The Matter of Grass in Basil’s Hexaemeron

Byzantine Studies has deployed the ‘animal’ and the ‘arboreal’ turns in all too few arenas, but with significant implications nonetheless. This paper contributes to ruminations beyond the human by exploring the potential of ‘plant humanities’ for the field. Specifically, it examines the elaborate and intriguing role of grass in Homily 5 of Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron (6th century CE). Although the matter of grass has been somewhat treated from a modern perspective (as movable good, vegetal colonizer/invader, product of exploitative relations, and sustainer of particular ecosystems), it is relatively unexamined in the premodern world. This paper demonstrates that grass assumes an outsized priority in Basil’s homily owing to his framing of it as a material and temporal starting point, as theological matter to think with, and as an intellectual tool for determining causal relations.