PAIXUE - Dr Mara Nicosia
We do not know exactly what the Syriac rhetorical teaching looked like between the 2nd to the 9th century, although we have a number of texts that are shaped as rhetorical discourses or that largely employed rhetorical devices. Moreover, public religious debates were common between Syriac Christians and the members of other religious groups, but we have to wait until the 9th century to have a proper treatise on rhetoric, in five books, written by the monk and teacher Antony of Tagrit. In his treatise, which was meant to serve as a handbook for his students, Antony of Tagrit discusses the aspects of the Syriac rhetorical tradition known to him: this tradition, which betrays the traces of its intimate connection with the Greek culture, reveals the effects of centuries of shaping and consolidation, and preserves, together with rules and definitions, a number of texts that are proposed as examples to follow (or progymnasmata). These texts stem both from the Greek and the Syriac ‘classical’ past, both pagan and Christian, spanning from Homer, Plutarch, Plato, Heliodorus and Pseudo-Callisthenes, to Gregory of Nazianzus, Ephrem the Syrian, Jacob of Sarugh and many others, sketching a narration of the classicising rhetorical tradition which turns to be incredibly syncretic. Dr Nicosia's paper proposes to investigate these texts in an attempt to sketch a draft of what the Syriac rhetorical tradition recognised as ‘classic’.
Dr Mara Nicosia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University affiliated with the ERC project Novel Echoes. For further information about Dr Nicosia, please follow this link.
PAIXUE seeks to examine in tandem, with equal focus on structural parallels and divergences, the conscious revival and subsequent dialectics of classicising learning in middle and later Byzantium (c.800–1350) and Tang/Song China (618–1279).
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