Chapter 2 considers the so-called cradle of Christian martyrdom: Second-century Asia Minor. Beginning with an analysis of the economic, political, and social relationships between Christian, Jewish, and Greek social structures in the face of the Roman Empire’s centralization of power, I outline the circumstances of Christian martyrs during the first centuries following Jesus’ death. Using legal statutes alongside letters between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan, I analyze the contours and relative scope and depth of Roman persecution. Through an analysis of the language used by Christian theologians and the period’s popular Acta Martyrum, I consider the way martyrdom was performed in recognition of a separate pax Deorum—agreement with God—that challenged that of the Roman state. I proceed to show how martyrs were interpreted as imitators of Christ’s sacrifice, and the meaning that designation brought to martyrs and their audience. Finally, I highlight the parrhēsia—bold, free speech—demonstrated in martyrdom to articulate the centrality of truth-telling to Christian martyrs, a theme to which I return throughout the book.

This chapter explores the interplay of voices, poses, and masks that mark all of Nietzsche’s writings, but especially his later writings. His models are the ancient Cynics and “Lui,” the titular hero of Diderot’s satirical dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau. A latter-day Cynic, Lui is a pantomime artist who uses physical and vocal mimicry to expose social hypocrisy through a shameless display of parrhēsia. Both Lui and the Cynics, literary artifacts themselves, explore philosophical problems in a performative mode that is hostile to conventions of all kinds, including those that govern literature and philosophy. Nietzsche follows suit with his own polyphonic and multi-gestural style of presentation, now directed at a late nineteenth-century audience. A self-conscious poseur and master of the falsetto, Nietzsche is supremely aware of his ability to trigger and lay bare his contemporaries’ ideas, fantasies, and fears by giving voice to them, not least by “sampling” them through a kind of theatrical extroversion of roles that are even today routinely mistaken for his own. A cultural pathologist whose primary object is the material of cultural fantasy itself, Nietzsche is ultimately concerned to critique the conventions that produce the very categories of literature and philosophy.