footnote ⁴⁵ In representing himself as celibate but still embedded in a range of family relationships, Gregory, the Church Father, is constructing a particular mode of how to be a Christian man (not least through the representations of the women he is surrounded by).Footnote ⁴⁶ The contrast with more austere versions of Christian praxis enshrined in the various models of asceticism, or even with Synesius’ aggressive refusal to give up on his marriage, or indeed even with Augustine's hesitant and emotionally fraught marital relationships (not to mention his mother's role), is telling. Gregory offers an idealised portrait of the possibility of his own celibacy within a network of family relations that does not require the rejection of the family or social duty. This positionality is a specific and polemical stance within the developing church that Gregory uses a variety of literary representations to formulate.

Fifth, and finally, Gregory is the first Greek author we know to have prepared an edition of his own letters for publication during his own lifetime.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is not just a footnote in the history of a genre. It also indicates Gregory's continuing interest in his own self-representation, and his recognition of how the organisation of his work can contribute to this self-publicising agenda: the manipulation of what might otherwise be singular interventions, into a coherent, book-length production where significant juxtaposition is integral to the work's persuasive meanings. Gregory is, that is, a highly literate and sophisticated writer who is fully aware of how juxtaposition, ordering of material and persuasive polemics of self-representation are essential to a Christian bishop's life of apologetics and power.Footnote ⁴⁸

With these five frameworks in mind, we can turn to Gregory's sepulchral epigrams themselves. It is immediately evident that these poems are structured as a book, and self-consciously marked as such: we rarely see structuring signalled with such explicitness in other books of epigrams (although Martial toys excitingly with this prospect).Footnote ⁴⁹ The opening epigram is on the tomb of the emperor Theodosius and John Chrysostom: since both Theodosius and John died after Gregory, this must have been added at some point. It does, however – like the poetic preface to the Excerpta Constantiniana – make for a foundational (new) start. It begins with the emperor, the height of power, and with a most distinguished episcopal and intellectual leader – before a collection which will indeed focus on the hierarchies of the church, the intellectual power of Gregory's family and friends, an image of a Christian community. It asserts a sort of intellectual genealogy, setting Gregory programmatically within his own subsequent heritage. Gregory's own poems begin with a sequence on his friend Basil, another bishop and intellectual leader – as his compilation of letters also starts with his correspondence with Basil.Footnote ⁵⁰ The first epigram ends simply Grēgorioio logos, ‘the word of Gregory’, a sort of sphragis or seal for the collection (AP 8.2.6, cf. 11.2).Footnote ⁵¹ The last of the Basil poems declares that he has dedicated this ‘dozen epigrams to your ashes’. There are now actually only ten or eleven (depending on how the poems are divided: we should probably assume one has dropped out)Footnote ⁵² – but the poem both marks its own status as an epigram and encourages us to see the placement, accounting and sequence as significant. So there follow (exactly) twelve for his own father. He honours his mother, in the next sequence, with tosois epigrammasi, ‘so many epigrams’ (AP 8.30.6)Footnote ⁵³ – another explicit marker of genre, ordering and number. There are editorial decisions to be made about where to divide some of the poems (AP 8.24–74), but if we follow the reasonable division of Paton's Loeb, then there are fifty-three poems for his mother. As scholars of the Excerpta Constantiniana, which has fifty-three books, have argued, fifty-three can have a theological significance in Christian numerology (as twelve, the number of the Apostles, more obviously has) – a particularly intriguing possibility because the numerology of fifty-three is expounded in a treatise on prayer by Evagrius of Pontus, a student and close associate of Gregory.Footnote ⁵⁴ Before he writes six poems on his own death and tomb, he advertises, as if with a title, ‘I will write my own fate too’ (AP 8.78.4). The first 165 poems of the collection expand from Gregory's own family (father, mother, brother, sister – even himself) to his extended religious family. Each figure mentioned has a brief collection of varied epigrams in sequence. After these epigrams of eulogy, however, the remaining ninety epigrams describe and lament those who do not understand and pervert Christian burial, first with five poems about those who feast indecorously at the tombs of the martyrs,Footnote ⁵⁵ and then with a long sequence decrying those who desecrate Christian tombs in the search of gold (a theme anticipated in his poems about the tomb of Martinianus (8.104–17)). Our point here is simple: not only are the epigrams collected so that each poem about a particular figure is in a gathered and regulated sequence, but also the whole book is structured as a normative diptych of praise and blame.

The image of the Christian community expressed in the first 165 poems is layered and fascinating. We will look in detail at the poems for Nonna shortly, but first some general remarks. The first sequence, as we have mentioned, is on Gregory's dear friend Basil (the repetition of the word philos and its cognates is marked),Footnote ⁵⁶ but the representation of Basil also focuses on his episcopal role. That is, we start within the structure of the church, overlapped with the formal language of affective ties, which mark and merge personal, political and theological links. Similarly, the poems for his father repeatedly emphasise his role as a priest and guardian of his flock (this time with no expressions of personal affection).

Gregory's paideia is in evidence throughout (AP 8.16):

Gregory echoes Homer's Hector (and Sophocles’ Ajax) in imagining a father's wish for his son as the hope the child will be better than the parent. Where Hector (Il. 9.479–81) specifies that his son should be better than his father in war, and where Sophocles’ Ajax (Ajax 550–1) hopes his son will be better in fortune, but in all other things the same (not better), Gregory rewrites this heroic anxiety about father/son competition in military excellence, as a prayer to be better in everything and to be worthy in gentleness (aganophrosunē), a Christian virtue, but also a word used in Homer in two highly personal contexts: first of Hector himself (Il. 24.772) by Helen lamenting his death, and of Odysseus, by his mother in the underworld (Od. 11.202). The prayer for gentleness is immediately limited by the humble recognition that it would be wrong to pray for more, a humility in self-performative contrast to the boastful self-assertion of Hector and, differently, Ajax. The simple prayer to reach old age also contrasts tellingly with the fates of Hector and his son (and Ajax); and the term kēdemōn, used in Homer only of those who care for the dead, inherently cues and contrasts the Homeric language of the feeble and lamenting dead with the Christian promise of the afterlife, marked by the term makar, ‘blessed’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gregory constructs his memorial of a father's hope for a child, always a highly normative moment of filiation to express what counts in life, out of a Christian redrafting of the discourse of Homer.Footnote ⁵⁸

