Christian writers from the second century AD until the end of Byzantium often chose to write in the dialogue form, of more (or often less) Platonic type. It has been argued that genuine philosophical debate in these dialogues ended some time in the fifth century AD, but the corpus as a whole has not so far been studied. The lecture uses some examples in Greek from the patristic period to raise general issues about the literary form itself, the nature of Christian writing and the role of dialogue and debate in the intellectual and religious history of late antiquity and early Byzantium.
Averil Cameron was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King’s College London and the founding Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. She was Warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2010. Her books include Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley, 1991) The Byzantines (Oxford, 2006) and The Mediterranean in Late Antiquity (London, 2011), revised and expanded to cover the seventh century. She recently edited with Robert Hoyland of a volume in press entitled Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300-1500 (Farnham, 2011) and is the editor of Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam (Farnham, in press). She is the chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR) and President of the Council for British Research in the Levant and of FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques). She has visited the CEU several times in the past and taught on a summer university course with Peter Brown and others in 2004. She currently holds a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship to work on dialogues in Christian late antiquity and Byzantium.