Burying the Emperor's Son: Valens and the Legacy of Basil in a Syriac Funerary Sermon

One of the most famous aspects of Gregory of Nazianzus's panegyric for Basil of Caesarea is his account of Basil's confrontation with the emperor Valens. On the eve of exiling the bishop, the latter had called on Basil for aid for his ailing son. Basil's intercession ultimately failed to save the boy's life; later historians, however, remembered the incident as a dramatic, if temporary, turning point in the relationship between bishop and emperor. This episode forms the backdrop to a homily for a departed child and was transmitted in two Syriac manuscripts. Both attribute the homily to Basil, with the earlier witness presenting it as preached on the occasion of the funeral of a king's son. This description suggests the possibility either of recovering a funerary oration preached by Basil, now lost from his Greek corpus, or of a Syriac funerary sermon attributed to Basil in light of his encounter with Valens. This article examines both possibilities with an eye towards the content shared between the manuscripts—an extended exposition of children's nature and fate after death—and its resonance with the genuine works of Basil, his Greek contemporaries, and Syriac Christian authors from the centuries preceding the homily's earliest witness.