ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the three key human relationships depicted in the Life of Eupraxia (Antigonos-Theodosios, Eupraxia-Ioulia and Germana-Eupraxia) and their interconnections. It aims bring to light an understudied, yet remarkable, hagiographical narrative and its workings; and to show how worldly relationships, such as friendship and enmity, acquire meaning in a religious text that has attracted the interest of Byzantine and post-Byzantine monks. The chapter uses both Aristotle’s theory of the perfect friendship as formulated in his Nicomachean Ethics and Jacques Derrida’s work on the nature of friendship. Pacatus admires Theodosios for being the first Roman emperor to elevate friendship to the level of an imperial virtue: after ascending the throne, he remains the same loyal, generous, benevolent, and caring friend for the friends he had acquired as a private citizen. As a religious author, our hagiographer, however, differs from Pacatus in that he presents as the main source of the two men’s friendship their common love for God.
