Table of Contents -- Introduction 1 -- 1. Life is a Theatre 19 -- A. The Theatricality of Everyday Life 21 -- I. The Emperor 22 -- i. The acting of tyrants 22 -- ii. Good and bad models of the philosopher-king 30 -- iii. The eclipse of the emperor-actor 39 -- II. The Nobility 45 -- III. The Self 56 -- B. From Distantiation as Affirmation to Distantiation as Negation 67 -- I. Distantiation as Affirmation 67 -- II. Distantiation as Negation 85 -- 2. 'Dead to the World': Asceticism and its Pleasures 103 -- I. Dead to the City 108 -- II. Dead to the Family 116 -- III. Live Unnoticed 125 -- IV. True Life: The Pleasures of Virtue 134 -- V. Between Life and Death 142 -- 3. From Stigmatization to Deculpabilization: Attitudes towards the Mentally Ill in Late Antiquity and the Healing Process in their Religious and Social Context 153 -- A. What is Mental Illness? The Case of the Epileptic Stageirios 160 -- i. 'The wounded healer' and his patient 165 -- ii. Demon or depression? Mental illness as a family, social and religious crisis 171 -- iii. Sin as mental illness 175 -- B. The Solutions of Despair: The Rationality of the Irrational 187 -- 4. Sun's Justice: Social Utopia as an antidote to Alienation 205 -- I. The Utopia of Compassion 210 -- II. The notion of Public Good 225 -- III. Christian Distributive Justice and the Problem of the Just Wage 235 -- 5. Imperialism and Christianity 253 -- A. Imperialism and its Discontents 256 -- B. Christian Attitudes towards Hypoteleia 269 -- C. The Political Implications of Christian Historical Hermeneutics 281 -- I. Jews and Christians as Marginal Political Groups 281 -- II. Christian revisionism of Jewish History 292 -- III. Responses to Defeat: Jewish Ingredients of Christian Triumphalism 298 -- IV. After the Defeat: The Persistence of the Spirit of the Fourth Philosophy 313 -- D. The Use and Abuse of Hellenism 319.

I. Hellenism as an Opposition Ideology 319 -- II. Graeco-Roman and Christian Universalism 341 -- E. Imperialism and Orthodoxy 357 -- 6. Martyrs, Criminals and Convicts: Christians show Solidarity towards the Outlaws without, ultimately, questioning the Law 365 -- A. The Name 'Christian': Its Criminal and Emancipatory Aspects in their Historical Context 366 -- I. The Symbolism of Power as Idolatry 366 -- II. What Crime in a Name? 372 -- i. Freedom of Conscience: the Socratic legacy 384 -- ii. The name 'Christian' bestows Freedom: Freedom as Equality 391 -- III. Torture and Truth: The Internalization of Martyrdom 401 -- B. Earthly and Divine Justice 408 -- I. Earthly Justice 408 -- II. Divine Justice as a Support and Correction of Earthly Justice 417 -- III. Law and Anomie 434 -- 7. True Life: Reading as Salvation 443 -- I. The Odyssey of Interpretation and the Odyssey of Life 445 -- II. The Reader as an Individual 452 -- III. The Reader and the Text 461 -- IV. Alienations 473 -- Conclusions 477 -- Bibliography 491 -- Index 553.