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Re: Invention of Macrina the Younger?
Posted: Sun May 05, 2024 7:05 am
by andrewcriddle
If Macrina existed at all, there seems little reason to doubt the historicity of the information in the epitaph by Gregory Nazianzen. The statements by Gregory of Nyssa may be another matter.
Andrew Criddle
Re: Invention of Macrina the Younger?
Posted: Sun May 05, 2024 5:36 pm
by Leucius Charinus
4. The epitaph 120 by Gregory of Nazianzus
The fourth and last Ancient writing about Macrina is an epitaph by Gregory of Nazianzus. It suggests that Macrina had been hidden and unknown before VSM made her famous. The epitaph reads as follows:
- “Me, the dust, I hold the radiant virgin, if you hear about certain
Macrina – the first-born of great Emmelia,
who hid herself from the eyes of men, yet now she is on
every tongue and she has achieved better fame” [63].
[63]Epitaphium 120, PG 38, 75-76 = epigram VIII 163, in Anthologie palatine, ed. P. Walz, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 1944.
The poetry as such could, of course, refer to real persons and historical events,
but it is not necessary for its literary construction
LC wrote:I have been in the past inclined to view and express a fictional Marcina as a Marcina who has zero historicity. This terminology may not be a standard in the field.
I am starting to accept that equating a fictional person as a person with zero historicity is a sort of a slippery slope. Carrier and others (who have published material on the term) appear to express historicity in terms of a probability spectrum. In this instance Macrina the Younger may have been an historical person however, as the author is claiming, has been (almost) entirely "fictionalised".
Somewhere on the "historicity spectrum" there will be a differentiation between people who did not exist at all and have been entirely invented and people who actually did exist but whose "history" is completely fictitious and has been entirely fabricated.
Such are the problems in reconstructing history.
Re: Invention of Macrina the Younger?
Posted: Mon May 06, 2024 8:55 pm
by JarekS