What Did Diodorus Write? Friendship and Literary Criticism at the School of Gaza

Abstract

Three of the letters by Procopius of Gaza (ca. 463-ca. 536), the most important representative of the School of Gaza, mention the shoes Procopius received from his friend Diodorus, a lawyer (scholastichos) at Caesarea. A comparison with other letters by Procopius, the fact that he defines Diodorus’s shoes as ‘unrhythmical’ and ‘without Muses’ and, especially, the references to Herodotus and Attic comedy contained in the text suggest that Diodorus’s ‘shoes’ may have been short prose or verse compositions, carelessly written in Attic Greek and in the tone of ancient comedy. A letter to the same Diodorus by another representative of the school, Aeneas of Gaza (450-518), seems to confirm that short compositions with biting contents were circulating among the members of that cultural environment. This paper proposes an intertextual reading of Procopius’s and Aeneas’s letters in order to shed light on the interests and tastes of the Gazan scholars, who were able to express the moral preoccupations of their Judeo-Christian environment using the language and style of ancient Greek literary texts.