Gregory displays his paideia, then, but he also repeatedly praises sophiē as a virtue. This might be taken as a form of Christian spiritual recognition, and, of course, Sophia is also a central figure in the Gnostic pseudepigraphical texts, but Gregory specifically links such wisdom to logic, grammar, history and rhetoric – all traditional branches of elite learning (AP 8.91).Footnote ⁵⁹ He praises himself for his own sophiē in three of the six poems on his own death (AP 8.81.3, 83.2, 84.4) and eulogises the youthful Caesarius, his dead brother, for his intellectual achievements, especially in medicine, with the word sophiē in no fewer than six poems (AP 8.85b.3, 86.2, 91.1, 93.2, 94.4, 98.4) – Caesarius indeed is mourned in terms that are closest to traditional Greek values.Footnote ⁶⁰ As Gregory puts together poems for his parents, his parents’ wishes for him, and their joint grave, followed by a set of poems on his own death, his dead brother, Caesarius, and for his sister Gorgonion, we are being presented with a holy family – a pious, philosophical unit. He goes on to commemorate other members of the community, named and remembered for their Christian virtues.Footnote ⁶¹ Each is known to Gregory, and, especially with his own family, he places himself at the node of the relationships that link the poems. The book thus constructs an ordered portrayal of a Christian community centred around himself. Each person is named, placed in a set of relations, praised within a now Christian set of normative values which privilege paideusis, chastity, piety. What a Christian community is – or should be – is represented: a monastery, as it were, or, better, an extended Christian philosophical family, in epigrams.Footnote ⁶² As collections of letters perform a network of social elite bonding, so here we see the network of a Christian community constructed in and through memorial.

The emphasis on the blessed afterlife is the cornerstone of the Christian discourse on death, which contrasts repeatedly with the traditional language of Greek literature out of which Gregory nonetheless constructs his sophisticated poetry.Footnote ⁶³ Book 8 establishes, that is, a set of normative variations on how to grieve in an educated Christian manner, or, better, how – through the display of the poetics of paideia – to commemorate the loss of a beloved Christian within the Christian commitment to the eternal and blessed afterlife integral to its theology and its evangelicalism.

After the eulogies, the second part of the diptych of book 8 turns to the blame. Here, too, the transgressors are represented within a conventionalised Christian framework. Again and again, Gregory emphasises that the robbers fail to recognise that a body is but dust and that a bare grave is all a Christian funeral allows.Footnote ⁶⁴ Again and again, lust for gold is specified as the corruption that leads to sacrilege: longing for material wealth is to misunderstand the nature of life and death in a Christian world. If you seek gold from a tomb, he asks, then ‘what are you worth?’ (AP 8.194.4). The contrast between the collective sacred community and the individual (anonymous) transgressors is striking. As Homer constructs the anti-funeral in the desecration of the corpse as a contrast to the hero's search for the glory of a noble death,Footnote ⁶⁵ so here Gregory contrasts the anti-sepulchral festivities and desecration of the grave with the celebrated lives of the Christian heroes. The book is organised around this juxtaposition.Footnote ⁶⁶

Yet here too there is more than a simple polarisation. On the one hand, the poems, as we have seen, insist on a now familiar Christian discourse of materiality. The body is but flesh and the flesh. What matters is the spirit. The memorial of death through the stone of the grave is a sign of the dull materiality of human life. The lack of splendid grave goods, and especially of gold, indicates the Christian denigration of such materiality and its most corrupting embodiment in lust for wealth rather than the eros for sophiē and other Christian virtues outlined in the eulogies with which the book has opened. Those that dig up and destroy Christian graves have wholly misunderstood the value of matter, and their very physical engagement with such vandalism performs the vanity of their commitments to material possessions. On the other hand, the very repetition of so many poems on the same theme – something for which Gregory has often been criticised by modern critics – is also part of this discourse in a remarkable way which shows the interconnections of the sophiē of rhetoric, the theory of the body, and the persuasiveness of Gregory's normative persuasiveness at work. Gregory is elsewhere explicit about this logic of repetition, in a sermon in which he rebukes theologians for asking repeatedly about the nature of God. With a performative exasperation at his audience's recalcitrance, he declares (Or. 20.10): ‘I repeat the same words often because I mistrust your thick (pachus), material (hulike) thought processes.’ Human beings, by virtue of the materiality of their minds, need to be told again and again – about the materiality of the body. While hulē/hulikos is the standard philosophical and theological term for material(ity), pachus and its cognates are terms that Gregory appears to be the first to revert to again and again to indicate the density, the thickness of the flesh that defines the very fallen nature of man as a physical being: ‘thickness’ is the essential quality of our flesh, our ‘human form’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Pachus is not a term the New Testament uses, except twice in the verbal form epachunthē, in both cases when directly quoting the same passage from the Septuagint;Footnote ⁶⁸ Gregory extends the use of this vocabulary with a consistent pointedness that indicates its now theological purposiveness. The epigrams put this logic into practice. At very least, such a statement of principle should make critics hesitate before excoriating Gregory's poetic ‘repetitiveness’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Critics who have looked at these poems on desecration have on the one hand questioned their connection to Realien and social anxiety around attacks on religious markers; and on the other, have articulated the variations on the long tradition of sepulchral language to show Gregory's ‘Callimachean’ allusive artistry.Footnote ⁷⁰ There is no doubt about Gregory's paideia or the care with which he appropriates the long tradition of sepulchral discourse. What we emphasise here, however, is the redrafting of such language towards a Christian discourse of materiality and death. The poetics of the past are in service of the polemics of the present.

