Gregory of Nazianzus and Q. Aurelius Symmachus: The Conflict between East and West and Elite Self-Presentation in the Later Fourth Century AD Rome and Constantinople
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article compares the literary self-presentations in the De vita sua of Gregory of Nazianzus and the Letters of Symmachus as their respective authors responded to public perceptions in Constantinople and Rome, respectively. It reads these works in the light of Gregory’s and Symmachus’ involvement in crisis management at two flashpoints in East–West relations in the last quarter of the fourth century ad, the dispute over the see of Antioch and the rebellion of Gildo in Africa. Both authors, by cooperating with regimes without strong local roots—in the case of Symmachus at the direct request of the regime—had compromised the real or perceived interests of their own cities; both argue in the works in question that they had nonetheless acted in line with locally accepted values and ideals. The Roman empire had long depended on well-connected local elites to mediate between central priorities and local interests in this way, but the sorts of challenges posed by East–West relations in the later fourth century were particularly difficult and the resulting works of self-presentation are both fundamentally novel. These works and the circumstances that led to their creation suggest that successful crisis management between East and West was far from easy, but remained a real possibility as late as the end of the fourth century.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".