This chapter considers the ways in which the classical credal and conciliar formulae provide a framework for understanding who Jesus Christ is and how God saves through the Incarnate Word. These credal and conciliar formulae provide the foundation for theologies across the spectrum of Christian traditions. The chapter is broadly divided into two sections, one focusing on the fourth century Trinitarian controversies, the second focusing on the christological controversies of the fifth to the seventh centuries. For classical Christian theology, only when Jesus is known as the Word made flesh, and as one coequal to Father and Spirit in the divine life, can the work of redemption be understood.

This chapter argues that, whereas many poets in the Garland of Philip never use Doric, several do so to evoke either a Leonidean or Theocritean pastoral world, and sometimes because their subject has a Dorian connection – so Myrinus, Adaeus, Thallus, Erucius of Cyzicus, and Antiphilus of Byzantium. That Cyzicus was originally a colony of Corinth and Byzantium of Megara seems not to be relevant, since Doric appears only rarely in these cities’ inscribed poetry. Finally I examine the puzzling case of the five epigrams on Sacerdos of Nicaea preserved in the Palatine Anthology (15.4–8), of which three use Doric, two do not. I suggest that more than one poet may have been chosen to composed sepulchral epigrams for this grandiose obelisk-monument of around AD 130, and that the composer of the Doric poems might have been Philostratus’ ancestry-conscious sophist, Memmius Marcus of Byzantium

In the decades between 1204 and 1261 the bronze horseman would be little more than a distant memory. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1261 by Michael VIII of Nicaea, the horseman was rediscovered. It became an intensely treasured relic of a bygone imperial era. In devastated, post-Crusader Constantinople two monuments continued to serve as grand symbols of a once proud empire: Hagia Sophia and Justinian’s column. Michael VIII made the column of Justinian part of the land holdings of the Great Church. Though the horseman triumphed over Latin adversity, the column did not emerge unscathed. The shaft of the column was stripped of its Justinianic bronze panels, which had originally made the column glow like gold. Palaiologan rulers had neither the funds nor the craftsmen to restore the metallic splendor of the column’s original appearance. Until the fall of Constantinople, they continuously invested their ever-diminishing resources into maintaining these two monuments, even as others (including the Holy Apostles) gradually crumbled. The soaring horseman became central to the elevation ritual in imperial coronations. Michael VIII payed homage to and competed with the bronze horseman by erecting a new column. Even though Michael VIII attempted to rival the column of Justinian and to cement his own legacy, he failed.

A key figure in the Arian dispute leading up to and following the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius of Caesarea (bishop c. 313-39) was not only implicated as a central player in the broader theological developments of the early fourth century but was also one of the most significant formulators of ancient literary representations of the council itself. His writings contain an eye-witness account of the council; a broader narrative of Constantine’s interactions with Christian bishops; letters of Constantine addressing issues of theological or practical debate; his own letters to his home congregation at Caesarea and to other bishops involved in the controversy; and his theological polemic against Marcellus of Ancyra, the promoter of a more radical anti-Arian position. These texts simultaneously assist and complicate modern attempts to construct the precise nature and dynamics of the controversy, the council, and its aftermath. They also provide a fascinating angle by which to discern important features of Eusebius’s fertile authorial work: he stands as a careful and creative formulator of a powerful historiographic, theological, and political vision that would make a signal impact upon later competing accounts of the Council of Nicaea.