Nor is Gregory alone in thinking through such issues. Augustine, in the Latin West, recognises that the materiality of the flesh makes the acuteness of his mind dulled (inualidam), as Gregory calls our human minds ‘thick’, and it prevents him from loving God adequately: consuetudine umbrarum carnalium inualidam mentis aciem gerit, ‘the habit of fleshly shadows makes the acuity of our mind infirm’ (De doctr. Christ. 1.9.9). If this passage, with the extraordinary phrase ‘the habit of fleshly shadows’, implies that sexuality is the root of the problem, Augustine generalises more broadly in the Confessions: corpus quod corrumpitur, aggrauat animum et deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem, ‘The body which is corrupt weighs down the soul, and our earthly habitation drags down the mind as it thinks on many things’ (Conf. 7.17.23): the corrupt materiality of the human body is the condition of necessary misunderstanding. For Augustine – a more complex and moving thought – it is the ‘habit’ (consuetudo) of fleshliness, the place where, as both Rilke and Heidegger would appreciate, we dwell (inhabitatio) that places the limit to our comprehension. For Gregory, repetition of his message – saying the same words, again and again – is designed to provide a necessary salve against this material dullness of human understanding. Both the message of Gregory's many poems on the grave and the very repetition of the message are designed to shock humans into a Christian understanding of the flesh.

There are strong reasons, then, from the internal markers in the poems to think of book 8 as organised by Gregory himself (even if we know from the epigraph to the book that he also wrote other sepulchral poems). But however the collection was put together, the book as it stands provides us with an image of a Christian community united in shared values and in the comprehension of a Christian life through the shared practices of memorial, as a normative expression of those values. This community is based on a holy, philosophical family – a rejoinder to the extremists of the flesh, the ascetics who wished to destroy the family – while also proudly and demonstratively maintaining the bishop's own virginity. Gregory represents himself as the node around which the community revolves: the bishop as the shepherd, the guardian, the learned centre of a Christian life. The community stretches from the immediate family to the brotherhood of the Christian faith. This elite community of the faithful is based on paideusis, education, as well as faith and piety – and thus on a more complex negotiation of the inheritance of the non-Christian literary past, which the language of his poetry embodies. Again, such a commitment to learning, including learning from ‘outside’, is a polemical stance, standing against the majority of Gregory's contemporary Christians, as he himself recognises, and especially the more extreme ascetic dedication, for all that he also engages in energetic arguments against Eunomius, Apollinaris, Maximus the Cynic, educated Christians he also passionately disagrees with.Footnote ⁷¹ The epigrams insist, however, on a new, Christian, discourse of death, based on the promise of the afterlife as a reward for faith. This in turn is predicated on a discourse of materiality, which not only despises the flesh, and the pursuit of material wealth, but also sees human inability to understand the Christian message of transcendence of the material as a product of the very materiality of the body – something only repetition of the word, and the Word, can mitigate – as is embodied in the poems of Gregory's book. Gregory's book of sepulchral epigrams should be seen, thus, as an important juncture in the history of the composition of books of epigrams, in the history of a Christian discourse of death and the grave, and in the history of the relation between Christianity and the tradition of non-Christian Greek literature.

3. Figuring Nonna

So far, we have explored the general structuring of book 8. The largest subsection of Gregory's book is the fifty-three poems on his mother – and it is this set of poems we wish to look at in more detail here as our test case for the polemics of death and memorial under construction.Footnote ⁷² In the latest study of the Palatine Anthology, Simone Beta imagines that the manuscript itself is annoyed and frustrated at how boring these particular epitaphs are that are written on it: a joke which only works, of course, because the critical position which it amuses itself with is deadly serious, and entirely typical.Footnote ⁷³ There is, however, as we will demonstrate, a lot more to be said about why Nonna is central to the Christian poetics of death in Gregory's composition.

Nonna was a crucial figure in Gregory's liturgical and literary life. She converted her husband Gregory to Christianity and was the mother of three children, each of whom became a saint. She outlived her husband and two of her children – our Gregory lived on – and died in 374, ‘of old age’ (γηραλέη, 8.58). These poems mark, mourn and celebrate that death. The nature of Nonna's return to God, as poeticised by her son, comes to consummate the extreme piety of her life: she died, so we are told again and again and again, in church, while still praying, at the altar.

Gregory acknowledges Nonna's formidable spirit in his gargantuan poem On his Own Life (57–71):

Gregory's description of Nonna's life is a crucial first step to comprehending the epigrammatic vision of her death. The role of the mother as a figure of particular influence and significance in late antiquity is well documented: the gradually emerging centrality of Mary as the mother of Christ,Footnote ⁷⁴ the discourse surrounding female ascetics,Footnote ⁷⁵ the central role of Monica in Augustine's Confessions and the complex, changing legislation on issues concerning female moralityFootnote ⁷⁶ are part of what makes the Christianising environment of the later Empire a fertile ground for disputing the connected questions of maternity, virginity, sexuality and seclusion.Footnote ⁷⁷ These issues also find a loud voice in the Greek poetics of the period, as authors who took on classical themes and forms refashioned their conventional material to reflect such new types of female subject.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, to take just two contrastive examples, the sixth-century Greek poet Colluthus, who composed an epyllion (‘miniature epic’) on the pre-Homeric narrative of the Trojan War, redrafts the canonical story of Helen's departure from Sparta to focus on the relationship between Helen as mother and her young daughter Hermione.Footnote ⁷⁹ And the Christus Patiens, once thought to be the work of Gregory of Nazianzus, but now more commonly dated to the Byzantine period, offers a vivid example of how these concerns found increasingly intense expression in the later antique world. The poem continuously manipulates classical paradigms to centralise a Christian maternal subject: Mary's impassioned speeches are constructed from a complex amalgamation of tragic ‘mothers’ – Medea, Agave and Musa – resulting in ‘a narrative of fragmentation through clashes between centonic form, tragic sources and Christian subject’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Greek Church Fathers also wrote frequently and discursively about the women in their lives (Gregory is not alone in this choice of subject): the women whom Carla Sunberg has aptly termed the ‘Cappadocian Mothers’ richly shaped the lives and theology of their sons (and vice versa).Footnote ⁸¹ For Gregory – as, more famously, for Augustine – the figure of his mother is central in his religious narrative.

