ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the cognitive, social, psychological and rhetorical effects of pity as described in the rhetorical handbooks of antiquity, some of which remained part of early Byzantine education. I shall focus on two types of rhetorical exercises: prosopopoeia (speech-in-character) and ekphrasis (description). Prosopopoeia involved the creation of imagined speeches for historical or imagined figures. Ekphrasis relied on the technique of enargeia (vividness) to choose words that bring what was being described before the eyes. When outlining these exercises, teachers of rhetoric recognised the power of both to stir the audience’s pity. The final section of this chapter considers the implications of these analyses for the study of early Byzantine homilies and the relation they created between the preacher and the audience. It looks at how the rhetorical teaching is deployed in homilies by Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzos, and in Romanos’s kontakion ‘On Elijah’. It examines the potential of homiletic monologue, and in Romanos the superior possibilities of dialogue, noting how these techniques together engage the congregation and evoke pity.
