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Acknowledgments This book began to take shape in the summer of 1998. At the time, I was immersed in research for a project on the relevance of slavery for the formulation of late Roman Christian notions of leadership: that is, for the role of the bishop. Gregory of Nazianzus’s second oration soon emerged as a central source, and I was already working on a number of papers devoted to it when Martin Nettesheim suggested I write instead a short little book on Gregory. Over a decade later, this short little book has accumulated an enormous debt of gratitude from friends, students, and colleagues. During a year spent at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton in 2000–2001, I formulated a first draft of what have become the first six chapters. It was an enormously fruitful and enjoyable time, for which I thank Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills. A semester as Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in the spring of 2007 allowed me to finish chapters 8, 9, and 10 in such splendor as I imagine Gregory and his peers enjoyed, mutatis mutandis, at their estates; no one who has had the privilege of Gary Smith’s and the Academy’s hospitality will ever forget the spirit of excited engagement with culture in all its depth and variety. I completed the final revisions as Visiting Professor and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, during the fall of 2009, yet another extraordinary place of intellectual engagement embodying the classical ideal of otium cum dignitate. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Annette Meyer, Dr. Sonja Asal, and Prof. Dr. Bernd Huber, Prof. Dr. Hans van Ess, and, above all, Prof. Dr. Barbara Vinken. I owe a very special debt of gratitude to the directors of the Historische Seminar at the Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, Prof. Dr. Frank Kolb and Prof. Dr. Mischa Meier, and to PD Dr. Hilmar Klinkott for their generous hospitality, giving me xvii room and board nearly every summer and during two semesters, in their wonderful Seminarbibliothek, where the memory of Prof. Dr. Hildegard Temporini Gräfin Vizthum is ever present. At the University of California Press, I very much thank Eric Schmidt and Cynthia Fulton. Stephanie Fay and Paul Psoinos transformed my text, and I thank the two readers, Harold Drake and John McGuckin, for their extravagant encouragement . And I owe far more than the footnotes suggest to my many conversations with Glen Bowersock, Peter Brown, William C. Jordan, Michael Maas, Philip Rousseau, and above all with Rebecca Lyman and Neil McLynn. Many thanks are also due my friends and colleagues in the University of California Multi-Campus Research Group “Late Antiquity”: Emily Albu, Ra’anan Boustan, Catherine Chin, Elisabeth Digeser, Hal Drake, Dayna Kalleres, Claudia Rapp, Michele Salzman, and the late, much-missed Thomas Sizgorich. At Berkeley, my friends and colleagues Erich Gruen, Carla Hesse, Thomas Laqueur, Maureen Miller, and Randolph Starn read the manuscript and gave me excellent advice. Boris Rodin Maslov and Laura Pfuntner were far more than the words “research assistant” suggest; they know how much I owe them. My very special thanks are due to my father, Kaspar Elm, who made me appreciate the importance of small differences in ways that I am only now beginning to understand, and to my daughter, Clara Cecilia, my constant source of joy. This book is dedicated to my husband, Martin Nettesheim, the light of my life. Berkeley, December 2010 xviii acknowledgments This page intentionally left blank Constantinople Antioch Nicomedia Nicaea Chalcedon Pergamon Ephesus Ctesiphon Tarsus Pessinus Caesarea Ancyra Macellum Nazianzus Arianzus Annesi Sasima Seleucia Sebaste Mopsuestia Edessa Nisibis Amida N 0 0 200 km 100 100 50 150 mi ...

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