EPILOGUE

The late antique author was a productive figure, a fashioner of words, narratives, characters, and arguments that transcended the sum of their parts to become texts. With texts, authors engendered feelings of sympathy or distaste or pride or social unity; with texts, authors persuaded, cultivated virtue, engendered piety, and enforced social boundaries tethered to concepts of ethnicity, status, religious identity, friendship, and kinship; with texts, authors generated new realities and value systems; with texts, authors created versions of themselves with nearly boundless freedom so long as their self-presentations fell within the limits of readers’ willingness to believe and engage with