Gregory has a nuanced, polemical position in the shifting politics of the family in fourth-century Christianity. He depicts himself, as we have seen, in the centre of an extended family and community imaged as a family; and yet he takes on the role for himself of a celibate – but not an (extreme) ascetic.Footnote ⁸² Any praise of a mother is equally rife with such tensions and paradoxes, as this praise also has to negotiate the competing models of lauded virginity.Footnote ⁸³ Gregory's Nonna epigrams thus take their place firmly within this strong and building tradition of maternal poetics in late antiquity. However, they also significantly exploit and disrupt that tradition, as Gregory takes up its markers of filiation, mourning and classical-Christian assimilation and reshapes them for his own agenda. The Nonna of these epigrams occupies a powerful double position: her very death inside the church aims at blurring the boundaries between church and household, and her character contains a number of contrastive characteristics (formidable but female, elderly; ephemeral but eternal). She therefore presents the perfect vehicle to convey the plurality of structures within the Christian community that these epigrams are constructing. Gregory's life in the church was never separable from, and was sometimes painfully intertwined with, his family and its dynamics of power. The Nonna poems convey this connection.Footnote ⁸⁴ His mother's place in this poetic network is posed as a continually shifting question. Who the ideal Christian mother ‘is’, what she is like, unfolds as a series of challenges and contradictions, as the plurality of these poems dramatically resist the singularity and consistency of message suggested by their repetitive form.

Immediately striking is the sheer variation in the modes which Gregory uses to talk about his mother: the fifty-three poems εἰς τὴν μητέρα are, variously, addressed to Nonna; ventriloquised through her; comparing her to others; personifying the tomb which holds her; or focalising the altar on which she died. They are shaped as prayers to her, by her, or to the martyrs whose company she now joins; and even, on one occasion, conducted as an imagined dialogue, as two unnamed interlocutors discuss her ‘excellent life and pious death’ (8.58) (a formal echo of a very long tradition of dialogue in epitaphic epigram). Like Christodorus’ ecphrastic statues in book 2, Nonna is viewed from all angles.

This variation works in pointed contrast with what may seem to be the ‘excruciating’ uniformity of the poems’ content (Nonna who died at church, Nonna who excelled in piety – her qualities in life and death are repeated like a mantra): the combination of repetition and difference, monotony and miscellany, familiar from so many books of the Anthology and, as we have seen in the discussion of the grave-robbing sequence, often deemed an unsavoury quality of book 8, is readily discernible here. However, what sets Gregory's techniques here apart from the other books of this collection is the self-consciousness, from the writer's perspective, about the effects of these variegating moves. What is true for book 8 as a whole – Gregory's logic of repetition – is especially true for these poems. Myron's Cow may provoke multiple authors to offer their singular views, Nonna prompts the singular author to multiply his views of the same iconic event. How many ways to view the good mother … may be an exclamation and/or a question.

We have argued that book 8 ought to be considered a coherent book, structured and organised by Gregory himself. As in his published corpus of letters, Gregory here revels in his joint position as author and editor, and shows himself to be intensely interested in order, numbering and juxta- and contra-positions. Because of this interest, the driving question becomes how these multiple different poems ‘about’ Nonna engage and influence one another: how Gregory uses their progression – as frictional, fluctuating parts of an accumulating whole – to ‘place’ his mother in this epigrammatic world. Gregory emphasises not the precise number of his poems to his mother, but rather their vastness: tosois epigrammasi (8.30) In contrast to the numbered poems for Basil and Gregory the Elder, Nonna's measurements of commemoration are not so easily contained. The first word of the whole sequence is pantos (8.24.1). While in the epigrams for Basil, Gregory begins with a precise locational marker – entha (‘here I [Basil] sleep’, 8.12) – pinning his subject down into the specific, earthly vestibule which holds his body, his opening for his mother marks a shift from the concrete to the conceptual, from the singular to the all-engulfing. The emphasis on multitude continues throughout the sequence. After he exclaims tosois epigrammasi, the next poem (8.31) functions as a recusatio of piousness: where other women are renowned for individual qualities, Nonna is en pantessin aoidimos: ‘to be celebrated in song among everyone [of them]’. This contrast between order and expansiveness provides the first, overarching tension which drives Gregory's portrayal of Nonna, as notions of excess and multiplicity collide with the neat, containing principles of the epigram as a potted vision of the world. In Gregory's depiction, Nonna, so distinguished, with so much praise, so many epigrams, threatens to burst the bounds of the ordered social and poetic world of the epigrammatic Christian family.

Nonna's excellence, however, is also repeatedly refocused through the lens of Gregory's own self-expressing voice. We have seen how in his orations to his family, Gregory proves himself a deft eulogistic acrobat: switching and subverting different subjects of praise – a tactic on which he comments explicitly in his speech to his sister, as she becomes metonymy for wider familial glorification. In these Nonna epigrams, this practice results in even stronger effects. Gregory now not only praises his mother in order to praise his family, but also – with palpable, almost wry impenitence – praises his mother and his family in order to praise himself. On many occasions, thus, he casts himself as the subject of the maternal commemorations, ‘competing’ with Nonna for the status of the epigrams’ central theme. This self-centring in the act of mourning, it may be argued, is a standard practice in lamentation: Greek laments, as far back as Homer, so often focus on the feelings of the bereaved as much as the praise of the dead. But in the context of these epigrams – where affection is expressed so formally, and so formalistically (there is no pretence that any of these epigrams is attached to an actual tomb), and where the Christian assurance of salvation would seem to allow so little space for outpourings of ‘real’ emotional pain – this self-centredness takes on an altogether different force.

