The Legend of Diocletian: “Naming and Framing” Diocletian in Coptic Hagiography

Abstract In the more than seventeen hundred years that passed since he was proclaimed emperor of the Roman Empire, different stories about Diocletian have provided different images of the emperor. The writers of “passions”, who tell us about the martyrs who died, or allegedly died, during the Diocletianic persecution recoil in horror when they describe this emperor. The reputation of Diocletian as a wicked persecutor is especially apparent in the so-called “epic passions”, that is, spectacular and fantastic stories about martyrs of the Persecution. In this paper, the legend circulating in Egyptian hagiography that Diocletian once was a Christian shepherd before he became a soldier, emperor and eventually persecutor of Christians is analysed. Following the introduction, the paper gives an overview of “the legend of Diocletian” in previous scholarship and presents cognitive discourse analysis as a useful framework for the study of rhetorical framing. An application of this method to the representation of Diocletian in Egyptian hagiography then structures the remainder of the paper in three sections, each focussing on a key component of the cognitive discourse analysis: discursive analysis, an examination of the social background and cognitive analysis.