The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature

Sheds light on a relatively dark period of literary history, the late third century CE, by examining how some early Christian writers tried to re-orient literature. Methodius of Olympus' dialogic Symposium exposes an era's new concerns, with its insistence that the future is more interesting than the past.

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This book sheds light on a relatively dark period of literary history, the late third century CE, a period that falls between the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity. It argues that more was being written during this time than past scholars have realized and takes as its prime example the understudied Christian writer Methodius of Olympus. Among his many works, this book focuses on his dialogic Symposium, a text which exposes an era's new concern to re-orient the gaze of a generation from the past onto the future. Dr LaValle Norman makes the further argument that scholarship on the Imperial period that does not include Christian writers within its purview misses the richness of this period, which was one of deepening interaction between Christian and non-Christian writers. Only through recovering this conversation can we understand the transitional period that led to the rise of Constantine.