This project envisages a literary-rhetorical analysis of Italo-Greek hagiography, a corpus of which the prominent, narrative qualities have long been recognized but, for historical reasons of academic ideology, have not yet received much systematic scholarly attention in their own right. This corpus comprises Lives, martyr acts and encomia written in Greek between the 5th and the 13th centuries and describing the lives of Christian saints and martyrs of Sicily and Southern Italy (a region that culturally had been part of the Greek world ever since the Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean between the 8th and 6th centuries BC). The project examines concepts of fiction in this corpus, which are crucial, it argues, for enhancing our understanding of it as narrative. More specifically, we are particularly interested in exploring ways in which concepts of fiction can be approached through an analysis of character construction.