Gregory of Nazianzus's De rebus suis and the tradition of epic didactic poetry

Abstract

Gregory's poem De rebus suis (Carm.2.1.1) is examined in this article from the point of view both of its content and of its literary and stylistic features. In content, the poem is personal and reflexive, and its central theme appears to be a crisis of faith that its author had experienced in his later years. In form, it has all the characteristics of the epic didactic genre: it is metaphrastic in nature (i.e., it turns prose material into verse form); it is written in the archaizing epic language; it makes use of the modified Homeric simile (the so-called multiple correspondence simile); and it carefully avoids the use of specific liturgical terms and expressions replacing them instead with various poetic paraphrases. The overall conceptual simplicity of the poem is generic too, and it may have been modeled on the earliest known representative of the genre, Hesiod's Works and Days. .