Methodius of Olympus has often been relegated to unique status, somehow cut off from the wider trends of late Imperial literature. This is partially due to the difficult status of his corpus and the opaque nature of his biography, but also partially due to the period in which he lived. Because we do not know much about the late third century, scholars are often left to think about this period very quickly and as a transition. And while there have been many attempts to look squarely at it as a period of political transition, there have been fewer attempts to linger over this period as a holistic literary landscape. The despair of either well-known primary sources or ancient historical narratives to guide such a study has not encouraged scholars to dedicate much energy to such a task, and even those who have tried often ignore the writer who is the subject of this book. In neglecting Methodius, scholarship has also neglected the opportunity to create a fuller picture of the literary world of the third century.

Literature in the Imperial period often displays a love of collection and compilation. The miscellanies of Aelian (both historical and animal), the crazy quilt of Clement of Alexandria’s theological musings in the Stromata and the collected biographies of Diogenes Laertius are only a few of the Severan-era examples of miscellanies. Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh have gone so far as to say that “it is sometimes hard to avoid the impression that accumulation of knowledge is the driving force of all Imperial prose literature” (König and Whitmarsh 2007: 3). And while miscellany could find a home in a variety of genres, there was one genre that was found to be particularly welcoming to the addition of bit upon bit – the Symposium.

In 362 CE, Julian the Apostate issued his famous School Edict, which effectively forbade Christians from teaching pagan texts. Decried by pagan and Christian alike, it also led to a rush of creative writing from a Christian father and son of the same name who were already well known as rhetoricians, the Apollinarii. The church historians Socrates and Sozomen relate that they took to transforming the Christian scriptures into new genres, to provide substitutes for the traditional pagan texts that were now forbidden for Christian teachers to use. The historical books of the Old Testament were translated into a mixture of heroic verse and tragedy, the Psalms into dactylic hexameter. But the Gospels were transformed into Platonic dialogues. In many ways, the intuition of the Apollinarii was a natural one: Jesus, like Socrates, was a wise man who spread his teaching through personal conversation and interaction, sometimes in the context of celebratory meals, until suffering death at the hands of the state for his subversive teaching. However, the choice seems far from natural to other readers and thinkers, especially certain modern scholars. For them, the playful seriousness and genuine openness of the Socratic-inspired dialogues of Plato (and presumably the other Socratics) is antipathetical to the spirit of Christianity.