So, on the only two occasions where Gregory personifies his mother, he does so in order to talk to and about himself: ‘Nonna’ praises Gregory's filial devotion and piety (8.32) and defines herself in terms of her relationship to him (‘I was the flesh and mother of a priest’, 8.48.1–2). Indeed, the only downside to her death is not, qua the usual logic of bereavement, the survivors’ loss of her presence on earth, but rather her loss of Gregory's presence in heaven (8.44):

The view from heaven, as it were, privileges the surviving son and makes him the pivot of the narrative of the mother's death. So, too, the final two poems in this set are another form of Gregory-centric ventriloquism. Like the hopes of his father for his future prosperity (8.16), 8.75 and 76 are imagined prayers for the son, now placed in the mouths of both of his parents together. Gregory thus moves from prayer-maker to prayer-receiver, and this vast series ends with him, not his mother, as the focal point of honour, worship and praise.

This overt mixture of filiation and narcissism goes to the heart of Gregory's genealogical politics in this book. Just as he redrafts the heroic language of competitive rivalry with his father (e.g. 8.16), and just as he will soon advertise his intention to write himself into this sepulchral family history, narrating his own fate even though he is the last to die (8.78), here Gregory uses his family as tools for his own identity formation. Amassing and sharing in their ‘group’ glory, he also uses their voices to distance himself from the potential indecorousness of self-praise. The Nonna epigrams form a crucial part of this strategy, and also add an important maternal vector to its expression: in contrast to his Homeric and tragic filial discourse, this is no longer a family competition involving only males. The praise of the ‘ideal’ Christian mother thus becomes the perfect carapace to convey the Church Father's self-motivated theology of being. In other words, through these poems to Nonna, Gregory not only expresses an idealised image of a Christian community, a Christian family, a Christian hierarchy, revolving around Gregory and his allies (and their theology), but also makes his understanding of his mother, her piety and his feelings central to this imaging, this strategy of self-representation.

Gregory's religious language also veins Nonna's portrayal with the conflicts of the period's – and his – transitional rhetoric. On any reading, the sequence contains an intense amalgamation of ‘pagan’, Septuagint and biblical vocabulary. Thus, to take a preliminary and striking example, the frequent likening of Nonna to mother figures from the Bible (a move which we will shortly consider in detail) is often mingled with the language of Homeric heroics. In 8.26 Nonna's ‘knees were loosened’ (ἐλύθη καλὰ Νόννης γούνατα) – a Homeric formula to describe warriors cut down in battle, a far cry from her peaceful death in church. In 8.31, as we have seen, she is aoidimos. This is a common enough word in Greek poetics;Footnote ⁸⁵ however, in Homer it is a unicum, and when used here, in the context of a woman being celebrated, it is invested with a special value, and can echo Helen's famous Iliadic prediction about the Homeric heroes’ future fame – who will include, more worryingly, Helen herself (ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι, Il. 6.358). And in 8.27, as she is being compared to a list of mothers from the Hebrew Bible, Nonna is said to share their kleos:

Kleos recurs twice again for Nonna, as Gregory praises her mega kleos (8.36) and the kleos of her death (8.42). This term, which is only very rarely available to females in classical discourse,Footnote ⁸⁷ is scarcely used in the Bible at all.Footnote ⁸⁸ Instead, the word for glory which resounds in biblical writing is doxa: the word which Gregory himself chooses elsewhere when describing Nonna's highly Thucydidean form of female renown: κρῦψαί τι μᾶλλον τῶν φανερῶν εἰθισμένην | ἢ τῶν ἀδήλων κομπάσαι δόξης χάριν, ‘Accustomed rather to conceal some part of the obvious rather than to boast of what is unrevealed for the sake of glory’ (De uita sua 65–6) – Nonna won fame by keeping quiet. Gregory in general, however, shuns the Bible's reticence for the Homeric term: he uses both kleos and doxa freely, and often seemingly interchangeably, throughout his corpus. And yet is it only in these epigrams, with such striking frequency, that he applies the word to a woman: to his mother and also to her famous female comparanda. Nonna's claim to kleos offers a neat illustration of Gregory's specific and self-conscious redrafting of a non-biblical term as an act of contestation and appropriation, as masculinised, non-Christianised vocabulary is reshaped to make Nonna, in her epigrammatic mould, the archetypal Christian heroine.Footnote ⁸⁹

This lexical shifting is most densely concentrated in the semantics of sacrifice. Sacrificial terms appear copiously in relation to Nonna, as her death at the altar is dramatised again and again as an act of self-sacrifice. Her ‘peaceful’ demise from old age is transformed into a personalised martyrdom, and the emphasis on her feeble ‘wrinkled body’ gives way to a more indomitable impression (γῆρας ἄκαμπτον, 8.57), as Nonna begins to resemble, paradoxically, an elderly ‘lamb of God’.

