Christos Simelidis: Emotions in the poems of Gregory of Nazianzus

This paper studies the presence of emotions in the autobiographical and epigrammatic poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory's poetic corpus includes emotional descriptions of personal events, poems on specific emotions (e.g. I.2.25 κατὰ θυμοῦ ‘against anger') or passions (e.g. I.2.28 κατὰ πλεονεξίας ‘against covetousness'), as well as fifty funerary epigrams on his mother and more than eighty against grave-robbers. The paper explores the function of emotions in the self-portrait and didactic argumentation of one of the most respected and imitated patristic authors.