This chapter traces the different uses of the term φοῖνιξ / Φοῖνιξ, the cognate adjectives φοινικός and φοινικοβαφής, and verb φοινίττω, running from this last’s allusive use to describe Theagenes’ bloodstained cheek at the beginning of Book 1 to the revelation at the novel’s close that its writer is a Φοῖνιξ, ‘Phoenician’. Ι noted how these uses span the word’s range of meanings – crimson, date, palm, Phoenician – and how Phoenicia’s importance is augmented by the mysteriously unnamed Tyrian’s victory at Delphi and by the description of the ship on which the trio escape as Φοινίκιον … φιλοτέχνημα, ‘a Phoenician masterpiece’ (5.18), a mis-en-abyme of the literary masterpiece which transports the couple from Delphi to Meroe.

Chapter 1 does the work of conventional introduction to De Excidio by surveying everything we know about the text, from date, authorship, and provenance to manuscript witnesses, sources, and reception history, including a critical discussion that clarifies the relationship between De Excidio and its main source, Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War (written in Greek around 75 CE). Chapter 1 also lays out a framework for the rest of the study by explaining Roman exemplarity as a rhetorical discourse especially familiar within scripted character speeches by historians in the Greco-Roman world.

This chapter is a survey of the genesis of the book “Confessions,” including reflections on the title, structure, date, influences, and style; an examination of the conversational structure of the text, including the dialogic form in relation to “Confessions” as a prayer; and an analysis of the terminology of “confession” as both positive (praise) and negative (admission of wrongdoing).

After a short status quaestionis laying out the main perspectives from which the book of Revelation has been studied, we show how the study of the reading guidelines laid out in the Introduction have hitherto been overlooked. We propose the methodology to follow in order to discover them. According to the reading theory, every reader creates a ‘model’ through which the sense is grasped and the text interpreted. The elaboration of this model involves a process of ‘disassembling the mechanism without ruining it; disassembling it until the keys to its organisation are found’, according to Alonso Schökel. This process is what we will examine in the following chapters.

The stages of development identified in the text-critical chapters of this study are then put into chronological relationship with other texts of the period. This chapter presents an argument that the Arthaśāstra, which was probably originally called the Daṇḍanīti, was composed around the first century BCE and redacted by Kauṭilya around the third century CE. This allows us to trace the development of certain political concepts in the text, which is undertaken in the final three chapters.