Now, on the one hand, this analogy is in perfect accordance with Gregory's idealised Christian discourse. The sacrifice is stressed as emphatically bloodless (8.49), aligned with the martyrs (8.33 and 52) and shown to outdo all other, earlier forms: Nonna's act is compared positively to the sacrifices of Abraham and Jephtha (8.51: handily for Gregory, it is better to give up one's own life to God than the life of one's child …) and she also triumphs over the outdated, unperfected pagan and Jewish paradigms (8.34):

The sacrifice of calves and goats, so familiar from the Hebrew Bible's injunctions (and Abel also sacrificed the ‘first-born’, Gen 4.4), is described as ‘shadowy’ because they are ‘shadows of what is to come’ (Col 2.17), that is, transcended types, an idea made explicit in his use of eikones, ‘types’, ‘images’, that were the law for the old days of Israel. Like the protupos of Moses and Pharaoh's daughter in AP 1.59, these earlier models provide the backdrop for Nonna's fully realised Christian version. Nonna, in contrast to these earlier examples, gave ‘her whole self’ – both not cut up into pieces like a sacrifice, and a freighted expression for the new, all-embracing sense of a Christian life – and this is something to recognise (the particle ara underlines) and something to learn (manthane): the didacticism insists on the supersessionist shift from the models of the past, which ‘shadow’ the future, to the fulfilment of the present. As Nonna the mother becomes a typological version of Sarah and Anna, so her death becomes a type of Christian sacrifice. As Gregory can represent his own life in Christomorphic form, so he imagines his mother as experiencing a version of Jesus’ death.Footnote ⁹⁰

And yet, such a neat pattern of progression is put under pressure through some pointed swerves of language, as the straight, ‘correct’ Christian model of Nonna's sacrifice is also articulated in a more radically composite way. The two most frequent terms used to express this sacrificial image are trapeza, which Gregory uses exclusively to describe the altar at which his mother died, and thuos, which occurs seven times (28, 33, 40, 49, 52, 53, 73) and is his most commonly selected word for her act of ‘sacrifice’ itself.Footnote ⁹¹ Both are remarkably un-biblical terms. Trapeza – the classical word for an eating table, or a table dedicated to the gods on which meat offerings were set – is the technical term in the Septuagint for the table for the shew-bread in the temple. It is used fifteen times in the New Testament, but never in relation to an altar.Footnote ⁹² It did, however, become the favourite term for ‘altar’ among the Greek Christian Fathers. Eusebius provides an early and instructive example: in the tenth book of the Church History, he includes a panegyric on the building of churches, at which the trapeza is the central set-piece of splendour: a vision which surpasses ecphrastic description, and also a boundary carved for the exclusive wonder of the insiders, artfully concealed from the gaze of ‘the many’ (Hist. eccl. 10.4.44):

In his concentrated, repeated use of this piece of vocabulary, Gregory selects a word borrowed from Jewish, Septuagint discourse, and which was becoming an integral part of the Church Fathers’ own language of self-formation. The term thus construed shows the transfusions and ruptures between old sacrificial models and new, and places Gregory's own theological ideology at the centre of these lines of (dis)connection.

Thuos, a resolutely ‘pagan’ term, is also tensely interwoven with more ‘conventional’ biblical language. Thusia, the Septuagint term for sacrifice, and Gregory's ‘favourite’ word in his discussions of the topic elsewhere, also occurs four times in the Nonna poems, but twice in a highly competitive sense.Footnote ⁹³ The filial offerings of Abraham and Jephtha are – suitably – described as Θεῷ θυσίην; and Nonna also lived a life ‘purer than any sacrifice’ (41), with thusia as merely the genitive of comparison. The Septuagint thusia is thus evoked and transcended; emulated and bettered.

The same blending occurs in more uncommon vocabulary choices in the sacrificial sphere. Still in the Abraham/Jephtha comparandum, Nonna is said to out-trump her forerunners by offering herself as a ‘dear victim of prayer’ (εὐχωλῆς … φίλον σφάγιον, 8.51). Later, as the set draws to a close, she is construed similarly as a φίλης εὐχῆς ἱερήιον (8.71). Here two common archaic and classical terms for sacrifice are wrestled away from their traditional contexts by an emboldened addition: from any Homeric or tragic perspective, being a sacrificial victim of prayer would be a non sequitur. Gregory thus, once again, rebrands his descriptive terms, defining his mother in own, idiosyncratic semantic image. This process shows in detail the Christianising of Hellenic paideia so integral to Gregory's communication. Through it, sacrificial discourse is endorsed as an emphatically shared religious language, and a crucial, elastic part of Christian self-expression. However, it is also acknowledged as a difficult and jagged transference, as Nonna's position as the ‘ideal’ Christian sacrifice is expressed with the seams defiantly on show. The contrast with the sepulchral epigrams of book 7 is especially marked here. In book 7, there is no language of sacrifice to describe the loss of life, and no prospect of such a loss being troped as the portal to the joys of the afterlife. In earlier epic and tragedy, human sacrifice – both the practice and the language of sacrifice for death – is always at some level transgressive, even horrific.Footnote ⁹⁴ Sacrifice is being transvalued in Christian language. Gregory's transitional language is striving to articulate a rupture in thinking about death and immortality.

Alongside the recurring trope of death-as-sacrifice, Nonna is also ‘compared’ (via simile, metaphor, antithesis – the full spectrum of analogy) to an array of figures from the biblical and classical traditions: Mary (28), Sarah (27 and 52), the ‘two Annas’ (27, 28) and also, negatively, Empedocles (28), Heracles, Empedotimus, Trophonius and Aristaeus (29.1–2) – a ‘curious choice of names’, as Paton's Loeb note smirks.Footnote ⁹⁵ But more curious still – and critical – is how these analogies themselves are stretched and strained: on many occasions, they do not quite add up. Thus, Nonna's comparison to Sarah, Hannah and ‘the second Anna’ (28) seems to work quite straightforwardly: this roll call of famous biblical mothers all also longed and prayed for a child,Footnote ⁹⁶ and Anna's appearance in Luke 2.36 is famous for being the Gospels’ singular depiction of a female prophetess, making her a useful figure for emphasising Nonna's superlative significance in this family, and in this book. And yet the analogy unravels, as so often analogies do, on the level of detail. Hannah in the Hebrew Bible was also renowned for being the model of silent prayer: the First Book of Samuel explains that one year Hannah ‘boldly’ came to the entrance of the sanctuary at Shiloh and prayed for a male child. Her way of praying, in which ‘only her lips moved’, caused Eli, the priest at the sanctuary, ‘to believe at first that she was drunk’. But when he realised ‘the purity of her purpose’, he too prayed that God grant her request. In this respect, her story stands in stark contrast with Gregory's extended emphasis on Nonna's vociferous mode of worship: for all of his praise of her reserve in De uita sua, the Nonna of the epigrams does not go quietly.Footnote ⁹⁷ She died ‘while praying’; her tongue was ‘performing hymns’ (ὑμνητήρ) as God chose to silence it (35);Footnote ⁹⁸ she ‘shouts out’ (βοόωσα) – twice to Gregory himself (30); and her voice is emphasised as the last remaining part of her to survive (μούνη σοὶ φωνὴ περιλείπετο, 40) – like an ecclesiastical Echo. Nonna thus becomes a model of parrhēsia, freedom of speech before God, a gift of the philosophers, acquired through ascesis,Footnote ⁹⁹ which also became a key monastic tool. For all her silence in the act of prayer, Hannah too offered a model for such biblical parrhēsia,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ speaking face to face with God in a way otherwise deemed to go beyond the bounds of contemporary acceptability. So too does Nonna have a direct relationship with God that allows her to speak far more freely than a fourth-century woman ordinarily could. Gregory draws on the duplicity inherent in the analogy device (which puts pressure on the similarities and differences between the entities being compared) to undermine the association with Hannah, only to assert it again with a new and different significance.

