In the first half of the fifth century, at the origins of Armenian literature, an anonymous author translated the apocryphal Acts of Thecla from the Syriac version of the Greek text (second century). The translation rapidly furthered the spread of the legend across Armenia. In that same century, three works written directly in Armenian presuppose the legend of Thecla. This article focuses on the narrative patterns and the ways in which the paradigms of holiness embodied by Thecla have influenced the representation of holy women who, in the Armenian tradition, are associated with the fundamental stages of the Christianization of Armenia. Thecla, indeed, served as a model of female sanctity along three important lines, namely as holy virgin, teacher and apostle, and martyr. As the venerated proto-martyr, she served as a model for the first female martyrs in the history of Armenian Christianity, respectively, in the apostolic age (Sanduxt) and at the time of the foundation of the Church of Armenia (Hṙip‘simē). The model of holy female apostle is found in the Armenian Martyrdom of Photine too. The Armenian tradition also contributed to the development of the legend and helped to make of Thecla a holy protector of Nicene orthodoxy.

This chapter explores the dialogue between civic rhetoric and literary texts, especially works of history and geography, in the later Hellenistic world. It argues for complex processes of mutual exchange and influence between the particularist civic ideology preserved in poleis’ inscribed decrees and the cosmopolitan ideas and projects of intellectuals. Citizens of some later Hellenistic poleis, such as Priene, strove to reconcile particularist and universalist perspectives, taking account of the cosmopolitan arguments and language of Hellenistic philosophers and other intellectuals. At the same time, later Hellenistic literary authors drew on, and reimagined, local civic ideals and institutions in order to give more concrete form to the abstract cosmopolitan ideals developed earlier in the Hellenistic period. The two main authors studied here, Diodorus and Strabo, were both deeply imbued with the values and forms of thought characteristic of the later Hellenistic poleis, which left their imprint even on those thinkers’ contrasting moves to transcend the small-scale polis and advocate more expansive forms of literary and political community. Whereas Diodorus strove to preserve aspects of the civic ideal within his cosmopolitanism, Strabo’s cosmopolitanism was more of a reaction against polis particularism – which remained, nonetheless, a foundational point of reference for him.

Two works survive from the mid-second century CE that narrate the complete history of Rome down to Augustus: Florus in Latin and Appian in Greek. They share some remarkable structural features. In particular, rather than adopting a linear annalistic progression for the late Republic, they employ extended separate narratives of, first, the Roman conquests in the century between the Gracchi and Actium, and then the civil wars that occurred at the same time. This chapter examines the distinct rhetorical and narrative techniques that each author uses to rationalize and pursue this approach, and what implicit comment each makes on the contemporary Antonine situation of internal peace and stable borders. It ends by suggesting that these structures have significant analogies with the ‘separated-lovers’ plot type found in Greek erotic novels, notably Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe. It suggests that the tension-and-resolution structure represented by novels presented itself to these two very different historians as a fitting expression of the relationship of the dynamic, plural history of the Republic to the static unity projected by Antonine ideology.