Petition and Performance in Ancient Rome : : The Apologies of Justin Martyr / / Brandon Cline.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Gorgias Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Cline, Brandon,
• Place / Publishing House: Piscataway, NJ : : Gorgias Press, , [2021]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics ; 75
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (292 p.)

This study advances a suggestive reading of Justin Martyr's Apologies as a subjective appropriation of the forms and practices of the Roman system of petition and response. It offers an historical contextualization of the Apologies within both contemporary administrative culture and the wider literary environment. It compares the Apologies with extant Roman-era petitions, using this comparison to shed light on Justin's transformations of the genre and their communicative significance. Using the heuristic metaphor of performance, it suggests that Justin performs in the Apologies the genre of the administrative petition, but he performs it multiply, as an integral part of a hybrid literary composition that weaves together apologetic and protreptic discourses in a way that finds precedent in the genre-bending literary strategies of the Second Sophistic. Justin's hybridization of the administrative petition is a uniquely stylized performance by a Christian philosopher and literary aspirant, one that both activates the form's potential for administrative redress and exploits it as a daring enactment of voiced injustice and Christian disclosure.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- TABLE OF CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- ABBREVIATIONS -- INTRODUCTION: PETITION AND PERFORMANCE -- CHAPTER 1. JUSTIN’S PERFORMANCE CONTEXT: PETITION AND RESPONSE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE -- CHAPTER 2. LITERARY SELF-DESCRIPTION IN THE APOLOGIES -- CHAPTER 3. A LITERARY COMPARISON OF THE APOLOGIES WITH ADMINISTRATIVE PETITIONS -- CHAPTER 4. GENERIC HYBRIDITY IN THE APOLOGIES -- CONCLUSION: SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT -- APPENDIX: HOW MANY APOLOGIES DID JUSTIN WRITE? -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- GENERAL INDEX