Nonna's loquacity to the very end, construed here as a key part of the ‘purity of her purpose’, both reinforces and augments her association with Hannah: another betterment of the Jewish paradigm, but also a comment on the very process of biblical analogy to which she is so rigorously subjected. Just like the hybrid language of sacrifice, this polyform depiction of Nonna works to raise as much as answer questions about what she is ‘like’: how to construct and promote her as a character and as a figure in this network. One of the closing, one-line epigrams in this sequence instantiates these questions (8.74):

In what ways a mortal, a Christian, a woman, a classically inspired, Homerically formed, typologically Hebraic mother, can be godlike – what exactly this theōsis, a relationship and (as the syntax here emphasises) this proximity to God, can and cannot entail – is inscribed by her son, her writer and her editor as fundamentally fluid and unstable.Footnote ¹⁰¹ If, in book 1, the key to the dynamics of compilation is the reader's complicit self-identification as one of the pious, and, like Eusebius’ trapeza, the polemical exclusion of the outside ‘other’, then Gregory redrafts the epigrammatic poetics of collusion to change the rules of entry once again. Here the reader is privy and complicit not to a hermetically sealed, closed-wall community, already fully formed. Rather, s/he is actively engaged in the process of building it. Nonna and the new world of displayed and recognised piety signal the beginning of a continuing project; a reconstruction of language, a gradual redefinition of literary models and reference points – an on-going challenge which promises the very highest of rewards.

It is here where the very ‘repetitiveness with variation’ of the poems has its salient impact. This is not a question of a ‘literary-rhetorical exercise’,Footnote ¹⁰² as scholars have often and unimaginatively suggested (as if a mother's death were a just good occasion to practise one's poetic skills). His on-going project of reacting to his mother's death as a Christian – and his multiple literary perspectives – may fulfil two of the aims he expressed for poetry in his In suos uersus (although critics have sometimes been rather too quick to take what is an ironic and sophisticated apologia as a direct programmatic agenda for all his poetry). They provide a form of education, and, more importantly, an access to Gregory's internal life (ta endon, 59), his search for consolation (parēgorēma). But, even more importantly, the repetition, like a liturgy, performs a type of askēsis, not so much an ‘anchorite askesis’Footnote ¹⁰³ – his sense of embedding in a family and a community belies any anchorite tendencies – but rather, as Kelley argues for the martyr acts,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ an act of self-formation through the process of reading and writing, repeatedly. The performance of these incantatory variations becomes a formative engagement with how death can be expressed for a Christian. As in his other autobiographical poems, Gregory's self-representation models what it means to live as a Christian, not just through the vagaries of a life, but also always in the shadow of death.

4. Gregory in Byzantium

Gregory of Nazianzus was also a major figure in the imaginary of tenth-century Byzantium. His writings were the most copied manuscripts in Byzantium, with the exception of holy scripture:Footnote ¹⁰⁵ at the centre of the court, for the emperor, was produced the magnificent illustrated copy of his sermons, now known as Paris 510 – a lavishly expensive and valued volume, and an icon of the respect with which Gregory was regarded.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His bones were ceremoniously transferred from Nazianzus to Byzantium in the tenth century. Sixteen of his sermons became part of official liturgy and were read annually in Byzantine churches; his work has numerous commentaries, lexica and treatises dedicated to it.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ If the Christus Patiens is not by Gregory, it is a twelfth-century imitation of Gregory, further proof of his continuing role in the literary world of thought. Gregory was a foundational thinker for the Byzantine church's understanding of its own past and sense of tradition.

It seems extremely likely, as Alan Cameron and Lauxtermann both argue, that book 8, Gregory's sepulchral epigrams, was added by Constantinus of Rhodes (as we may call the later compiler) to the anthology of Cephalas, thus constructing a new order, a new juxtaposition for his anthology. Why did he do so and with what effect?

Book 7 consists of ‘pagan’ sepulchral poems. There are 748 poems covering a vast range of time and space – and topics. Some are epitaphs for famous people, some for anonymous corpses; some for historical characters, some for figures from literature or myth. There are poems for cats, locusts, pets of all sorts. But, in contrast to book 8, there is no sense of a set of kinship ties or relationships linking sequences of poems – let alone a recognition of a community of mourners – and most poems celebrate individuals precisely and solely as individuals (although women are more likely to be praised through their relationships in the familiar gesture of patriarchal thinking we have already seen in Gregory). There are some epigrams that recognise paradoxes or bizarre deaths, particularly of brides and grooms, but no recognition of a noble death, even for mythic heroes. Above all, there is no acknowledgement of an afterlife or that the values of a lived life may be directed towards a life after death. Indeed, as with the dedicatory epigrams of book 6, repeatedly there is an elegant contrast made between the fleetingness of life and the briefness of the epigram's form; between the ability of poetry to capture and hold the moment of ripeness, and the necessary and immediate decomposition that follows such a moment in life. There is no sense of a coherent theology behind the collection. Like displaced and deracinated tombstones, they speak their genre, as we, like the travellers so often addressed from within the poems, move on.

