International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Mattia C. Chiriatti
Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; 
[e-mail]
Gregory of Nyssa’s Funeral λόγοι as an Early Model 
of Byzantine Rhetoric and Imperial Propaganda
Gregory of Nyssa became the official orator at the Theodosian court, as he was in charge of 
delivering the funeral orations of Meletius, patriarch of Constantinople (381 AD), Flaccilla, first 
spouse of the emperor Theodosius I (386), and Pulcheria, their daughter (385). 
This sort of speech, one of the most distinguished genres in the Byzantine literary production, 
found its roots in the Christian rhetoric, although the latter one was, at the same time, debtor to 
the legacy of the Second Sophistic and Menander’s βασιλικὸς λόγος. The readaptation of a classical 
funeral genre, the ἐπιτάφιος, already in use from the 5
th
century BC (the oldest surviving Greek 
funeral oration was held by Pericles in honour of the fallen of the first year of the Peloponnesian 
War, in the winter of 431) to mourn in a public assembly the death of fallen warriors, became for 
Late Antiquity bishops, both in the West and the East part of the Empire, a powerful rhetorical 
weapon in order to spread a political and religious propaganda, where the grief addressed to distinct 
imperial and ecclesiastical figures allowed them to create a new politics. This was basically the result 
of the powerful amalgam of the Emperor’s support together with a new coined language, which left 
aside its traditional simplicitas to become a new instrument of proselytism for the growing power 
of the Church. 
The Christian rhetoric, whilst mourning the loss of a prominent ecclesiastical character such 
as Meletius, president of the first Council of Constantinople, turned itself into an accommodated 
vehicle of religious and political issues diffusion. Gregory, as official orator, availed himself of the 
discourse public occasion to infuse into the assembly the idea about how important Christian 
worship was and how this conduct of life yielded lots of rewards. Thanks to this popular involvement, 
therefore, the preacher tried to instill the new ὁμολογία τῆς πίστεως into the faithfuls making the 
public imperial cult continue and, at the same time, while eulogizing the deceased ones, sought the 
legitimization of the Nicene Creed, articulating a new official ideology for imperial characters, as, 
for instance, the empress Flaccilla, who embodied the icon of a new βασιλεία, the Christian one, by 
means of her three main virtues, pietas, castitas and virginitas. 

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Through the analysis of the aforementioned Gregory of Nyssa’s speeches, it can be consequently 
deduced, as A. Cameron pointed out, how the Christian discourse recontextualized the Second 
Sophistic rhetorical past, adopting its literary pattern “to convert a simple rhetorical technique into 
a powerful rhetorical message shaped in political terms, seeking to legitimize their newly found 
political power” (A. Cameron, “Christianity and the Rhetoric of the Empire. The development of 
Christian Discourse”, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 1991, p. 123).