124 Chapter 3 the time of commissioning (including the aforementioned Anastasios and probably Peter as well), the commissioners might perhaps consist of monks now based in Constantinople (or nearby Mount Olympus), or a combination of Thessalonian- and Constantinopolitanbased monks.395 All the above does not falsify Makris’ hypothesis that Joseph the Hymnographer could have been the commissioner of the Life . It is clear that Joseph made other efforts to promote Gregory’s veneration as a saint, evinced by his hymns and monastery foundation, so it is not unthinkable that he was the commissioner or that he belonged to a group of commissioners. The objections raised above indicate that this is not as certain as Makris suggests. Moreover, if Joseph was involved, I believe that he would have commissioned it before founding his monastery in 855, and so the Life would not – as Makris asserts – originally have been intended to be read in this monastery.396 If Joseph had commissioned it after he founded a monastery dedicated to Gregory with Gregory’s relics, these events would be expected to be included in the narrative, but they are not. In addition, a further possibility that we should consider is that Joseph did not have anything to do with the commission, but that it came from the circle of followers based in Thessaloniki or Constantinople. From this discussion we moreover learn that the fact that there is no clear attention paid to the establishing of a monastic community by Gregory in the Life makes it more difficult to establish for which occasion, for which commissioners, and with what purposes the Life was written. We will see that such attention to the foundation of a monastic community does feature in the Lives of Euthymius and Elias, and that these foundation descriptions establish a link between the commissioner(s) or author of the respective Life and the saint. If anything, the uncertainties sketched above suggest that more research should be done to the various commissioning and performance contexts of hagiography. Not knowing the commissioners and the intended performance context and audiences will also make it more uncertain why Ignatius will represented Gregory’s travel motivations in a particular way and whose possible evaluative ideas on monastic mobility might be reflected in the Life. As we are not certain who the commissioners were this also leaves in doubt who the intended audiences of the Life were and on which occasion(s) the text was meant to be performed. What we do know is that the text was written in a time of political and ideological change (probably around 843). Óscar Prieto Domínguez has made some illuminating propositions on the intended aims of the commissioners in light of the iconoclasm 395 Cf. footnote 393. 396 Although I would imagine that the monastic community would have obtained a copy of the Life soon after its foundation and is among the future audiences of the text.
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