Book 9 is a collection that is headed ‘epideictic epigrams’. According to Lauxtermann, this category contains ‘anything [Cephalus] did not know what to do with’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Lauxtermann captures something of the nature of the miscellaneous poems, but nothing of their import. For sure, book 9 contains poems on a staggering range of topics: from toilets to Troy, from an ethopoetic collection of ‘what would so-and-so have said’, to responses to Myron's statue of a cow, from single couplet bon mots to versified alphabetical lists of the epithets of Dionysus. Wonder, surprise and paradox, encoded in balanced versification, construct the viewing subject as the educated and cultivated man about town, the pepaideumenos: as the title, ‘epideictic’, suggests, there is a strong element of display, of showing off, that runs through each poem. The world is policed and regulated by to eikos – the normal, the likely, the probable – and thus explored and revelled in by poems that celebrate the opposite. There is a powerful organising principle of a lack of evident system – like a cabinet of curiosities as opposed to a museum. If any book of the Palatine Anthology invites a fragmented, aleatory reading, it is the epideictic epigrams.

Constantinus of Rhodes (shall we say) introduced book 8 between books 7 and 9, a perfect example of oikeiōsis, ‘appropriation’, that the court writers of the Excerpta Constantiniana announced as a principle of composition. Indeed, the Scribes J and A in the margin of the manuscript note explicitly that Gregory's poems ‘form part of the sepulchral epigrams’ and were added ‘at the end’ of the preceding book.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The juxtaposition is eloquent indeed. In contrast to book 7, these Christian sepulchral poems offer the promise of the afterlife rather than merely the paradox of an observer's witty reflection; they offer a coherent image of a community in which death and its value are understood, instead of un-located individuals; they focus on the link between the moral worth of the dead and their just rewards, rather than paradox or twists of fate; they celebrate a Christian life through an integrated set of values, memorialised and commemorated in a set of interlinked poems, which perform the shared values of the community through repetition and ritual. Perhaps for Constantinus, looking back to Gregory in the fourth century from 600 years later, this was an idealised image of ‘the early’; perhaps it represented a longing for a holy family that the reality of Byzantium's court rarely matched. The contrast between the pagan and Christian engagement with death and commemoration could scarcely be more articulate.

The juxtaposition with book 9 turns out to be no less significant, even if it takes shape only as a consequence of the placement of Gregory's poems after book 7. Book 8 ends, as we have seen, with ninety poems emphasising and re-emphasising the Christian moral stance on materiality – on the body's flesh that turns to dust, on the brute stones over the corpse, on the lack of interest in gold, which always corrupts. It demands a simple respect for the dead and for the sacralised space that holds the body. It insists on a coherent and direct view of matter as a Christian moral issue: ‘All the wealth of a tomb is bones’ (AP 8.233.2). Book 9 – again the contrast is coruscating in its simple power – revels in the multiformity of materiality and human response to it, celebrates the paradox of man's relation to the physical and to value: ‘Things are turned upside down, I see’, begins Palladas (AP 9.181.1). Gold is ‘fear to have but pain not to have’ (AP 9.394.2) – an easy and familiar paradox that Gregory has rejected entirely. Christian and non-Christian writers jostle for space; a full list of Greek culture heroes and Roman military figures are the expected frame of reference; poets, prostitutes, animals, talk; buildings are there for fun and jokes as well as celebration and memorial. By juxtaposing Gregory's world and the world of the epideictic epigrams, Constantinus constructs a stark rhetorical contrast between an ordered Christian community resting on shared values and moral worth and a mess of pagan paradox and amazement. The act of placing Gregory's book before the epideictic epigrams turns what might be celebrated as a kaleidoscopic cultural miscellany into a gaudy, superficial revelling in the trivial materiality of things.

To place Gregory between the sepulchral epigrams of book 7 and the epideictic epigrams of book 9 is a pointed and rhetorically violent gesture of Christian reframing. If the prose epigraph to book 1 indicates a contrast between Christian and pagan readers, the sequence of books 7, 8 and 9 powerfully performs it. It is therefore regrettable to see the disdain with which this oikeiōsis is treated by modern scholars. The book is literally or metaphorically discarded without even a glance at the effect it might have or the order it might pronounce. The Teubner of the Palatine Anthology does not print book 8.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Paton in his Loeb of the Palatine Anthology announces that he wishes he could follow the Teubner in doing the same (and his editing reflects such distaste, as does his translation of Christian poems throughout). Cameron does not deign to discuss it.Footnote ¹¹¹ Beta, most recently, can find nothing but embarrassing tedium in it.Footnote ¹¹² Such responses show all too clearly how the Palatine Anthology is not taken seriously as a work of Byzantine literature by critics – though it does reveal a good deal about their ideological prejudices. We may not wish to accede to such a bold Christian reframing, but it should at least be acknowledged for what it is.Footnote ¹¹³ By including book 8 and, we might add, by the significant ordering of books 1–3, the compiler of the Palatine Anthology designedly heightened the juxtaposition and contrast between Christian and non-Christian material which the individual books themselves each thematise and exploit. We should see this as a significant gesture within the cultural politics of tenth-century Byzantium.Footnote ¹¹⁴ To discard book 8 is both to underestimate the interest of Gregory and to oversimplify the Palatine Anthology by writing out the violent intrusions of difference, conflict between groups, the play of power, history's interventions within tradition, and the incremental battles over meaning that constitute tradition. It is to use scholarship to produce an image of antiquity that is whitewashed, and distorted by its longing for a smooth, unbroken, marmoreal whiteness.