In seventh-century Byzantium, the imperial panegyrist George of Pisidia and the peregrinating monastic theologian Maximus the Confessor represent two distinct ways of knowing and interpreting the new creation purportedly being realised in the empire. George envisions it largely in terms of the political and military exploits of the emperor Heraclius, Christ’s viceroy on earth. Maximus sees it instead as the work of the peerless agent of creation and redemption, Christ himself, whose unique politeia, embodying a whole new mode of creaturely being in the world, has inaugurated a new eschatological ordering of existence. Yet George and Maximus both engage primarily in theôria, a heightened spiritual vision of the created universe, integrating perspectives from biblical history, the contemplation of created nature, and the observation of current events. Each writer is a theoros of the new creation unfolding in the imperial and ecclesial foreground.

This chapter investigates the significance that Roman augural practice, as a kindred practice to Greek theôria, held for Roman comedy and tragedy. Central to its arguments are notions of time and space, which ultimately show the broad importance of Aristotelian concepts to the broader Hellenistic world. This piece argues that augury-taking involved sitting in a terrestrial temple while gazing at a specially demarcated zone of sky or a ‘whole-world’ (mundus). This temporarily legible space in which the gods would direct the signifying flight of birds was more than a celestial backdrop; it was also itself a temple (templum caeli), and the technical term for this temple-gazing was contemplatio. The institution of Roman theatre has not generally been associated with practices of auspication, but because of the emphatic insistence on the temporary stage, the conventional ‘unity of time’ and the probable placement of audience seating, there was a suggestive similarity between the Middle Republican audience’s spectation at tragedies and comedies and traditional augural contemplation. The structural echo between augural and theatrical contemplation outlives the Republican temporary stage in Seneca, where it has become a distinctively Roman mode of construing the intersection of the cosmic gaze and philosophical or spectatorial theôria.