ABSTRACT
The monody is one of late antique rhetoric’s forgotten genres, sitting in the corner largely ignored while panegyrics and encomia attract most of our attention. Of course, some of this has to do with the nature of monodies. They tend to be short, mournful works of commemoration. Aside from Libanius’ monody of the emperor Julian (which usually is read alongside the self-styled stelographia invectives of Gregory of Nazianzus), 1 these works shed little light on the great political and religious dramas of the period. They are instead about people and places whose loss the speaker wanted remembered but whose significance now can seem relatively slight.
