The "cheap unseemly, and readily despised" one: a rhetorical understanding of Blandina's gendered performance in «The Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne»
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne is a second-century Christian martyrology. Of the victims narrated in this letter, the female slave Blandina appears to have a prominent role. This thesis analyzes how the author uses Blandina as a rhetorical tool to communicate his concept of martyrdom to his audience. Each time she makes an appearance in the amphitheatre, an authoritative, gendered image is invoked by her performance. Each metamorphosis (athlete, Christ, and mother) embodies the necessary qualities that constitute the ideal martyr identity. Because Blandina exemplifies all three personas, she is constructed to be a 'super martyr.' Blandina's remarkable performance aims to change the audience's beliefs regarding the weakness of this female slave, or the potential weakness of any Christian body, in order to demonstrate that all Christians are capable and ought to embrace martyrdom.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".